Lost Waters: A History of a Troubled Catchment

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Author: Erica Nathan

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Lost Waters

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Lost Waters A History of a Troubled Catchment

Erica Nathan

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MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited 187 Grattan Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia [email protected] www.mup.com.au First published 2007 Text © Erica Nathan 2007 Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Ltd 2007 This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers. Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher. Designed by Phil Campbell Typeset by J&M Typesetting, Blackburn, Vic. Printed in Australia by the Design and Print Centre, The University of Melbourne National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Nathan, Erica. Lost waters: a history of a troubled catchment. Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 9780522853513 (pbk.). 1. Water rights - Victoria - Moorabool. 2. Water resources development - Victoria - Moorabool. 3. Water-supply Victoria - Moorabool. 4. Rivers - Environmental aspects Victoria - Moorabool. I. Title. 333.9115099457

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Contents List of illustrations

vii

Acknowledgements

xiii

Introduction: My Path to the River

1

1

Before Water Was Lost

7

2

Beales, from Swamp to Reservoir

25

3

Beyond the Water’s Edge

46

4

Unseen Waters

69

5

Local Springs

109

6

History and Hydrology, Part One

139

7

History and Hydrology, Part Two

167

8

Lost Lal Lal Waterscape

188

9

Conserving a River’s Social Flow

232

Bibliography

240

Index

255

v

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List of illustrations 1.1 1.2

1.3 1.4

2.1 2.2 2.3

2.4

3.1

3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7

Moorabool River catchment (P. Dahlhaus, 2006) West Moorabool catchment, with shading to indicate approximate boundary of old Bullarook Forest (P. Dahlhaus, 2006) Moorabool Enterprise Sluicing Company plan in support of water race licence, 1858 (PROV, VPRS 242/P0, Unit 95) Portion of Ballarat Water Committee’s plan of ‘The Lal Lal Mining Race Co.’, 1858, showing water races and forest huts around Beales Swamp Beales Reserve, as represented by F. Krause, portion of Sheet 4, 1869 (Ballarat Water Commission) Feeder creeks north of Beales, F. Krause, portion of Sheet 5, 1869 (Ballarat Water Commission) Beales Swamp in relation to Bacchus Flat and Two Mile Creek (‘The Lal Lal Mining Race Co.’, Ballarat Water Committee, 1858) School site (in Section X1X) at Beales Swamp before reservation, Parish of Bungaree (R. Surplice, 1860) Map of Beales Reserve relative to surrounding selections, portion of Lands Department working plan, Bungaree and Warrenheip, c. 1865 (PROV, VPRS 242/P0, Unit 934) Blocks available for leasing at Beales Reserve, Ballarat Water Commission, 1886 ‘Rustic Scene, Beales Reservoir’ (Ballarat and District in 1901, F. C. Jarrett) Entrance avenue at Wilsons Reserve (E. Nathan, 2003) The Lodge at Moorabool Reservoir (courtesy of Friends of Moorabool) Entrance gates to Wilsons Reserve, no longer in use as there is ‘No Public Access’ (E. Nathan, 2003) One of several seats, overlooking Moorabool Reservoir, once connected to promenade and gardens (E. Nathan, 2003)

8

9 16

18

28 31

32 33

47 51 58 62 62 64

65

vii

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4.1

4.2

4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8

4.9 4.10a

4.10b

4.11 4.12a

4.12b 4.13

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‘Millbrook residents beside the Moorabool River’ (Sullivan family, private collection, n.d., from ‘The Sullivans of Millbrook, 1857–1993’) 70 ‘Millbrook ladies playing bridge by the Moorabool’ (Sullivan family, private collection, n.d., from ‘The Sullivans of Millbrook, 1857–1993’) 70 Rockies reserve, Lal Lal (E. Nathan, 2003) 76 The Lake at Lal Lal (Lower Lake, Fisken’s Dam), A. Smith, 1866 (Picture Collection, La Trobe SLV) 77 Landscapes of West Moorabool catchment (P. Dahlhaus, 2006), with signature traits 80 Portion of Section Eight, Parish of Lal Lal and Peereweerh (Webster, 1856) 81 Bacchus Family at Falls below Homestead, A. Smith, 1866 (Picture Collection, La Trobe SLV) 83 Contemporary road access to major waterways in a portion of Lal Lal Parish (courtesy of CCMA, 2003) Note: Four viewing points marked with a cross. 89 Parishes of Lal Lal and Peereweerh, with closed roads marked (C. Webster, 1856) 90 Departmental plan showing road reservation between Spreadeagle Road and West Moorabool River (DSE, UR & WF file 058937). This road (2.4 ha) is now licensed until 2093, at a cost of less than $10 per annum. 91 Farm gate that marks closed road (one of several) from Spreadeagle Road to West Moorabool River (E. Nathan, 2003) 91 View of eucalypt-lined West Moorabool River, upstream from Blue Bridge, Mt Egerton Road (E. Nathan, 2003) 92 Plan of disputed Crown water frontage north of Butter Factory Road (Wallace), Parish of Kerrit Bareet (DSE UR & WF File 058972, n.d.) 96 Licensed Crown water frontage south of Butter Factory Road, Wallace (E. Nathan, 2003) 97 Survey for C. Diamond’s application, 1876 (PROV, VPRS 5357/P0, Unit 1471). Note position of road originally surveyed to protect and service frontage. 100

List of illustrations

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4.14 West Moorabool River, Lal Lal Forest, 1990 (D. Martin, private collection) 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8

5.9

5.10

5.11 5.12 5.13

6.1

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Departmental plan for reservation of West Spring near Black Hill, 1868 (PROV, VPRS 242/P0, Unit 804) Allotments designed to maximise frontage to springwater reserve near Wallace, 1872 (PROV, VPRS 242/P0, Unit 17) Plan for 10-acre reservation of spring near Mt Warrenheip, 1863 (DSE, Reserve File 3285) Portion of ‘Design for Township of the Warrenheip Railway Station’, W. O’Brien, 1862 (PROV, VPRS 44/P0, Unit 44) Sketch plan of amended reserve boundary to accommodate illegal occupation of Warrenheip Spring, c. 1872 Warrenheip Spring, looking south from road, with woolly tea-tree in centre (E. Nathan, 2003) Springwater reserve at Navigators, originally petitioned for in 1863, granted 1873 (PROV, VPRS 242/P0, Unit 25) Spring north of Mt Buninyong, adjacent to saleyards and pound, W. Dawson, 1855 (PROV, VPRS 44/P0, Unit 775) Farmers queuing at one of the district creameries (Sullivan family, private collection, n.d., from ‘The Sullivans of Millbrook, 1857–1993’) ‘Girls playing at Green Springs’ (Sullivan family, private collection, n.d., from ‘The Sullivans of Millbrook, 1857–1993’) Minister of Lands, Sir William McDonald, ‘opens’ Green Springs (Courier, 28 March 1968) Green Springs Reserve, with tanks and newly planted trees in background (E. Nathan, 2003) Plan of spring reserve near Black Hill prior to sale (DSE, Reserve File 21050)

101

111 112 115 116 118 121 123

126

128

129 131 133 134

Approximate boundary of the initial Moorabool reservation, as understood by C. Hodgkinson, 1866 Note: Timber Reserve was to the north of the ‘Gathering Grounds’ (PROV, VPRS 242/P0, Unit 16)

141


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6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5

7.1 7.2 7.3

Sawmill application, Biddle and Brown, showing position near junction, 1862 (PROV, VPRS 44/P0, Unit 40) Occupancy of the Moorabool Reserve, Ballarat Water Commission, 1898 Portion of ‘The Western Moorabool Reservation’, showing blocks held by Brown, Gabriel and Calwell Bolwarrah before Moorabool Reservoir (courtesy of Friends of Moorabool) Location of Bungal Dam (from West Moorabool Water Board brochure) Lal Lal water supply catchment, as proclaimed in 1973 (Victorian Government Gazette) Logo of Moorabool Landowners Action Group

8.1a One of the few fishing expeditions in the reservoir’s first year (D. Martin, private collection) 8.1b Trout release near dam wall (D. Martin, private collection) 8.1c WMWB signage prohibiting access to what was ‘Loft’s (or to some, Cahir’s) Flat’, (E. Nathan, 2003) 8.1d WMWB signage prohibiting access to what was ‘Diamond’s Flat’ (E. Nathan, 2003) 8.1e Lal Lal Creek meets Lal Lal Reservoir, just downstream of Lal Lal Falls (E. Nathan, 2003) 8.1f Known as ‘Loft’s, after the family which built and lived in the house, now unseen behind reservoir fence (E. Nathan, 2003) 8.2 Lal Lal Falls, F. Kruger, most likely the floodwaters of 1870 (Picture Collection, La Trobe SLV) 8.3 Location of Lal Lal Falls Reserve in relation to Ballarat, Buninyong and Lal Lal (portion of Tourist Map of Ballarat and Creswick Districts, J. M. Reed, 1917) 8.4a One of Niven’s many photographs of Moorabool Falls (Ballarat Pictorial Guide, 1898) 8.4b Picnic party at Lal Lal (from F. Niven, 1898) 8.5 Rose series of postcards, Lal Lal, Moorabool and Lower Moorabool (Granite) Falls (P. Holloway, private collection)

x

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144 151 152 159

168 170 173

190 191 191 192 192

193 195

196 199 200 201


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8.6 8.7 8.8 8.9 8.10 8.11 8.12 8.13 8.14a 8.14b 8.14c 8.14d 8.14e 8.14f 8.15

Aerial view of Lal Lal Falls Reserve and surrounds, showing link to racecourse and access to Falls Photographic Society members at Lal Lal Falls Reserve (Graeme Scott, private collection) Photographer, Lal Lal Falls Reserve, 1889 (Graeme Scott, private collection) Local family group eeling at Lal Lal Falls, c. 1960, with description by Pauline Holloway Camping near the waterfall, 1889 (G. Scott, private collection) Land excised from Lal Lal Falls Reserve for Lal Lal Reservoir (DSE Reserve File 9142, Part 3) Fishing near the Junction, c. 1962 (private collection, D. Martin) Reservoir earthworks with Junction in view (private collection, D. Martin) Picnic area, Lal Lal Falls, 2003 One of several ‘No Access’ signs, Lal Lal Falls Reserve, 2003 Steps to the waterfall, 2003 Willows and blackberries at Lal Lal Falls, 2003 Note bridge along unused basin pool path. Upstream of Lal Lal Falls, 2003 Moorabool Falls choked with weeds, 2003 Lal Lal Falls, A. Smith, 1866 (Picture Collection, La Trobe SLV)


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202 203 204 209 211 213 214 215 221 222 223 224 225 226 227

xi

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Acknowledgements This book emerged from postgraduate research at The University of Melbourne. I thank Brian Finlayson, from the School of Anthropology, Geography and Environmental Studies, and Janet McCalman, from History and Philosophy of Science, for their expert guidance during this time. A workshop at the Australian National University, hosted by Libby Robin and Tom Griffiths, and attended by environmental historians in the making, exposed me to the breadth and depth of this discipline. The brief participation of historian David Lowenthal was inspiring, as was his newly released biography of G. P. Marsh, author of the influential Man and Nature. I thank Geoff Syme, CSIRO Land and Water, and Mark Madison, foundation historian of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, for encouraging feedback on my initial research. And without the support of an Australian Postgraduate Award my continuing commitment would have been difficult. Essential to this research was the abundant documentary record of Ballarat’s Water Commission and Victoria’s various land and water departments. At Central Highlands Water, Rosalie Poloski from Records helped me to navigate many leather-bound volumes, with both authority and warmth. Staff at the Public Record Office of Victoria, the Ballarat Office of the Department of Sustainability and Environment, and Ballarat’s Municipal Archive were always obliging. I thank the Corangamite Catchment Management Authority for the opportunity to participate on a number of ‘water’ committees as a community representative. The waterway staff and fellow committee members helped me to understand the complexities of water resource management. As a recipient of the Authority’s Sue Hickey Memorial Grant, I was assisted in spending a year in the United Kingdom where I experienced a very different environmental culture, participated in a river restoration conference with a European agenda, met with Common Ground staff, plunged into the Ladies Pond on Hampstead Heath, discovered Richard Mabey’s writing, and just happened across such watery gems as Mathew Buckingham’s mesmerising film about the Hudson River. These opportunities, together with a dry summer month spent in Portugal where conflict over water was raging, were important reminders to me to think beyond the Australian experience.

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There are a number of people local to West Moorabool I would like to thank. Adventurous walks with Pauline Holloway and Ursula Diamond-Keith revealed their childhood geography of the Lal Lal area, now sealed in our naming of Holloway Falls along the unseen Black Creek. Dave Downie, Jack Toohey, Tom Sullivan and Pat Toohey are farmers with a keen sense of the area’s water settlement history. They were generous in sharing memories, records and photographs. The Bungaree Historical Society holds a varied repository of local knowledge, which I was encouraged to survey. I thank the Friends of Moorabool Reservoir, the Sullivan family and Graeme Scott for special photographs. And thank you also to David Martin, who shared his fishing memories and photographs of West Moorabool River. I thank Melbourne University Publishing for this opportunity to move beyond the thesis, and in particular Ann Standish for her initial suggestions on the manuscript. A number of people—Tony Barrett, Anne Beggs-Sunter, Rory Nathan, David May, Linda Zibell, Jim O’May, my son Patrick Barrett, and Peter Dahlhaus—kindly read particular chapters. Peter also generously created a number of maps for reproduction. My son Jesse Barrett, and more recently my daughter Edith with her photoshop wand, were of great help with scanning the numerous images. My partner, Tony, always welcomed this project, and believed in its value and in my capacity to finish. I thank him for much support over many years. And, finally, thanks to my parents, Joan and John Nathan, for leading me to the waters of Ricketts Point and Lake Wonboyn.

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Introduction: My Path to the River

When I first began to consider how people connect with their immediate waterways, I did not know how to find my local river. River geography was not in me even though I had lived in rural Victoria, Australia, for sixteen years and was someone who tuned into things environmental, or so I thought. And I did not understand how a river’s water connected to rural towns and big cities. ‘Water catchment’ was a term I understood in its physical sense of boundaries directing water one way and not another. Appreciating that these same boundaries were bursting with social meaning was a revelation. As my path to the river was being hewn out in archival basements, water debates intensified. Water is increasingly attached to thinking about global warming and resource sustainability, with mini-debates being played out in community forums about how to increase security of supply to irrigators, towns and the environment. I did know my local water had been considered a highly limited resource more than once in the past, and was keen to understand how prior partitioning occurred. My starting question was why water remained such a potent issue for farmers who clearly held the regional water supply authority in disregard. No simple answer related to the economic value of the water resource emerged. What follows is a set of historical narratives that track the experience of one catchment

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community as water was gathered and channelled, as waterways were reconfigured and connections with waterscape weakened. I joined the first surveyors in examining the essential principle of transferring water between catchments, and considered the social consequences of it being assumed rather than debated, declared and evaluated. The narrative action is restricted to the highly stressed West Moorabool catchment near Ballarat in south-west Victoria, but it intersects, I hope, with water conflict farther afield. As I investigated how the loss of water from a rural catchment across a divide to service an urban one transformed into a social divide, a second theme bubbled to the surface. Rivers, creeks, swamps and springs revealed themselves as transient historical entities that signified lost waters in a different sense. I discovered that rivers could disappear, not just into pipelines but also from our navigable physical world and our collective psychological terrain. Extensive river frontage was privileged to a few pastoral families. Local government and interested landholders colluded to close ‘unused’ roads that connected to waterways. Public water frontage was absorbed into farmland. Spring reserves were abandoned to become unrecognisable wastelands. Reservoirs were moved in and out of popular focus to pose as outdoor laboratories of scientific water management. These two narrative themes of water resource and waterscape loss became intertwined. Here was a community that increasingly held water central to its identity while connection with its waterways concurrently weakened. This narrative of estrangement and loss is less pertinent for those cities of the Western world, including nearby Melbourne, that have recommitted to their local waterways, restoring their visibility and connection with urban dwellers. And the narrative is foreign to Australia’s bigger rivers that are often showcased within national park reservations, known to visitors far and near. Rather, it concerns those many finer blue lines that cartographers use to represent inland water across rural land. The episodic transformation of West Moorabool’s unallocated water into an overallocated catchment involved a realignment of people with the landscape of water, which has itself been rearranged. As this story of water transfer and water connections progressed, it bristled, increasingly, against the dominant scientific representations of waterways prevalent in our broader environmental culture.

2

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There exists a massive public agenda concerning inland waters that has developed particular weight in Australia. Environmental agencies implore the public to care and help restore degraded rivers. Urgent ecological arguments are employed to convince dairy farmers to contain effluent, landowners to fence off wetlands, irrigators to use less water, and for all to revegetate unstable banks. They tell stories of how white settlers have sucked the rivers dry, infecting them with an overload of nutrients and sediment. They paint pictures of ‘sick’ and ‘ailing’ waterways in need of measures to restore them to good ‘health’. Encouraging people to be close to inland water goes against this historical grain. There persists an unresolved tension between resource and landscape agendas—with one demanding distance and the other, intimacy—and with neither being satisfactorily addressed while considered to be disconnected. The multiple resource management agencies that produce promotional advertisements and policies do not encourage people to directly experience the water they are being requested to respect. One central explanation for this conundrum is the hegemonic wedge that science drives between our natural and cultural worlds. These worlds are perceived as separate, overlapping when human necessity, as in the case of an urban water supply, dictates. Mitigating the negative impacts of this human intrusion into the natural domain is the agency mission that steers contemporary environmental agendas. Humans are assigned alien status. Their footsteps are discouraged from sinking into floodplain silt or river gravel. Or, to use a more popular metaphor, humans contaminate healthy ecosystems. The prevailing understanding of our natural world as a biophysical sphere in which people intrude or infect, rather than interact with, shape, and internalise into more personal environments of being, is of course itself historically derived. Its acceptance in the Western world is associated with the weakening of religious frameworks and the ascendancy of empirical scientific knowledge. For a number of years a season of Ballarat district river walks has been organised by a local landcare network. Usually a dozen walkers arrive with provisions for a day’s walk across farmers’ paddocks and through bushy mazes with few worn paths to follow. Progress is slow for another reason. Individual plants in and near the water are sniffed and pawed until a botanical name seals the moment. It is recorded,

Introduction

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and the group lurches on to the next find. For the Moorabool there exists a growing body of knowledge about its riparian vegetation, its water quality, its wildlife and its distinct geomorphology. This knowledge is being gathered not only informally on river walks, but also through a statewide system of data collection measuring the relative biophysical dimensions of river systems reach by reach, with the process itself under periodic review. Using these measurements environmental professionals establish work priorities and apply for public funds to progress into the next working year. River health strategies remain un-satiated, no matter how generous the table of statistical offerings. But this hunt for the definitive snapshot, or rather series of snapshots, seems strangely disconnected from the real world of people and places. Our imagination cannot feed on aquatic taxonomies. It requires a history of our past connections with water, a sense of how our values have shaped particular waterscapes and then ricocheted back into community life … what I refer to as a river’s ‘social flow’. Knowledge, memory and experience of water petitions, riverside picnics, special waterholes, creation stories with river resting places, sepia photographs and modern paintings, overhanging trees, slippery boulders, gold diggings and water races, allocation moments, submerged towns, frontage disputes, sandy bottoms and twiggy snags, are what connect people to place. A scientific understanding of changes in riparian vegetation, streamflow volume, and the physical form of bed and banks are strands of knowledge that can strangle our more central stories of the natural world. This history of one rural water-stressed catchment asserts the need for social flow to be at the fore of water debates, alongside, but certainly not in place of, environmental flow. The idea of social flow emerges from the strength of environmental flow as an essentially scientific concept with broad acceptance, rather than from any preferred ideological distinction between the natural and cultural worlds. Recovering water for the environment—to secure an environmental flow—sounds like a simple affair, but scientists, farmers and resource managers in the heat of reallocation debates know otherwise. The provision of wild water for ducks and fish and platypus is not limited to the volume of water that slides from forested ranges to open sea. There are questions of water quality discrete from quantity, of when

4

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and how water is released so that environmental benefits are maximised and supply requirements sustained, and perhaps most perplexing is the task of retrieving water when already more than the existing resource has been allocated. Similarly, social flow is not a simple matter of determining the amount of river water we need to fulfill our playful function as humans in a physical environment. Social flow is about recovering and securing the connections people have with their local waterscape, much the same as we conceptualise environmental flow as a sinuous blend of biophysical bonds. Social flow, like its scientific partner, is tied to a golden past— when black fish were abundant and carp unknown, when elvers made it upstream unimpeded by dam walls, when the settlers’ hut nestled on the treed bank without planning controls, and when Aboriginal camps feasted on plump black mussels in blissful ignorance of white invaders. The principle of strong physical and cultural connections can be promoted without the heavy millstone of a sometimes idealised and static past dragging the concept into impossible-hood. It is through the changing waterscape of West Moorabool that fluctuations in social flow are analysed with regard to the condition of our natural world, and with community capacity to link modern stories of river degradation, resource sharing and landscape creation. The water settlement history of this one rural catchment, so very bound by the urban sponge of nearby Ballarat, reveals a strengthening of water’s identity as a physical resource and its diminution as a landscape entity. And the narrowness of our national and state water debates hints at a more widespread estrangement between people and waterways. Not only is our geography of water blurred, our imaginative powers to actively engage with wild watery places has shrunk. A disconnection from history, of water stories from less estranged times, is itself an impediment to a community’s ability to imagine a more intimate rural scene. I began this preface with a declaration of ignorance for my local waterways. I now know where the rivers, streams and springs are, even if I cannot clamber over electric fences to reach them. It has taken me much longer to understand how the geography of water has been altered. Once central and close to people’s lives it now occupies the margins of landscape. This rural environment of estrangement is in curious contradiction to the fountain-like resurgence of water as a

Introduction

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sustainable resource issue. West Moorabool’s water history explores this contradiction. It searches for a more expansive environmental framework designed to reimagine waterscapes full of personal meaning, public utility, and supportive of greater social equity between those rural communities who primarily supply water, and recipient urban ones.

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1


Bundaramoon, Beowile, Ghiniliurmil, Carrung-e-borun, Mirt-jannuc, Murabul, Lal Lal … these are the words that went on an 1839 river survey following the occupation of the country by pastoralists extending south from the newish British colony of New South Wales, and north from Van Diemen’s Land. For the Tooloora Baluk, a clan of the Wathawurrung people, these lost words represent a reality faded, almost completely.1 Imagine hearing them again, and understanding something of their meaning. Only the last two names—Murabul and Lal Lal—have any current usage and the meanings are from another world. Murabul has become Moorabool, and now refers to a river near Ballarat in the central highlands of western Victoria. The western and eastern branches of this river begin in the Great Dividing Range before flowing towards the coast near the city of Geelong. ‘Lal Lal’ is a major tributary that enters the West Moorabool branch of the river near a town of the same name. The Tooloora’s early story with its river-rich language I cannot tell, and in narrating the tale of another loss of the same water there is no comparison to be drawn. This book enters the waterscape of West Moorabool after most Tooloora had died or dispersed, but before land and water were held under established arrangements by the invading occupants.2 Water had been seized as Crown property but had not

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1.1

Moorabool River catchment

been divided. An adherence to the chronology of white settlement is not in denial of the massive cultural displacement and violent death experienced by Aboriginal communities of these particular waterways. Rather, it reflects an emphasis on water ‘settlement’, of how access to the resource was variously assumed, debated, apportioned and secured by vested European interests. West Moorabool events comprise a glimpse only of a wider water settlement process which is currently intensifying as a new wave of water transfers challenge embedded interests, including indigenous ones, nationally. We will start in Bullarook Forest, just before the nearby discovery of gold, in 1851, brought its generous surface waters into new focus. Once occupying much of the land between Ballarat and

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1.2 West Moorabool catchment, with shading to indicate approximate boundary of old Bullarook Forest


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West Moorabool River, it must have been a dark and damp forest, with messmates, manna gums and blackwoods growing tall and close on very deep, volcanic soil. There were open clearings of swampy lagoons that gurgled up excess water and fed several streams, including Lal Lal Creek. This forest covered the northern third of West Moorabool’s catchment. It is now considered prime cropping country, with few trees in the way of the potato harvesters. Before being transformed into farmland, Bullarook Forest hosted significant water battles that still arouse raw emotion in some parts. Not everyone would accept the notion of ‘battles’ to depict this period. If you were writing the official history of Ballarat’s water supply authority, or of the city itself, it would be the product of the battles—three reservoirs with a network of aqueducts—that would be celebrated, not as war trophies but as tribute to the city’s pioneering independence. And it was a great achievement that Ballarat’s goldmining industry and population were able to thrive because water was imported from its neighbouring forest catchment. There were many times when the future of the city, and its considerable contribution to colonial coffers, were doubted because of sparse and dirty water. Publicists for Ballarat have embroidered the civic view of its water history in tourist pamphlets and commemorative books.3 I prefer the battle version of these years because so much conflict over water continues. For many people who live and work in what has become a proclaimed water supply catchment for Ballarat, the contemporary conflict has umbilical ties to the successive siphoning of the resource from Bullarook Forest. And there are ties to a less recognised conflict. While West Moorabool’s waterscape was fashioned to accommodate the reservoirs as seemingly benign historical certainties, so too began the push of people away from water. By the 1840s Bullarook Forest was more the territory of pastoralists than of the Tooloora clan. A number of gentleman squatters and their families held extensive pastoral licences that included portions of the forest. Their shepherds lived in forest huts and kept an eye on the foraging cattle and pigs. Water was the defining feature in the generous acreage of the new pastoral geography. Pastoral ‘runs’ wrapped around creeks, bordered the river, edged the swamps and included permanent springs, so there was little need to manipulate the water resource. The new masters located homestead huts near sizeable

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waterholes, and established outstations adjacent to water. Larger waterholes were probably identified by prior Tooloora use, with minor works to retain the supply as secure and accessible continuing as pastoral interests became more entrenched. If gold had not been discovered nearby at what became Ballarat, it is likely that these licensed pastoral runs would have become large estates with permanent tenure. A few pastoralists on the waterways running south of Bullarook Forest, at a greater distance from the main mines, were able to obtain freehold titles. Both the Fisken family at Lal Lal Estate and the Bacchus family at Perewerrh held land into the twentieth century.4 Their prior rights to water became one element in the ensuing resource battles and one significant wedge between people and river. Gold transformed how the country was seen. For the second half of the nineteenth century Ballarat was one of the leading alluvial and then deep lead mining districts in the colony.5 Not only did goldminers literally turn portions of the country inside out, they also marked the entire country with a radically different vision. Mineral deposits were valued above swards of nutritious kangaroo grass, and nearby timber and water resources were reappraised. Gold could not be mined without vast quantities of flowing clear water, and, increasingly, timber was required as both fuel and propping material for mine shafts. When the forest and water reserves more immediate to Ballarat became clearly deficient, the Bullarook Forest to its east became an essential focus for industrious parties of miners, sawmillers and water merchants. Because of gold, people entered the forest to both labour and live. The new forest dwellers of what was unreserved Crown land were sometimes in legal occupation, sometimes not. Because the colonial goldfields erupted at a time when bureaucratic control fell far behind land occupation, and because rights of commonage persisted from European tradition, the forest was an ambiguous space. Land officials did issue an array of licences that offered a paper legitimacy to reside in the forest. Those wanting some commercial benefit from the new mining industry could apply for a Miner’s Right, or a Splitter’s or Sawyer’s Licence, and those wishing to set up stores and inns could apply for an Occupation Licence. But the bureaucratic thread between Melbourne, the administrative centre for the breakaway colony of Victoria, and Ballarat was slender. Just getting enough


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of the right official forms to Ballarat was a constant problem for land officers representing the new colony. Even more tentative was the link between Ballarat and the forest hinterland. Land officers were preoccupied with the chaos in Ballarat itself. Miners, and the many who supported them, were pitching tents and constructing improvised dwellings on the most favoured civic sites. With scant regard for bureaucratic sanction, they infiltrated the bluestone plateau of the new town to escape the muddy murk of the alluvial flats. A mere handful of land officers were expected to impose a system of legal tenure for Ballarat. Seeing to the illegal occupancy in the forest and along the southward flowing waterways—Lal Lal Creek and West Moorabool River—was not top priority.6 Furthermore, for these representatives of the Crown there was a certain hesitancy about entering the forest. It took District Surveyor Taylor and his assistant, Surveyor Bird, a half-day to ride east out of the hollow of Ballarat, past the volcanic Mt Warrenheip being stripped of its timber by three sawmill communities, and into Bullarook Forest via Black Swamp. They followed the rough roads made by sawmill workers onto Harry Beales Swamp, where a network of feeder streams and springs contributed to the main swamp, and then to Lal Lal Creek. At Beales there were at least two sawmill communities relying on water to power the saws. At the northern end of the swamp was Borders sawmill, run by the enterprising Henry Clark, and at the southern end was a Mrs Mills, who ran a smaller mill. These mills connected to others throughout the forest. We know that there were about two hundred people living and working at Borders sawmill during the 1860s. There were families, some linked to each other and some going it alone. The mill was the centre of operations surrounded by a number of supporting trade workshops, a hotel, a school, and an evolving jumble of huts and houses with gardens and livestock.7 English historian W. G. Hoskins’s term of ‘hand-made’ landscapes captures the anarchy of these forest settlements relative to the systematic survey being attempted for Ballarat.8 Although there was fierce competition between the sawmill owners, there was a sense of forest fraternity, of an enclave at risk of intrusion by government officers and freeholders. The forest dwellers did not want the land opened to farmers and its resources, including

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water, locked into private tenure. As Ballarat expanded, nearby pastoral licences were revoked or reduced, and the timber reserves closest to town boundaries diminished as sawmills migrated further into the forest. A byproduct of this process was partially cleared land with potential to be sold as farms. The forest communities united as petitioners to guard timbered land against what was regarded as privileged freehold. Two Bullarook Forest petitions representing approximately one thousand workers reached Melbourne in 1858. In protesting against a land sale, it was explained that five sawmills worked Bullarook Forest, with two located near the proposed sale lands. Petitioners asserted the establishment of their families ‘in respectability and comfort’ having created homesteads, stores, hotels and schools.9 Taylor and Bird reported on these petitions in a manner that betrayed a fear and disdain for the illegal spontaneity of forest dwellers. These communities were considered beyond the reach of the licensing system based in Ballarat, and within the realm of bushrangers and ‘illicit’ distillers.10 Taylor acknowledged that many forest occupants held a Miner’s Right allowing some call on natural resources, but believed the government was not collecting adequate revenue to cover the ‘extensive timber splitting trade’. He believed that opening the land to farmers would create a domesticated reality of land amelioration that entailed trees being clear-felled rather than selectively culled with no mind to debris. In this way, an industrious and visible farming community would replace unseen forest dwellers, that lowly class of ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’.11 And, of course, the makers of whisky, who used the high-quality running water in the forest to condense alcohol in stills resting in the streams.

Forest Water for Mining There was another allied group of workers who lived in Bullarook Forest at this time and who signed the forest petitions. Enterprising mining parties were tapping into the waters of Lal Lal Creek and West Moorabool River, digging and constructing many miles of race to carry clear water to the Ballarat diggings. These races were usually earthen channels, and often the local topography and soil demanded improvised engineering solutions. Depending on the length of race


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required and the complications involved, considerable investment in forest labour as well as materials was needed. Once constructed, these races were guarded and maintained by forest hut-dwellers. Taylor’s assistant surveyor believed the forest petitions were a conspiratorial attempt to protect, from alienation, accessible Crown land used for cutting water races through to the goldfield. And, indeed, for the water workers the sale of land could interfere with the carefully surveyed line of a race. To understand the new politics between the forest and Ballarat we need to know more about water on the goldfields. There was not nearly enough of it. This dearth was not restricted to summer months or to Ballarat. Miners throughout the colony were desperate for adequate ‘wash’ water. Indeed, the viability of a particular goldfield was based on proximity to a reliable supply of water as much as on the nature of the mineral deposit. It was during the 1850s gold rush that water was first perceived by European colonisers as being seriously limited in supply. Atkins, a contributor to Smyth’s epic account of Victorian goldfields, suggested that ad hoc access to existing or dammed pools of water began to strain the Victorian resource by the end of 1852.12 But it was one year earlier when Ballarat miners first agitated for a water supply, only months after gold licences were first issued, and within the first year of gold being discovered in the area. Individual miners and parties of miners variously co-operated and competed in enlarging waterholes on Ballarat’s Yarrowee River, building small dams and channelling water from the nearby Wendouree Swamp. The need for permanent, quality water for both mining and domestic water supply purposes was acute in Ballarat by the late 1850s. Even before the extremely dry summer of 1858–59 the Ballarat Star declared, with usual colour, that: ‘Noah was saved by an ark made of Shittim wood, but nothing but stringybark and water, in the shape of sluice boxes and races, will save Ballarat just now’.13 It was from within the mining camp that solutions, and capital to invest in dams and a network of races, were first found. Water entrepreneurs formed water companies and provided a product the government was in no financial position to monopolise. Ballarat’s Kirks Reservoir originated as a 17-acre dam managed by a party of miners.14 The demand for water soared as mining techniques altered. In Ballarat the period of

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alluvial pickings by individuals or small groups was being replaced by a more systematic processing of wash-dirt and by mining into deep seams of gold-bearing material. By 1860 a number of quartz crushing companies constructed large dams on the Ballarat goldfields and developed means to recycle their water several times over. It was not nearly enough. Sluicing operations demanded great quantities of water and, regularly over the summer months, mining ceased for lack of the resource. Initially water permits were granted to miners for the use and diversion of water to almost any distance, but with minimal assessment of available resource capacity. These permits developed a grassroots legitimacy that was not enshrined in law. The legality of permits ‘increased’ when transferred from one miner to another. Miners were claiming first, second and further rights of water under the permit system, according to the date of registration, even though no hierarchy of rights was recognised by law. This system of first and second rights to a particular water source broke down when what was originally constituted a right or privilege became a matter of ownership. In moving between claims, a miner would take ‘his’ water with him, and if he moved from a district, this water right became saleable. Competing claims overloaded the courts.15 Investing in water was a risky proposition for mining entrepreneurs, who could be entrapped in the administrative muddle that characterised the early goldfields. Following problems associated with the locally authorised permits, it was decided to issue licences from Melbourne. Those who had been granted permits were anxious to obtain the increased security of a licence. The Moorabool Enterprise Sluicing Company, a party of nine mining investors, was in such a position. In September 1857 it was granted a permit to cut a water race from the West Moorabool River into the new Bendigo diggings north of Ballarat. Five miles of the 13-mile race had been constructed when the party applied for a licence. Knowing that other mining parties had tapped water at Beales Swamp and, just a little further west, at Stony Creek (Two Mile Creek), the Moorabool Company proposed to bypass these waterways. Under the new legislation they were required to be relatively exact in their allocation request:


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The quantity of water that will pass through a Box twelve feet long with a section of twelve inches by twelve inches the said box having an inclination of six inches in the twelve

1.3

Moorabool Enterprise Sluicing Company plan in support of water race licence, 1858. ‘Race to be cut from Point A (Sailor Toes Hut) on the Moorabool River, crossing West Moorabool at the junction with Devils Creek, then crossing Beales Swamp and Stoney Creek, River Yarowee, to Point B, Little Bendigo, for sluicing.’

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feet and that liberty be granted to erect a dam at the head of the race of a sufficient depth to secure your Petitioners the first right to a depth of two feet of water above the upper surface of the discharging box as shewn in the plan, and your petitioners pray that the same gauge may be secured to them.16 The Melbourne Lands office directed District Surveyor Taylor to report on the approximate catchment area of the Upper Moorabool before the Company’s licence be approved. In the dry summer of 1858, Taylor revealed the pressure under which he processed similar claims for forest water races. He was very much in the field and understood the implications of such water rights being granted. At least three times he alerted his superiors to the complexities, and proposed that a board of inquiry be convened to consider the equity issues of resource ownership and distribution. Importantly, Taylor understood the urgent need to establish allocation guidelines for water. He didn’t believe that races should be granted ‘where the locality from whence the water is drawn may be in any manner dependent upon that supply’ and considered it unfair that ‘these valuable privileges should be monopolised by a few individuals’.17 He recommended that the Moorabool Company’s licence be denied because the loss to the overall resource would be too great. As well as expressing concern for the general water supply of the catchment area being sourced, he foresaw the horrific drainage problems experienced by the conveyance of race water to the mining ‘flats’ of Ballarat. Underlying Taylor’s urgent request for principled water allocation was his knowledge that a supply was limited by creeks and watercourses commonly dry in summer. For him the solution was in the construction of a few dams to collect water ‘over and above the usual flow in winter’, with government-controlled leasing of water for mining purposes. He wanted dams within 5 miles of Ballarat, not 20-mile–long races ‘cutting up’ the country. He was concerned that permission to cut races through Crown land would interfere with land sales and create obstructions for timber carriers. When Ballarat community leaders asked Taylor to report on the area’s water supply capacity, he supported a submission by Surveyor Phillip that was based on the following premise:


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1.4

Portion of Ballarat Water Committee’s plan of ‘The Lal Lal Mining Race Co.’, 1858, showing water races and forest huts around Beales Swamp

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… it is undesirable that water from one locality or great natural basin should be deflected into another—for instance the Lal Lal tributaries collected and thrown over into the Yarrowee for Ballarat—it becomes a question whether there are not waters to be reclaimed without prejudice to the purchasers of land on the Lal Lal and made to augment the Yarrowee and it has occurred to me that there are.18 Phillip described how swamps associated with the Yarrowee River, which ran through Ballarat, could be dammed to collect winter flows. Unfortunately the critical perspectives gleaned by Taylor and Phillip were ignored in the wider colonial debate aimed at alleviating the water crisis. There was extensive discourse about whether government or private enterprise should take the initiative on the goldfields for provision of water, about how water supply schemes might best be engineered, and about the science behind the engineering. This debate was given greater substance once Ballarat’s miner rebellion at the Eureka lead in 1854 accelerated government response. ‘Eureka’ politics encouraged a much broader electoral representation for the colony. One of the new popularly elected politicians was Ballarat’s John Humffray, who became chair of a mining committee to encourage mineral surveys and technological innovation for all goldfields. The committee, although short-lived, forged a bureaucratic link between goldfield problems and government policy that continued after its dissolution. It did not survive a debate that pitted practical mining expertise against the theory of science professionals, but was reinvented as the Board of Science headed by Brough Smyth, an abrasive supporter of applied science.19 Smyth’s slim professional credentials and unorthodox career path can partly be explained by his timely alliance with scientists and bureaucrats who advocated the need for Australian, not European, hydrological data as the basis for reservoir planning. From the late 1850s, he became a key figure in establishing scientific guidelines for the supply of water on the goldfields. Although the Board of Science was short-lived, its charter was continued in a new Department of Mines, long lobbied for by the mining industry, with Smyth as Secretary for its first fifteen years.20 He whipped the new Department


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into action and employed a tribe of mining surveyors to establish correct statistical data for the assessment of various goldfield water supply schemes. He created mining districts which initially set boundaries for a new mining survey system and eventually became units of administration. Continuing a precedent set by the Board of Science he insisted on a high degree of public accountability, with surveyor reports on both mineral and water resources made easily available through the media and in published format. These reports highlighted the water supply problem in all mining districts. Mining Surveyor Fitzpatrick reported to Smyth from the Ballarat District. He urged that ‘the waters of the creeks and swamps of Bullarook’ be utilised to meet the water crisis.21 When mining industry pressure increased for government assistance to finance water schemes, it was decided that regional plans be submitted to the Board of Science for consideration and recommendation to government. Smyth instructed his surveyors to support their site selection for reservoirs with a comprehensive table of statistical data concerning hydrological parameters. He wanted submissions to include estimate tables of available rainfall, area of catchment, distance from supply area, geological formations and reservoir dimensions.22 The central criteria by which a reservoir site was assessed related to effective volume of water, qualified only by the cost efficiencies of transporting the resource to the area of greatest need. The significant role played by the Board of Science, and later the Department of Mines, in water supply decisions of the goldfields did establish a particular sense of legitimacy to the almost exclusively scientific criteria used to justify later dam decisions. For colonial administrators such as Smyth, the challenge to find on-ground solutions to the water supply crisis was in the calculation of relative statistical data. For surveyors outside of Smyth’s domain, such as Taylor, direct experience of water allocation politics raised social questions that required, and still require, resolution. Back to Bullarook Forest. It was not until the early 1860s that the government committed funds to help secure goldfield water supplies, albeit limited. In the meantime it was a matter of miners securing water as best they could. By the late 1850s there were a number of mining parties with the capital, the knowledge and, usually, a local goldfield permit to divert water from waterways to the east of Ballarat

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for mining purposes. For both the water companies and sawmilling communities in the forest, there was an evolving regulatory system that conferred legitimacy on their interests in water. By contrast, for the local municipal government of Ballarat the means of securing a water supply from either inside or outside municipal boundaries was not delineated clearly. As an urban entity Ballarat strengthened throughout the 1850s and 1860s, with domestic demand for water increasing alongside the mining. Municipal and industry leaders came under considerable pressure to source a reliable water supply.

Miner-farmers of Bullarook Forest After ten years of sustained goldmining activity and continued growth in Ballarat, Bullarook Forest assumed a more distinct, but irregular, profile. Clearings of partially harvested trees were left in the wake of mobile sawmill communities moving further east away from Ballarat into the fresh timber. In the early to mid-1860s the working families procuring wood and water had an opportunity to reside permanently in the patchwork forest. Some forest workers hoped to supplement seasonal work by applying to license a smallholding of land. This new opportunity to farm was, unlike prior incursions on the fringe lands of Bullarook, available to those without much existing finance. The political climate which followed the Eureka uprising infused miner demands for land and electoral representation with a measure of respectability and acceptance. There was fresh political capital in legislating for social reforms, in particular for the goldfield regions, where a new Residence and Cultivation Licence was formulated to alleviate the land crisis. It was a controversial reincarnation of the Occupation Licence, tailor-made for the many illegal occupants of Crown land associated with the mining industry. Originally accommodating storeholders and innkeepers, this licence was extended to include agricultural settlement of usually 20-acre allotments near Ballarat, and later further afield. Ballarat District accounted for 210 of the total of 477 licences granted on the goldfields between 1861 and 1862.23 Most of the 210 were taken up in the parishes of Warrenheip and Bungaree, on those relinquished pastoral runs in Bullarook Forest. Included was the land that fringed Beales Swamp. A local newspaper reported that the new land licence was being hijacked by squatters, professionals and speculators. This was not


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completely unfounded. Applications by Fisken and Bacchus, both pastoralists, and Borders sawmill proprietor, Henry Clark, were made and only Fisken’s was rejected.24 Generally, though, miners, traders and seasonal timber workers became the new licensees of ‘occupied’ land in those parts of Bullarook Forest vacated by pastoralists and then sawmillers. A few years later, the land occupants under this licence were given contested entry into land selection under Duffy’s Land Act (1862–65), which allowed them to rent additional land up to 320 acres. An examination of later parish plans for Bungaree and Warrenheip confirms that this pathway from Residence and Cultivation Licence, and later by the similar Section 42 licence, to land selection provided the basis of much agricultural farming in this northern part of the West Moorabool catchment. The names of the original licensees have been constantly recycled in the paddock names of amalgamated farms now belonging to families with links to land occupation in the 1850s and 1860s. The Residence and Cultivation Licence, and later variants, did not mean an end to illegal occupancy. Forest families lived in the hope that some security was obtainable in future land offers, or trusted that their evasion from authority would continue. Police Magistrate J. M. Clow was sensitive to the hardship and aspirations of these poorer forest dwellers. When Charles Dunn of the reduced Bolwarrah Run, north-east of Beales Swamp, tried in 1862 to bring legal proceedings against ‘a number of men who have located themselves near the Moorabool’ by fencing in gardens and paddocks, Clow implemented a strategic postponement of the hearing.25 Some men had been in the forest for several years, moving from gold prospecting to sawmilling trades. Clow knew the families involved and indicated that if illegal occupation could be substantiated, he would give them time to relocate ‘to avoid as much as possible depriving them and their families of what both have been looking forward to as a means of subsistence’. The processing of Residence and Cultivation Licences coincided with moves by municipal Ballarat to supplement its water supply by converting Beales Swamp into Beales Reservoir. Some licences had been granted, some were in a long administrative pipeline, and others were the stuff of landed dreams. The scene for a Bullarook Forest drama was set with Act One unfolding at Beales Swamp. It was the

22

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first site within Bullarook Forest where competing interests for water were seriously played out between colonisers determined to secure a more permanent claim to the resource. On the eve of the swamp water being ‘gathered’ and ‘allocated’ to Ballarat, both urban and forest communities were poised to expand. Like now, there was seen to be a water crisis, and until the capacity of the resource increased, it was perceived as a highly limited resource. Ballarat’s mining and civic leaders did not, of course, climb Mt Warrenheip and invite the forest dwellers to assist in apportioning the water. In fact, their sense of progressive fervour and economic mission was such that the forest people were scarcely acknowledged.

Notes 1

2 3

4

5 6

7

8 9 10 11

12 13

Land Victoria, Historic Plan Series, Loddon 76A, 76B; Clark, Aboriginal Languages and Clans, p. 311. Clark, Aboriginal Languages and Clans, pp. 288–329. For example: Chisholm, ‘The Early Days of the Ballarat Water Supply’; Kimberly, Ballarat and Vicinity; Jarrett, Ballarat and District in 1901; guide books by Niven Publishing Co., such as Guide to Ballarat; McCay, ‘Centenary of Ballarat Water Supply’, pp. 137–8; Odlum, ‘History of the Ballarat Water Supply from 1852 to 1947’; Jones, A Century of Permanent Water Supply. Public Record Office of Victoria (PROV), VPRS 244/P0, Pastoral Run Plans, Units 155, 190, 224, 295; VPRS 5920/P0, Pastoral Run Files, Units 208, 209, 236, 499, 500, 658, 659; NSW Archives, Roll 2748, Roll 2756, for reports by Commissioners of Crown Lands, 1837–1849. Bate, Lucky City, for a general history of Ballarat’s goldmining era. PROV, VPRS 44/P0, Unit 17, Chairman Ballarat Council to District Surveyor Taylor, 8.10.1857, reply 22.10.1857; Unit 553, Warden’s report re residential crisis, 26.9.1857; Unit 577, Crown Lands Ranger report for August, September, October, 1860; VPRS 6605/P0, Unit 23, Letter from Assistant Commissioner of Crown Lands. BWC (Ballarat Water Commission), Book of Reference to Plan of Reserve at Harry Beale’s Swamp showing Names of Occupiers of Houses and Allotments and the Estimated Value of Existing Improvements. Hoskins and Stamp, The Common Lands of England and Wales, p. 105. PROV, VPRS 44/P0, Unit 771, petitions, 26.2.1858. ibid., Assistant Surveyor Bird’s report, 26.2.1858; Taylor’s report, 4.3.1858. Reference to the multi-ethnic Atlantic underclass created by acts of expropriation researched by Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many–Headed Hydra. Legacy of commonage for Australian forest communities requires further investigation. Smyth, The Goldfields and Mineral Districts of Victoria, p. 397. Ballarat Star, 17.7.1858, p. 3.


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14

15

16

17 18 19

20

21

22 23

24

25

Correspondence re transfer of Kirk’s Dam into public domain indicates complexity of water politics emanating from mining interests. PROV, VPRS 3844/P0. Water Supply Correspondence Files. Unit 8, Report, July 1861; VPRS 242/P0, Crown Reserves Correspondence, Unit 95, Taylor’s report, 17.2.1858. Mining Surveyors’ Reports to the Board of Science, 1859–1863, especially reports by T. Cowan, Ballarat District, provide details of water supply schemes of mining industry. 1860 report for recycling, p. 57. For a review of regulations re water supply on the goldfields, see Smyth, The Goldfields and Mineral Districts of Victoria, esp. pp. 388–92; Royal Mining Commission, Goldfields Royal Commission of Enquiry. PROV, VPRS 242/P0, Unit 95, Correspondence Taylor and Board of Works, 13.1.1858, 11.2.1858. ibid., Reports by Taylor, 2.2.1858, 3.5.1858, 10.5.1858. ibid., Phillip to Taylor, 14.4.1858; Taylor’s report, 19.4.1858. Brough Smyth (1830–1889), Secretary Department of Mines 1860–1875. For tensions between scientific camps and the mining industry, see Darragh, ‘The Geological Survey under Alfred Selwyn, 1852–1868’. Debate about hydrological records, part of Melbourne’s Yan Yean reservoir debate, see Hoare, ‘Learned Societies in Australia’; Smyth, ‘On the Influence of the Physical Character of the Country on the Climate’; see also contributions to Transactions by Hodgkinson, Wilkie and Jackson. Powell, Watering the Garden State, pp. 55–6. For Smyth’s career, see Darragh, ‘Robert Brough Smyth’; Hoare, ‘The Half-Mad Bureaucrat’. Board of Science, Mining Surveyors’ Reports, Ballarat No. 2 District, June/ December 1859, p. 4. Miner and Weekly Star, 4.5.1860, p. 12, 6.7.1860, p. 12. Powell, The Public Lands of Australia Felix, pp. 81–2; PROV, VPRS 44/P0, Units 51, 33, 486, 501. Details of individual applications, including name of relinquished pastoral run, existing improvements, and usually an associated plan. These can be traced to parish maps to determine extent of further land selection from original grant. Ballarat Star, 25.1.1862, p. 2; Applications by Fisken (5.7.1861), Bacchus (10.7.1861) and Clark (2.7.1861), VPRS 44/P0, Unit 486. PROV, VPRS 44/P0, Unit 38, Letter from Dunn, 7.11.1862; Unit 140, Clow correspondence, 20.11.1862.

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2


Ballarat’s Water Committee built Beales Reservoir at the southern end of the swampy headwaters of Lal Lal Creek, West Moorabool’s major tributary, during 1863. It was completed in early 1864 and filled quickly with autumn rains. The new water was transferred by channel across a narrow reserve of land that connected with a Ballarat catchment supply dam. Beales Reservoir was an important milestone in civic and institutional history that was commemorated at the time. There was a grand dinner, with many toasts and much good cheer, to celebrate ‘the meeting of the waters’ which allowed ‘Harry Beale waters to fraternise with those of Wendouree’.1 This new water promised a strengthening of the local gold economy, a measure of urban fulfilment, and an increased level of domestic comfort. Beales was the first forest reservoir associated with this promise of urban growth. The significance of the ensuing battles is not a simple matter of Ballarat’s success equating with Bullarook’s misfortune. To understand the forest community’s water experience we need to move beyond the knowledge that swamp became reservoir to knowing exactly how the transformation came about. Whereas the reservoir itself was formed almost within the year, the boundary and function of the wider reserve was a changeable and extended affair. Much greater conflict arose from the messy process by which forest water

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was lost than from diminished access to the resource itself. Residue from this process has echoed and been compounded through the decades to become a recognisable, for some, intrusion into contemporary water politics. Nowadays rural protests against expansive urban water plans are constantly in national and overseas news. West Moorabool experience suggests that behind competing declarations of need by polarised groups, other layers of explanation simmer below the surface. In the detailed telling of this water history lie questions that link to water conflict elsewhere.

Ballarat’s Claim to Beales The Water Committee responsible for the conversion of Beales Swamp into a reservoir was composed of an equal number of representatives from Ballarat’s two municipal councils. Their co-operation indicated the desperation experienced by the rival councils to find a solution to the town’s inadequate water supply. This Committee eventually established independence as Ballarat’s Water Commission but initially it was conceived of pragmatism in the face of wider colonial inaction on the goldfields.2 The orthodox town history version of events ends here for, despite an 1862 Deed of Grant from Treasury, the Ballarat councils were not in a strong legal position to expropriate Beales Swamp. A later government report was to confirm a court finding that they had ‘no legal right’ of occupation. There was no land reservation secured by the Deed, only a clause stipulating that the required unalienated land would be entrusted to the councils ‘so far as the law would permit’.3 Ballarat Water Committee built on land outside municipal boundaries, on a site not yet reserved for water supply purposes, and before compensating existing occupants with licensed claims to mining water or smallholdings. Clearly these actions were beyond the most generous interpretation of the Deed’s clause. The Deed was granted to the Ballarat councils as complete entities and could not be administered by commission. Although the Water Committee soon adopted for itself the title of ‘Commission’, it was not an incorporated body with the more independent powers to secure loans, set rates, and operate beyond local government jurisdiction until it was reconstituted in 1872 and 1880. For this ‘Beales’ episode I will retain the more accurate title of ‘Committee’. Even with extra council funds made conditional on receipt of the 1862 Grant,

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the Water Committee was not adequately financed, let alone fully authorised, to do all of the following: build Beales Reservoir, connect it to a town supply, maintain existing infrastructure, and commit to compensation. Several water companies and many forest workers held licences that represented a legitimate claim on natural resources before Ballarat’s move on Beales. Timely compensation was especially vital to those who could not afford to move and start anew without compensation funds, but, if they delayed, their chances of applying for new ground lessened. It is not surprising that Ballarat’s popular press rallied to protect this long-awaited reservoir when it was threatened by rival claims to its water from a mining water company that serviced goldfields well beyond town limits. It was the very successful Lal Lal Waterworks Company, with links to the Fisken pastoral family resident downstream of Beales, which exposed the illegality of the Water Committee’s reservoir at Beales. The company had both political connections and finance to challenge the hegemony of the ‘public’, that is, Ballarat, interests over pre-existing quite legal ones. After several court challenges, which consistently ruled against the Committee, combined with support from the Mines Department, the Lal Lal Waterworks Company was eventually compensated in 1871.4 Water companies operating from Beales without similar political muscle did not fare as well.

View from the Forest Less menacing to Ballarat’s new water asset, and hardly considered newsworthy at the time, was the threat posed by those living in Bullarook Forest. Ironically, it is the angry voice of forest occupant turned farmer that has reverberated through the years of progressive land expropriation into a traditional conflict zone between city and country. But, at the time, there was only one passing reference in the local press to the forest dwellers who reportedly ‘demanded extravagant sums in compensation before they would remove’.5 It is the dearth of historical record that so captures the unevenness of this significant contest for natural resources that established future terms of engagement. Geologist Ferdinand Krause was employed by the Water Committee to survey Beales Reserve in 1869, five years after the reservoir was built and at the height of forest hostilities.6 Apart from


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2.1

Beales Reserve, 1869

locating the Roman Catholic Chapel and a store just south of Beales, its representation of a landscape devoid of people mirrored the mindset of the Ballarat Committee men who did not see, and felt no pressure to see, the layer of humanity in the forest. Those in the forest, on the other hand, had a vivid, threedimensional picture of Beales Reservoir by 1864. Seeing the land reserved around it—eventually some 2000 acres—as a distinct entity

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was not so easy. Nowadays the boundary to Beales water reserve is unmistakable. The area is fenced, signposted, and planted principally with pines. On the other side of the boundary fence is cleared farming land. For most of the 1860s, the demarcation between reserve and licensed Crown land was especially unclear. This was not only because eucalypt trees dominated both areas and, with the exception of the reservoir, the land use was similar. There was also confusion because the exact acreage of the reserve changed as different surveyors prepared plans for its temporary and then permanent gazettal as a water supply reserve. The 1200 acres at Beales, ‘entrusted’ to the councils in 1862, were not temporarily reserved until the end of 1863, as the reservoir was being constructed. A further 1000 acres of land to the north of the dam, with Borders sawmill community at its centre, were not reserved for a further few years. Permanent reservation for water supply purposes was not until 1866, and for north of Beales, 1869.7 The shifting status of land confused those in authority and those wanting to maximise opportunities to occupy land legally, a situation aggravated by the lack of regularly updated, easily available maps. In the early stages of what became a ten-year conflict to clear settlers from the water supply reserve at Beales, there was no one moment when the battle lines were clearly drawn. Certainly the land and mining bureaucracies did not work in clear collaboration with the Water Committee. They became implicated in tidying up the mess of claims that followed Ballarat’s bold move into Bullarook Forest. Although the Ballarat mining lobby wanted Beales Reservoir, there was a multiplicity of mining interests represented by the activity around Beales that complicated loyalty to the scheme. It was through the system of Local Mining Courts that the Committee’s sole rights to Beales water were being challenged successfully by the Lal Lal Waterworks Association.8 And it was the Lands Department that had issued, and in some cases continued to issue and monitor, the various forest licences. How was the Committee, asked the District Surveyor, going to deal with James Peet who had erected a hotel on a portion of the water reserve, and with Adamson whose 20-acre holding was entirely in the reserve? Michael O’Malley lost water frontage to his 20-acre allotment. Mangan, Carmody and Cummins had already cleared ground to grow potatoes in what became reserve ground. Patrick Conway’s land was divided by the new aqueduct.


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He wrote for assistance on behalf of ‘ten to fifteen other holders of licences who will if these lands are reserved be deprived of their holdings … ’9 Although the Water Committee made efforts to oppose further occupation of the proposed reserve, there was no plan to deal with those already living on land below the dam wall and along the aqueduct to Ballarat. Licensees wrote to the Lands Department and to the Water Committee both individually and at times collectively to seek clarification as to the new Reserve boundary and to seek compensation for improvements made. Only those clearly in the path of the water were compensated in the early 1860s with the help of the Committee’s initial government grant. Occupants were entitled to be compensated for the value of their improvements made prior to the temporary gazettal of the reserves, which, for much of Beales, was September 1863.10 However, it was not until 1869 that the Committee was in the financial position to push the compensation process through with any conviction. This, of course, was not an admission that was broadcast. The Committee, unable to access loans, was hamstrung along with the residents, whose improvements made beyond the temporary gazettal date were not to be recognised. And the longer the Committee prevaricated, the less opportunity there was for alternative settlement. Forest occupants attempted to rent reserve land that was previously ‘theirs’, especially acreage under cultivation, or have the reserve fence altered so it was more accommodating of former occupancy and water access, or continue lobbying for compensation to cover improvements. There was only one Water Committee motion to meet with representatives of the Bungaree Roads Board to ‘enquire into any disputes or grievances that may exist with the inhabitants of Bungaree in reference to the water reserves’, but it was not even seconded.11 Bungaree was the locality name for this part of Bullarook Forest, and it became the administrative centre for local government in the northern part of the catchment. The Bungaree Roads Board, and later Shire, was clearly a poorer, rural cousin to an increasingly confident, urban Ballarat. With great persistence the Roads Board negotiated for the provision of stock tanks at points where Committee water races had been cut; for the removal of road obstructions that blocked water access to travelling stock; for the right to quarry on reserves; for thistle

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eradication; and, most importantly, for the valuation of Committee land for its annual rate purposes. Many disputes ended in costly litigation for both Ballarat and Bungaree municipalities.12 But during the 1860s, the Bungaree Roads Board was not in a position to add much weight to the land occupants’ claims at Beales.

Challenge North of Beales Assisted by the distance between Ballarat and the ‘forest watershed’, as well as its populist charter, the Water Committee managed an element of denial in its responsibilities to the settlers. It found no difficulty in simultaneously finalising fountain sketches for the opening of Beales and appointing a caretaker to keep trespassing cattle from destroying the embankment. More importantly, the Committee ignored the enormity of a problem that emerged as the construction of Beales neared completion. For the new reservoir to be effective, the land to its immediate north also required reservation, as water was being diverted, legally, from the remaining swamp and its four main

2.2

Feeder creeks north of Beales, 1869


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feeder creeks by water companies and by Borders sawmill. It was the more organised Borders sawmill forest community, occupying the ground now under Wilsons Reservoir (1890) that provided spirited resistance to Committee interests. Timber work was seasonal, and some families were already hybridising as subsistence farmers and licensed small landholders. This was a community that was witness to the dislocation to its immediate south. There were links to the emergent farming communities south along Lal Lal Creek and westwards to Bacchus Flat and Two Mile Creek. Henry Clark, the proprietor of Borders sawmill, became a spokesperson and advocate for the community. To a lesser extent so did Charles Bamber, who ran a hotel, store and post office.13

2.3

Beales Swamp in relation to Bacchus Flat and Two Mile Creek, 1858

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An 1866 valuation by Ballarat’s Water Committee provides a skeleton view of the Borders sawmill community above Beales Reservoir. There were fifty-two homes, most described as huts, with perhaps three to four people residing in each. Almost half had gardens, subsistence plots and livestock. There were enough children to enable James Kittelty to establish a school. On average, the residents above Beales had lived there for four and a half years prior to the Water Committee’s valuation of improvements, that is, one to two years before work on the reservoir began. Alfred Brown was listed as the longest serving resident, having established a house, garden and

2.4

School site (in section X1X) at Beales Swamp before reservation, Parish of Bungaree


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stable over ten years. Alfred finally left the reserve in August 1870, which meant that Beales was his home for almost fifteen years. Huts belonging to Mrs Haggerty and Mr Tabulo, and cultivation paddocks worked by the Fitzpatricks, appeared on an 1858 plan of the area.14 It is likely that less established illegal occupants had already moved further east into the forest. Some of Beales’ occupants, however, were unable to become bona fide landholders or to migrate with the sawmills. In 1868 Sarah Baldock and six children were left with few resources after the death of her husband Joseph, listed in the Eureka directory as miner, sawyer and farmer. Mrs McDonald clung to her hut until the end of 1871. In the same year, John Duggan remained resolute about staying in his hut above Beales. He had been gaoled previously for trespass and on several occasions appealed to the Committee on grounds of poverty. Without the means to relocate, he refused to move.15 In these cases it was often left to the discretion of the Committee’s chairman to settle. Although this class of resident did not become selectors, it cannot be assumed that they left the district. When compensation was first offered to those north of the dam it was in most cases rejected. Residents, against a Committee valuation of £7000, claimed £18 000.16 No inventory for compensation purposes was initially taken so there was room for both resident opportunism and Committee paranoia. On receipt of a trespass summons in 1870, Mungovin revived a compensation claim for buildings erected in 1862. This claim was challenged by the Committee’s engineer, who argued that Mungovin knowingly invested in buildings after temporary reservation. The Committee was irritatingly slow to respond to settler enquiries and to pay even minor sums. When residents agreed to fence an altered boundary to accommodate the reserve, inspection and payment were prolonged, sometimes taking years, not months, to complete. Michael O’Malley’s loss of water frontage south of the dam produced five years of correspondence before he received payment for the Committee’s share of material and his labour costs to construct the new fence. O’Malley’s enquiries over the following four years as to renting the reserve were treated with similar disregard.17 Some licensees who straddled the disputed reserve fence were in a better position than those fully within the reserve because improvements could be concentrated on ‘their’ side.

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The resident community illustrated considerable resourcefulness and unity in its defence of Beales. Unknown to the Committee, it seems, there was an attempt to have the entire ‘reserve’, prior to its permanent reservation, incorporated in an extension of the Bungaree Farmers Common. There were many personal representations at Committee meetings. In 1868 Edward Giles led a deputation protesting against the interference with their water rights from Committee earthworks. He declared the intention of the residents above Beales to extend their improvements at their own risk, that if the land was really required then compensation should be immediate. Some months later Henry Clark appealed on the same grounds. He threatened, more convincingly, that legal action would follow any interference with his mill bridge or water race.18 The Committee yet again deferred discussion to the ‘next meeting’, itself waiting for financial rescue. Five years into the conflict some residents argued with a strategic knowledge of catchment issues. A deputation from above Beales assured the Lands Department of its intention to fence off ‘the creeks to insure the purity of the water, to drain detached swamps and remove dead timber to the advantage of the water supply’.19 They wanted landholder boundaries extended and those of the reserve reduced. Residents regularly pitched the Committee against the Lands Department, just as the water companies used the Mines Department. On occasions they achieved minor success. When John Shaw cleared and cultivated ‘his’ portion of the reserve above Beales, he was convicted of trespass and faced a fine of £50. He appealed to Lands Minister Grant, who not only directed the District Surveyor to ‘interfere’ with the penalty imposed by the District Police Court, but also suggested a reduction in the size of the reserve. Meanwhile three more adjoining residents were convicted of trespass and four received warrants for eviction and, once again, the Lands Department requested a suspension of fines. Further memorials of complaint against the Committee were made to the Minister of Lands, prompting a counter deputation by outraged Ballarat councillors.20 The outcome was agreement to a Department-supervised valuation process, which brought permanent reservation a step closer. Some residents did accept a revised valuation, including widow Baldock who was offered double the original valuation of her house. Generally the difference in valuation was not extreme, but the


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involvement of a more independent valuer gave greater legitimacy to the process. Minister Grant included an entitlement to select land in a portion of nearby state forest as one compensation option. His support waned on learning that many residents did not hold current licences to the land and, indeed, had not done so for periods of up to ten years. The question of legality was complicated as some who began their licence payments were refused renewals when permanent reservation for water supply purposes, as opposed to temporary reservation from mining activity, seemed likely. Grant withdrew his forest offer, but it was not forgotten.21 The Water Committee correctly identified Henry Clark of Borders sawmill as one who actively encouraged his sometime employees to retain their boundaries within the reserve, and who assisted in appeals to the Lands Department. There was a history of tension between Clark and the Committee, despite his commercial and—as a member of the Bungaree Roads Board—political status in the District. In 1867 Clark applied on behalf of the Bullarook Tramway Co. to have a tramway run though Beales Reserve, creating a link between the timber mills and Ballarat markets. The Committee, after the customary delays, denied the company access to the reserve, explaining it was held for a ‘public purpose’ and was not available to ‘private individuals for their own aggrandisement’.22 The alternative of purchasing freehold was not considered viable and the scheme was dropped. Part of Clark’s personal compensation agreement at Beales was that his house be retained on site for the reserve’s ranger. His final departure involved a tiff over fixtures, with Clark removing oven, water closet, inner flooring, stables, and trees ‘plucked from the roots’.23 Apart from deputations and appeals to both the Water Committee and Lands Department, ‘trespass’ and sabotage were endemic until the early 1870s, in part fuelled by the Committee’s high-handed treatment of the resident community. The notion of trespass was contested, by both residents and Department, because the Committee had not fulfilled the required compensation obligations for permanent reservation. Settlers used Beales Reserve as unofficial commonage, with stock regularly moved on at night to be then removed by morning. They felled timber for private and commercial use. They disputed property damage claims after fires, ones which the

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Committee suspected were deliberately lit and the settlers attributed to poor reserve management. Fences were sometimes ‘removed’, and settlers tacitly supported each other in individual sabotage efforts. No reward was ever collected in connection with a series of deliberately lit fires on the reserve in February 1872. Of three fires, one started at White’s boundary fence, ‘at the very same panel which some short time ago Patrick White cut down to let his horses into the reserve, and for which offence White was fined two pounds at the time’.24

Appointment of Engineer Bagge These less orthodox activities intensified from 1866 and peaked in 1868. It was the appointment of engineer Christian Herman Ohlfsen Bagge that steered the Committee towards stronger management and provided the residents with an on-site target. Appointed early in 1866, Bagge supervised the foremen, caretakers and rangers on the reserves in Ballarat and at Beales. He came to know the ground well and, although he knew the residents, there was no familiarity. He became a significant link between the Committee closeted in Ballarat and issues erupting in the forest, and, importantly, he connected the Committee to the wider world of resource conservancy. Bagge was an engineer with experience in Germany and England. Like James Blackburn, Melbourne’s convict engineer and promoter of its Yan Yean scheme, Bagge would have appreciated the link between water supply and disease causation, and the efficiencies of gravitational schemes. And although Bagge never referred directly to the influential American author of Man and Nature, George Perkins Marsh, his reports and actions were infused with knowledge of the impact that changing catchment conditions, such as tree clearance, had on waterways. By the mid-1860s Marsh’s principles were conscripted into colonial debates concerning the need for forest protection measures around the goldfields and the need to ‘close’ Melbourne’s new water supply catchment of Yan Yean by excluding woodcutters.25 Bagge’s first report to Ballarat’s Water Committee included a critical assessment of current works ‘to prevent previous errors being placed to my credit’.26 His critique was referenced with European citations in support of calculations of evaporative rates and soil permeability. He was seemingly unaware of the colonial furore concerning the need for Australian data. From the start Bagge recognised


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that Beales and its races were not ‘tight’, and puddling the main aqueduct became part of his works program. Eventually stone pitching was laid. He pushed the agenda of water quality and the associated need for generous catchment protection. Almost two years into his position, Ballarat’s Courier referred to Bagge’s ‘perfectly scientific and systematic manner’.27 As a scientist he brought a new language that encouraged a much greater articulation of reserve management by a Water Committee composed of Ballarat councillors more familiar with the world of commerce. And as an engineer he brought a determination to effect on-ground change. The dry conditions of early 1868 provided Engineer Bagge with the impetus to improve the intake of Beales Reservoir by cutting a series of channels to its north. It was a huge earthmoving task that severely disrupted the largely uncompensated residents, including the sawmill families, on land temporarily reserved two years prior. Bagge became the Committee’s front-line general, leading a northern offensive into the heartland of the swamp community. His engineering skills were very much on show, having missed out on the initial reservoir construction. He recommended, without disguising his contempt, that the numerous little huts, privies, piggeries and sawdust heaps be removed, speedily. He deplored the ‘daily amount of offal of the most disgusting description being thrown upon the margin of the swamp’, as well as children who started bushfires that destroyed trees and damaged reserve fences.28 Bagge reported a Mrs Monett ‘washing her clothes in one of the catchwater drains, and having done the washing, emptied the dirty water into the channel as a matter of course’.29 It was not noted that Oliver Monett had requested, unsuccessfully, to settle with the Committee six months before Bagge’s observations. Their entire holding was in the reserve which meant they couldn’t sensibly make new improvements but, equally, couldn’t afford to move without compensation. Bagge pressured the Committee to accelerate permanent reservation; it in turn pressured Melbourne to legislate for incorporation so that compensation and development funds could be sourced. Meanwhile, the Lal Lal Waterworks Association applied pressure to obstruct incorporation, until its settlement payment was made. There were many seemingly trivial and sometimes staged tussles between Bagge, his deputies, and the residents. There is no doubt

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that the locals deliberately taunted Bagge. A letter to the local press from ‘Post and Rails, Bungaree’, alluded to Bagge’s extravagance in paying undue cartage for fencing posts north of Beales.30 Bagge had paid for the posts to be split on the northern boundary, but was nervous about leaving them in situ so he had them carted to sawmill proprietor Clark’s old house. Bagge’s report to the Committee was a tediously detailed two-page defence, with calculations to prove his judicious savings and to reject accusations of extravagance. The persistence of the residents makes it impossible to trivialise the significance of their losses and seemingly petty claims, such as Murphy’s 10-foot–square portion of damaged garden. According to Bagge, the ‘garden’ was full of wild oats and not even with the aid of a microscope would any damage be discerned. The Murphys responded with axes to bait this ardent engineer representing the authority of Ballarat interests.31 Within three years Bagge became a suitable target for Ballarat Punch. Under the title, ‘New Publications’, Punch recommended ‘The Defence of the Fence, and How we Kept the Field’, by Engineer Bagge, illustrated with a map showing ‘the position of the opposing forces on the lines of entrenchment, and the point where the gallant defenders won the battle’.32 This piece perhaps related to Daniel Brophy’s men on a farm above Beales, who broke fences along the reserve, dumped a large quantity of stumps and dead timber, and ‘when not watched are in the habit of opening the fences at night’ and driving in cattle. Bagge put a watchman in place. Bagge’s deputies were recruited from the forest, a weak point in the defence of the reserve, and one well illustrated by Ranger Barlow. In a thirteen-page account, Bagge related his investigation into the trespass of 2000 sheep, a mob of horses, and a camped party of splitters preparing mining props near the northern boundary. At first it seemed that Campbell, the foreman, was implicated, but a web of intrigue finally pointed to Ranger Barlow, who resided at Clark’s old house on the reserve. Any doubt about Barlow’s innocence was removed when Bagge and the Committee chairman caught the ranger and his local accomplice in the act of droving stock within the reserve. Barlow’s complicity with the splitters assured his final condemnation. Although repeated appeals for reappointment were denied, an eventual court case did allow him to retrieve lost wages. This was not


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enough to satisfy the aggrieved ranger. He refused to remove himself from Clark’s old house. One night he returned from the hotel with a strange horse and was not in a state to stable the animal. Unfortunately it fell down the 60-foot well in the front garden, and before too long the decomposing animal was discovered. Bagge, in true character, wanted to save the well and organised to have the dead horse winched out. Before Bagge had an opportunity to bury the horse, Barlow made considerable efforts in arranging revenge. He hired some bullocks, cut fences, and removed the horse to the head of one of the catchwater drains, which would have, explained a rather restrained Bagge, ‘conveyed the putrid matter into Beales Reservoir’.33 With permanent reservation finally within reach of the Water Committee in 1869, pending a successful compensation process, claims were pursued more vigorously. It was still to be another few years before the last of the settlers were removed and Bagge could begin work on new fences to deter adjoining land occupants and their stock, as well as parties of timber workers. Although trespass and sabotage continued in the 2000 acres reserved around Beales Reservoir, it was officially considered cleared in 1872, almost ten years after the Water Committee forged ahead with its dam. In the early 1860s Beales was more than a swamp. A community lived there because a source of water allowed people to combine subsistence farming with casual work under the wider regional umbrella of a mining industry. The residents’ fight for the land and water at Beales needs to be understood in the context of a newly found land democratisation of sometimes fierce proportions. The wave of illegal occupancy that swept across goldfields was given political capital and respectability with Miners’ Rights, Occupation Licences and, most importantly for Bungaree and Warrenheip, Residence and Cultivation Licences. Twenty acres offered a measure of landed security previously unknown, perhaps an agricultural income, the opportunity to continue casual, mining-related work and, for those who selected more acres, a farming life. For Beales residents who lost an entire or substantial proportion of their holding, the sense of injustice must have been acute, especially if a sluggish compensation process obstructed future opportunities. Ballarat was developing handsomely on the riches of gold and water. Bungaree district, lampooned by Ballarat Punch and local

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politicians for its boggy, impassable roads and its Irish Catholic ‘savages’, was losing its water to Ballarat.34 With the creation of Beales Reservoir, water was moved across the West Moorabool catchment divide into Ballarat. This divide, which once marked a physical parting of waters, was now invested with social difference. Importantly, it was the process of expropriation more than the reservoir itself that stamped new value into the catchment boundary. Before leaving this narrative of initial water transfer that so influenced future water ‘settlement’, we need to briefly incorporate Lal Lal water downstream of Beales.

Lal Lal Water below Beales Once Beales Reservoir was in place, Ballarat’s proprietary interest in district water became anchored in a changed waterscape. During reservoir construction there was no recorded discussion about the control of ‘passing flows’, of water that bypassed the dam and continued into Lal Lal Creek. Since then, none has been determined. Complaints were immediate. Bacchus, owner of Peerewerrh station, on behalf of Fisken and six other landholders along Lal Lal Creek, sought compensation unsuccessfully.35 The entanglement of both pastoral families in the Lal Lal Waterworks Association (LLWA) dispute was a likely complication. The LLWA was one of a number of water companies using water from Lal Lal Creek when Ballarat’s Water Committee constructed the reservoir. All except the LLWA were taking water from above the dam near Borders sawmill. The LLWA, however, did not have the same strategic value to prompt compensation from the Committee because its works diverted water into dams and races that began about eight miles downstream, not upstream, of the reservoir. Dolly’s Creek goldfield, on the most southern tributary of West Moorabool River, was the main market initially. With no reservoir structure designed to regulate compensation flow, the LLWA objected that the Committee’s diversion of Lal Lal headwaters into Beales interfered with its priority of right to the summer flow in the creek.36 For six years Hermann Schroeder persisted in his claim that there was insufficient water from Lal Lal Creek available for the dam used to power his sawmill. This dam was almost three miles downstream of Beales, and adjoined Bacchus’s land. A special report from Engineer Bagge revealed that, although Schroeder’s first mill was on


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purchased land, his second mill had been erected on Crown land to which he had no licence. Although solicitors took up his case, the Committee was on firmer ground, and common law’s riparian doctrine was untested in this instance. Downstream farmers more immediate to the dam protested at floodwater that flowed over the Beales bywash into Lal Lal Creek. It became fast-moving water that channelled rather than dispersed over a larger area. New floodgates along the aqueduct at Two Mile Creek offered relief for some, but none of the complainants received compensation for continuing pasture loss or crop damage.37 Committee interest in the water resource east of Ballarat was not restricted to swamps and creeks. Those dispossessed landholders close to Beales and along the aqueduct reservation had reason to feel insecure about their groundwater resource. Dry conditions, and Ballarat’s increasing demand for water, periodically triggered groundwater investigations. In 1868 Ballarat Councillor Abrahams lobbied to have groundwater tapped from near Mt Warrenheip. Krause’s 1869 map series identified a number of district wells, with notes and crosssections indicating depth, strata, salinity, and even means to improve water quality.38 One Ballarat councillor, who had already tried to interest the Committee in a private scheme to supplement Ballarat’s water, put the case for groundwater extraction in 1881: The manafactories are increasing, our mines using a greater quantity of water, and the embellishments of Ballarat by tree-planting, grass-plots, orchards, fish-ponds, ferneries etc, etc, are so numerous and so pleasing, that these reasons alone, I think, should urge upon the Committee the advisability of taking measures to secure a further supply.39 He presented a plan locating eighty-eight wells around Beales Reserve, and an associated schedule listing depth of each well and water level. He believed that transferring the water ‘to put it into the reservoirs’ could be undertaken by the Committee or by contract.40 His survey of district wells does illustrate the extent to which smallholders depended on this source of water once denied access to the headwaters of Lal Lal Creek.

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Prior to exploiting the wells around Beales, this same councillor urged the Committee to first of all ‘open up some of the springs in the reserves’. A number of springs were ‘opened’, with most extensive tunnelling and channelling at the head of Fern Tree Creek, north of Beales. William Grigg complained that this work interfered with the spring on his land. Although there was an increased bout of ‘wilful damage’ at this time, a decision to cease work was more clearly related to measured results.41 Gauging boxes placed at Beales for this project revealed no significant increase in flows. An earlier attempt to channel spring waters into Beales ‘was brought to a stop by the then hostile action of farmers who were looking for compensation to allow the right of entry to cut races in their respective properties’.42 It is not clear what, if any, compensatory measures would have been devised if the Committee had decided to further invest in such schemes. That forest settlers lost water from Lal Lal Creek, and that they feared more being taken, does not adequately explain why, well over 100 years later, a catchment farmer with family links to Beales is capable of recalling Bagge’s name, and the engineer’s use of the term ‘peasants’ to refer to his forebears and their friends. For those in West Moorabool, and I suspect for those living in many other rural water supply catchments serving more powerful urban interests, the contemporary water allocation conflict runs deep and is about more than the physical resource. The undeclared legacy of Ballarat’s ever-increasing presence in the forest catchment is best appreciated, ironically enough, through the management of the Beales Reservoir reserve after people were removed. In the following chapter we will examine how the three ‘Upper’ forest reservoir reserves—Beales, then Wilsons and Moorabool—became Ballarat outposts in hostile Bullarook country. They have been managed variously as zones of exclusion, gentrified parks with selective entry, commercial forestry sites, revenue-raising estates with tenanted local farmers, and as scientific bubbles of catchment management. More than that, the very existence of the reserves entailed an altered physical connection to waterways for forest and farm communities.


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Notes 1 2

3

4

5 6

7

8

9

10 11 12

13 14

15

16 17

18

Ballarat Star, 10.2.1864, p. 2, 10.12.1864, p. 5. Chisholm, ‘The Early Days of Ballarat’s Water Supply’, for details of changing composition of early water committees, including a ‘Committee of Local Bodies’ with Mining Board representation. Although there were several name changes for both the Committee and later Commission, I will adopt the brief title of Water Committee/Committee or Water Commission/Commission. The archive which relates to these bodies will be referred to as BWC (Ballarat Water Commission), administered by Central Highlands Water, its inheritor authority. For details of Deed, see BWC, Minutes 24.6.1862; PROV, VPRS 3844/P0, Unit 8, Report by Wrixon to Christopherson, 17.7.1866, p. 9, Christopherson’s Report to Minister of Mines, 24.9.1866, p. 7. Ballarat Star, leader article, 3.2.1865; reports of court hearings, 1.12.1864, p. 2, 10.1.1865, p. 2, 23.6.1865, pp. 2–3. A fuller account of this dispute, with references to BWC minutes and government records, is in Nathan, ‘Lost Waters of West Moorabool’. Ballarat Star, 3.2.1865, p. 2. F. Krause was commissioned to survey all Ballarat’s water reserves during 1869, after Selwyn’s Geological Survey was dismantled and before Smyth appropriated the role for the Department of Mines. Reservation details summarised by Wrixon, PROV, VPRS 3844/P0, Unit 87.7.1865, 17.7.1866; BWC, Minutes 24.6.1862, 25.8.1862, 2.3.1863, 3.10.1864, 6.2.1865, 2.10.1865, 12.2.1866, 15.10.1866, 3.6.1868, 7.7.1868, 16.3.1869. Court composed of elected members from district mining interests, superseded by Ballarat Mining Board. For particular cases see BWC, Engineer’s Report, 5.1.1863, 14.4.1864; Minutes 22.6.1863, 28.9.1863, 1.12.1863 (Correspondence items detailed in Minutes); PROV, VPRS 44/P0, Unit 38, Conway to Lands Department, 29.8.1862. BWC, Minutes 17.8.1863, 1.12.1863. ibid., 13.6.1864. ibid., 16.11.1863, 25.1.1864, 8.1.1866, 28.4.1868, 12.5.1868, 13.10.1868, 2.2.1869, 16.2.1869, 13.4.1869, 6.7.1869, 17.8.1869, 12.10.1869, 7.12.1869; for summary of litigation, see 10.7.1874. ibid., 13.10.1868, 16.3.1869. BWC, Book of Reference to Plan of Reserve at Harry Beale’s Swamp showing Names of Occupiers of Houses and Allotments and the Estimated Value of Existing Improvements. 1858 Plan reproduced in Winfield, ‘Landscape and Community’. BWC, Minutes 8.12.1868; Engineer’s Report, 28.7.1871, 14.9.1871, 6.10.1871, 15.12.1871, 5.4.1872. BWC, Minutes 17.9.1866. ibid., Mungovin, 1.2.1870; O’Malley, 22.6.1863, 3.8.1863, 28.10.1867, 25.11.1867, 30.12.1867, 17.3.1868, 12.5.1868, 24.8.1868, 26.3.1872, 5.4.1872. For Farmers Common: PROV, VPRS 242/P0, Unit 274, 11.8.1864, 19.8.1864.

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19 20 21 22 23 24

25

26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37

38

39 40 41 42

For Giles: BWC, Minutes 4.8.1868; for Clark: 30.9.1867, 13.10.1868. ibid., 30.9.1867. ibid., 13.4.1869, 25.5.1869, 14.6.1869. ibid., 8.12.1868, 22.6.1869, 20.7.1869. ibid., 15.4.1867. ibid., 20.7.1869. BWC, see Ranger’s and Engineer’s Reports for trespass incidents, for example 19.9.1864, 4.8.1868, 8.6.1868, 28.9.1869, 21.12.1869; for White, Engineer’s Report, 12.1.1872. Powell, Environmental Management in Australia 1788–1914, pp. 54–64; O’Shaughnessy, ‘Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works Catchment Management Policies’, pp. 1–10; Gill, ‘Social and Scientific Factors in the Development of Melbourne’s Early Water Supply’; Victoria Parliament, ‘Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Assembly, Report from the Select Committee on the Water Reserve, Plenty Ranges’, pp. 14–21. BWC, Engineer’s Report, 8.1.1866. Courier, 5.11.1867, p. 2. BWC, Engineer’s Report, 13.10.1868. These observations were repeated by a Courier reporter (7.11.1868): ‘There are pigsties and privies innumerable, dirty children in scores, and many adults not a vast deal more wholesome in appearance…’ Two letters from Borders sawmill followed (12.11.1868). They were highly critical of the ‘scurrilous and slanderous report on a class of respectable people, although they are working people…’ BWC, Minutes 17.4.1868. Ballarat Star, 8.12.1869, p. 2. BWC, Engineer’s Report, 23.11.1869; Minutes 6.7.1869. Ballarat Punch, 19.12.1868, p. 368, 16.10.1869, p. 573, 20.11.1869, p. 591. BWC, Engineer’s Report, 10.2.1871. Ballarat Punch, 11.1.1869, p. 755, 7.8.1869, p. 528; Bate, Lucky City, p. 139. BWC, Minutes 30.10.1865. Lawrence, Dolly’s Creek; Dicker’s Mining Record, Guide to the Gold Mines of Victoria, October 1863, pp. 219–21. For LLWA objections, see court reports, footnote 4. BWC, Minutes, for Schroeder: 15.5.1865, 29.5.1865, 11.5.1869, 22.6.1869, 6.7.1869, 3.8.1869, 18.7.1871; for downstream complaints: 9.9.1870, 23.9.1870, 7.10.1870, 2.12.1870, 6.10.1871, 20.10.1871, 3.11.1871, 15.12.1871, 6.9.1872, 31.3.1876, 28.4.1876, 26.5.1876; floodgates: 14.6.1872. ibid., 7.7.1868; PROV, VPRS 3844/P0, Unit 8, Letter from Abrahams to Lands Department, 29.4.1868. The importance of including hydrological details was stressed by Selwyn (Geological Surveyor) as early as 1856; Victoria Parliament, ‘Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Assembly: Report on Artesian Wells’, pp. 427–31. BWC, Minutes 18.11.1881. BWC, unsorted manuscripts, for Thomson’s wells schedule. BWC, Minutes 10.3.1882, 24.3.1882. BWC, Report attached to wells schedule.


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3


In the parish map, opposite, you can hear the noisy bustle of Bungaree district farmers and bush workers pushing in on the cavernous quiet of the new Beales Reservoir reserve. After the bulk of residents vacated Beales in the early 1870s, the many acres of reserved land around the reservoir took on a true wilderness state. Although trespass by both persons and stock continued, the pressure from grazing and timber foraging was reduced relative to the previous twenty years. Thistles, rank introduced grasses and timber debris combined to create a severe fire hazard and optimum conditions for vermin, in particular rabbits. Beales Reservoir was the Trojan horse of Ballarat water interests, providing both an actual and ideological platform for further advances into Bullarook Forest. Just as importantly, the 2000 acres of land surrounding the dam became a significant barrier that separated the local community from the new water body that largely consumed the headwaters of Lal Lal Creek. This distancing was augmented when Wilsons Reservoir replaced the Borders sawmill site in 1890 and when Moorabool Reservoir, built in 1914, isolated the headwaters of West Moorabool River. The changing management of these reservations is integral to the catchment community’s experience of water. It deepened the social divide between city and country, and contributed to a

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3.1

Map of Beales Reserve relative to surrounding selections, c. 1865

physical and cultural rift between people and local water. We will start with the familiar Beales, but will then proceed to take in a greater sweep of West Moorabool waterscape.

Exclusion under Bagge Engineer Bagge was alarmed by the potential of the Beales reserve to both self-combust and, perhaps worse in his mind, to revert to a


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‘carter-common’.1 He advocated the employment of selected contractors to clean up the timber debris in a supervised manner. He envisaged the gradual introduction of commercial forestry plantings to infill gaps between the native trees. It was Bagge who placed the item of reserve management firmly on the Water Committee’s agenda. It is likely he was influenced by debates about the protection of Melbourne’s water catchment, in particular the Plenty Ranges, where timber workers defended their interests until 1879. Bagge did not articulate the microclimatic connections between forest cover and water supply derived from George Perkins Marsh, and clearly accepted as scientific principle in the Plenty Ranges debate, but it is likely he was swayed by contemporary bureaucratic belief that ‘thick umbrageous trees, not thick scrub,’ complemented reservoirs.2 Bagge convinced the Committee that systematic clearing would facilitate a protective buffer of naturally regenerated trees and forestry plantings, as well as being a future source of revenue. Although serious forestry efforts did not begin until the 1880s, initial interest was ten years earlier during Bagge’s era. Ferdinand von Mueller, from the Botanic Gardens, Melbourne, donated tree stock annually, and Ballarat West Council nursery provided trees for regular plantings. The Victorian Inspector of Forests, Mr Ferguson, was invited to give management recommendations that became incorporated in a works program supervised by Bagge.3 More basic management tasks came first, though. Bagge’s management priority for Beales was the visibility of the reserve boundary. He supervised the dismantling and replacement of the many internal and boundary ‘bush fences’. He organised a wide firebreak around the inside boundary fence of Beales and lobbied for the clearance of dead timber to more easily ‘detect and prevent trespass’.4 People were not part of Bagge’s vision for the reserves. He provided Ballarat’s Water Committee with a scientific rationale for reserve management—one of water quality protection based on tree cultivation and people exclusion. His professional hauteur was clearly ruffled when a proposal for ‘Ornamental Works’, designed to incorporate water views with quiet recreation, came before the Committee. Such ‘unnecessary work’, he explained to the councillors, could only be provided by ‘what nature has supplied i.e. the formation of the country, and, beyond that in the imagination of non-professional

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Engineers and agitators ’.5 Bagge was reprimanded for this slight on his employers, and he was instructed to withdraw and strike out the words he had underlined from his report. Although Bagge’s professional pride was on occasions a source of tension and irritation to the lay Committee members, his influence increased. And as his perceived engineering proficiency grew, his disregard for wider reservoir agendas, such as recreation, intensified. He believed that an 1870 proposal to create a picnic space at Ballarat’s much closer Kirks Reserve, by simply cutting a sward in the long grass, was an ‘extremely injudicious’ move.6 Eventually picnic parties were arranged by appointment at Kirks, with rights periodically withdrawn as vandalism occurred. Trout fishing was also an on-again, off-again proposition, but only for members of Ballarat’s emerging Acclimatisation Society. To begin with there was no picnicking or more active recreation allowed at Beales. Early requests for boating were either rejected or ignored. The netting of eels was sometimes permitted to assist in pipe maintenance, but illegal fishing was a continuing battle for the Committee. Large trout, not from official releases, travelled up the shallow main channel waters north of Beales Reservoir for summer spawning. Running along the channel with spears and stones became a local sport, with those keeping watch repeatedly eluding the ranger. Decayed fish and collapsed channel walls created pollution problems, as did bathing by dignitaries and dogs. Councillor Rodier squirmed in his Committee chair as he confessed to a charge of bathing in Beales, with two others in public office, while on a tour of inspection. John Robson, Beales’ first caretaker, was fined for polluting the reservoir close to his land when it emerged that he and his two boys allowed their dogs to swim in Beales daily.7 Bagge’s management message was fenced exclusion. He left Ballarat at the end of the 1870s, when substantial damages from a court case with contractors for the Gong reservoir, within the Ballarat catchment, threatened to bankrupt an already vulnerable Water Committee. His departure marked a new era of reserve management. The Committee was reconstituted as a Commission, its loans renegotiated, and a government-appointed chairman, Mr Noble Wilson, directed operations for the next twenty-three years.8 Under Wilson, Beales Reserve was transformed into a more ordered entity, with


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portions managed for agriculture, forestry and recreation. Undoubtedly the biggest turnaround in policy was the encouragement of agriculture within the reserve. For those still on Bullarook Forest land, this reversal must have been truly shocking. The process whereby people were removed from the reserve had been protracted and painful. The casual reversal of the exclusion policy added to the hurt by devaluing the initial dislocation.

Back to Beales In 1885, twenty-two years after the first attempts to eject those living in and around Beales Swamp, and some fourteen years after the last residents were removed, local land occupants were invited back to lease 650 acres of the reserve divided into seventeen blocks of various sizes. Prior to 1885, adjoining landowners and the Bungaree Roads Board had exerted intermittent pressure to rent, and rate, reserve land, but Commission response was always negative. There are a number of factors that explain why this changed. With the departure of Bagge, the Commission’s link to wider colonial issues of catchment protection was severed. And after he left, the Commission employed no engineer for the following twelve years. Bagge was not there to encourage the commissioners to discuss the well-publicised Melbourne debate regarding closed catchments. Simultaneous to Ballarat opening its reserve land to farming and forestry operations, the management of Melbourne’s water supply catchments became central to a public health debate that, prompted by typhoid, escalated during the 1880s.9 Yan Yean was finally ‘closed’ just as Beales ‘opened’. Around Yan Yean, timber harvesting ceased, inflows from occupied land were diverted, and action to remove all farming and habitation from its catchment was initiated. Around Beales, forestry began in earnest and farmers once again tilled the ground and, before too long, raised livestock. A second factor effecting change in the Commission’s reserve management was the endemic bushfires, sabotage (including arson), and trespass. Of the 812 cattle that the ranger actually detected on the reserves in 1883, only 147 were impounded, with the offenders believing that the cost of trespass was, at times, an economic proposition. In handing down a light sentence to two local farmers for attacking the caretaker at Beales, the magistrates stated that some

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3.2

Blocks available for leasing at Beales Reserve, Ballarat Water Commission, 1886


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responsibility lay with the commissioners who had allowed trespass to continue unabated for so long.10 There was a sense that the Commission had never been able to sustain an effective on-site presence, despite the strategy of allowing some employees to live on the reserve. Leasing was viewed as a means of legitimising abuses the Commission was incapable of controlling. But more important in explaining the policy reversal than either the exit of Bagge or the condition of the reserve was the revenue it promised. In farm tenancies the Commission found a solution to its long and litigious attempts to exempt itself from rate payments to Bungaree Shire. For almost twenty years, from 1868 when the Shire first valued Commission assets, there were hostilities over rate payments. In 1870 the Commission’s lack of co-operation almost prevented the rate-poor Bungaree Road Board from being proclaimed a shire. Periodically the Commission sought legal solutions, and in 1873 intervention by the Supreme Court established that the Commission was not to be exempt from local government rates, as were water authorities in Melbourne and Geelong.11 The issue remained unresolved, with the Shire exacting revenge for late or reduced rate payments through its zealous thistle and rabbit inspectors who forced Commission compliance on its unkempt reserve land. Lack of compliance not only enraged adjoining landholders, but also eventuated in an associated series of costly court actions that overshadowed the main rates issue. The Commission’s chairman, Noble Wilson, established strong political links with Melbourne and was determined to resolve the ongoing rates dispute. He lobbied for legislative reform that would ensure immunity to municipal rating. Bungaree Shire responded quickly with a petition to parliament. It cited bankruptcy and road destruction as the inevitable consequence of a proposed rate exemption for the 3200 acres of Commission land within its boundaries.12 The government was reluctant to legislate in support of the Commission without extending a life-line to the Shire. Leasing a portion of the reserve emerged as the solution. It was agreed that Bungaree Shire would have power to rate any tenants on reserve land. In addition to this, for a period of fourteen years, the Commission was to give a percentage of the rents to the Shire, an amount comparable to its annual rate of past years, as a means of settling a

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government debt. Fifty-eight tenders were received when first advertised. The sixteen successful lessees paid the Commission, in their first year, a gross rental of £809, leaving a profit of £300 after payment to Bungaree Shire.13 This profit margin and eventual income became a significant source of revenue for the Commission. Although not articulated clearly by the Commission itself, Bagge’s exclusionist strategy for reservoir protection was superseded by a policy of land use zoning that accommodated an expanding agricultural and forestry function. The Commission was, unlike its Melbourne counterpart, the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works, aided in this new management direction by having its water reserves vested in itself outright when permanently reserved. Furthermore, from 1895, Noble Wilson encouraged the Commission to purchase, and then lease back to farmers, land adjoining the Upper reserves (Beales, Wilsons, Moorabool) as it became available.14 This pushed the boundary of Commission-controlled leased lands further out into the catchment and well beyond the reservoir water’s edge. Scientific arguments were sidestepped rather than completely forsaken in the implementation of the new management policy. Geologist Krause helped determine the boundary for leased land least likely to affect water quality, although the proximity of allotments to the reservoir suggests his options were not great. And some land use controls were adopted, with the tenants regarding initial prohibition of livestock restrictive.15 It could be argued that forestry created a decoy that deflected attention by the wider scientific community from the leased portions of the reserve, with plantations established in earnest during the 1880s. Timber was grown for ‘marketeable purposes as well as for ornamentation’.16 Commission lands became renowned for these mainly softwood plantations and became a continuing, if controversial, source of revenue. Once the agricultural portion of the reserves was demarcated, a plantsman, Christopher Mudd, with experience in India and Africa, was employed to organise systematic forestry plantings. Mudd was the son of a botanist and gardener employed at Cambridge University. He developed links with the State Conservator of Forests, with the experimental forester at Creswick, La Gerche, and with state departments in South and Western Australia. In 1899 the Australian Association for the Advancement of Science toured


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the reserve plantations. For many years, Commission lands were viewed as an innovative forestry resource for its repositories of seed and species trials.17 There was no equivalent attention afforded the opening of reserve land to agriculture. Leasing the reserve further polarised Commission and farmer by providing a continuing source of tension and by formalising the subservience experienced by this segment of the catchment community. Relationships with the Commission had feudal overtones that extended into the twentieth century. Chairman Wilson made tours of inspection and, of course, tenants in arrears were ‘visited’. A scheme of awards and prizes for tenants with ‘best kept’ farms was endorsed by the Commission and at least one dinner, at Wilson’s Hall, was organised.18 The Commission was clearly master, and Bagge’s deprecatory ‘peasant’ became more than mere word. Tensions arose when tenants tendered for leases, negotiated rebates following poor seasons, had their ploughing interrupted as Wilson’s Dam was constructed, contested the repair of boundary fences, and objected to the encroachment of forestry trees. It was Commission staff that determined the siting of farm buildings. When a lease terminated, the buildings and any improvements could be removed, but were not subject to valuation if they remained on site. When one tenant’s paddock became dry, the request for ‘some way or course to the water’ was denied.19 These blocks, leased for a period of ten or fifteen years, were of greatest value to those with better-serviced adjoining land. After twenty years of leasing reserve land, the tenants negotiated a more flexible contractual arrangement, for which they paid greater rent. Concerned that continual cropping was exhausting the soil, farmers petitioned to graze one-sixth of their leased land with up to fifty sheep. Mahony, the Commission’s first engineer after Bagge, argued strongly against such a move, stating that if the area was allowed to be developed as full farming land it may as well not be reserved. His counter suggestion was that land of reduced cropping value should be made available for forestry. Despite Mahony’s protestations, grazing was allowed and rents were renegotiated to reflect this more profitable farming activity. Mahony was appointed in 1891, six years into established tenancy arrangements. Less fanatical than his predecessor, he seemed to take the middle ground with catchment protection issues. For example, in the one report he both advised

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against an application from two farmers to extend leased land, and advocated the Commission purchase cattle to control summer grass. He did add the proviso that the cattle be sold in winter before rains increased damage.20 Four years after permission was granted to allow grazing, it was agreed to double the pasture portion of leased land to one-third of a tenant’s holding. The report, by Chairman Kirton, and the incoming Chairman Brawn, that introduced this more liberal arrangement for livestock provision, was a departure from Noble Wilson’s highly conditional access to wider reserve lands. They rationalised that: Seeing that there are hundreds of settlers on the Commission boundaries and watersheds who keep all classes of stock and over whom the Commission have no control, we think that this restriction may be removed and tenants allowed to keep stock at certain seasons of the year at the will of the Commission.21 This relaxation of leasehold conditions was driven by economic imperatives, with the Commission anxious to fund a new reservoir at Moorabool. In 1910, the Commission received £1617 revenue from leased lands. This was almost double what it received from pine timber, firewood, and livestock sales. The rental revenue from the reserve was equivalent to just over 10 per cent of the Commission’s total water rates from Ballarat. In hindsight it seems that the tenants helped tighten their own noose by financing the Commission to build more reservoirs that in turn effected stricter land use controls for following generations of farmers. The increasingly symbiotic relationship between tenants and Commission did not mean an absence of tension and conflict. This is well exemplified by the Commission’s response to a petition by tenants affected by Irish blight in their potato crop. They asked for a reduction in rent or permission to sow two-thirds, rather than onethird, of their land to grass. Chairman Brawn, a stockbroker turned pastoralist (west of Ballarat), did not recommend any concessions and in his inspection report to the Commission seemed intent on revealing both his astuteness and the tenants’ duplicity: ‘Some of the tenants had potatoes dug for inspection but we preferred digging up


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the growing ones to judge for ourselves’.22 In 1911 the Bungaree District was placed under quarantine in an attempt to contain the disease. Despite this, and with a sense of self-congratulation, it was noted in the Commission’s annual report that, as a good season had followed the blight scare, the Commission displayed wisdom in not reducing rents. Although events at the Moorabool reserve would show Wilson in a less flattering light than portrayed by his contemporaries, he was much more of a negotiator than Brawn. There was overwhelming support to name the reservoir north of Beales ‘Wilsons’. Brawn was chairman for twenty-five years, but a lone suggestion to name the proposed reservoir at Moorabool after him was never pursued.

Expansion of Commission Holdings In 1910 Brawn accelerated the Commission’s land acquisition policy, begun by Wilson, with purchases adjoining water reserves at Moorabool and Beales. Bungaree Shire Council viewed this expansion as unnecessary, deceitful and wasteful. It was not just that land purchases reduced its rate base and deprived landholders of freehold, the increasingly commercial operations on land purportedly earmarked for water supply purposes was bitterly resented. Bungaree Shire’s three grievances, as put before Victoria’s relatively new State Rivers and Water Supply Commission, concerned: 1. The purchase of privately owned lands for supposed water supply purposes subsequently leased for agriculture and grazing. 2. The purchase of lands also for supposed water supply purposes subsequently devoted to plantations from which timber is cut and sold. 3. The purchase of similar lands also supposed for water supply purposes and subsequently devoted to the grazing of stock for sale.23 The Water Commission remained the largest landholder within Bungaree Shire and the question of rateable property continued to rankle with local government. Hopes erupted after a 1960s agreement was brokered between Melbourne’s water supply authority and the

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seven country shires with reservations within its boundaries. The government opposed renewed attempts by Bungaree to be able to rate Commission land. On this occasion the Shire focused on the highly commercialised timber plantations which, since 1928, had been serviced by a Commission packing case factory.24 The factory, along with eighteen Commission houses, was not rated. The roads endured heavy timber traffic but were not subsidised. For the Shire, the effect was discriminatory: … 17,000 ratepayers of the Ballarat Water Commissioners are directly subsidised by 850 ratepayers of the Shire of Bungaree and also that the ratepayers of the Shire must pay higher rates than would otherwise be normal to compensate for the direct loss of rates brought about by the Commission’s occupation of rich farmland.25 Without legislative change, pressure had been applied regularly for Commission ‘contributions’ on the basis of its ‘moral obligation’.26 Although a rough formula for contributions was established for a time, the issue has never been resolved to the satisfaction of local government. In a 2003 water forum between Central Highlands Water and the Bungaree community concerning water quality, the issue of rate compensation was again raised.

A New Agenda From the 1880s the Water Commission created both farms and forestry plantations on its Upper reserves. There was a third act of creation. The reservoirs were reborn to double as scenic lakes, fringed by ornamental gardens and nestled in naturalistic landscapes. In this more esoteric category of land zoning, the Commission was swept along by a cultural current even Bagge could not have resisted. Weston Bate depicted Ballarat’s 1880s decade as a time of consolidation, when its public-spirited pioneers were ‘free to pursue their boom-time vision of unsurpassable Ballarat, metropolis of the goldfields’.27 Unlike Melbourne in this same period, Ballarat’s population was stable. It was Ballarat’s celebrated mining history as well as its economic capital that became the foundation stone on which new cultural institutions were based.


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Ballarat patriots coined ‘Golden City’ to counter ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ and invested generously in civic beautification. Ballarat’s parks and gardens, together with its water reserves, and waterfalls, were identified as scenic public space within excursion distance from the city. A local, innovative publishing house, Niven and Co., did much to promote Ballarat’s blossoming image of prosperous refinement by producing illustrated pamphlets that featured streetscapes and local environs. In Niven’s earliest guide (1885), he wrote with relative restraint that ‘The Water Commission’s Reservoirs are easily reached within an hour from Ballarat, and are among the most complete in the southern hemisphere’.28 Multiple productions of pamphlets and books and posters about Ballarat appeared throughout the 1890s and into the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1893, Niven and Co. asked the Commission for assistance in publishing a pictorial poster ‘in order to advertise Ballarat as a holiday resort for the public’. In 1898, he advertised the natural ornamentation provided by ‘the artificial lakes the reservoirs form and the copses and plantations of English and other deciduous trees’. Furthermore, ‘at Kirks, and also at Beales, (twelve miles from Post

3.3 ‘Rustic Scene, Beales Reservoir’

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Office), shelter houses have been erected for the accommodation of picnic parties’.29 In a more substantial publication, Ballarat and District in 1901, there was reference to the ‘attractive resorts’ that adjoined the reservoirs. Of its thirty-one photographs, seventeen featured the water reserves under such headings as ‘Evening Shadows, Kirks’, ‘The Tangle of the Trees, Gong Gong’, and ‘Rustic Scene, Beales Reservoir’. In this same publication the Commission appended a history of the water supply reserves, attributing them to the ‘spirit of independence and self-aid of the people of the District’.30 Christopher Mudd, the Commission plantsman, keenly applied his expertise to the new task of superimposing a leafy landscape of leisure and cultural gratification on a water supply reserve. Although some ornamental plantings and two ‘mia-mias’, one at Kirks and one at Beales, preceded Mudd’s appointment, his galvanising role has been unacknowledged. He was excited by the ‘scope there is for adding to, improving, and bringing out the natural beauties and features of the Reserves’.31 Along with Chairman Wilson he organised the construction of picnic pavilions, tracks and rough-hewn rustic bridges, all set within a naturalistic landscape in view of the reservoirs. He recommended a combination of ‘Conserved and Artificial Forestry’, whereby native timber had room to grow and trees of both ornamental and harvesting value were planted strategically. He promoted the clearance of undergrowth to minimise fire risk, enhance native tree growth, and create clearings for more intimate landscaping. He established a nursery and was invited to assist Ballarat staff with civic plantings. His six years of reserve management established high horticultural and forestry standards that endured beyond his tenure. Mudd resigned early in 1893 following an insubordination incident that he believed received inadequate support from the Commission. Perhaps because of his strong allegiance to the Salvation Army, he was on uneasy terms with some locals and employees. Later in life he completed three books of thinly disguised sermons celebrating the Australian landscape, with particular reference to the vegetation.32 Like Bagge, Mudd, for a short time, forged connections between Ballarat and the wider world. The reserves of Kirks and Gong, in reasonable proximity to the main centre of Ballarat, received most attention from the publicists, although Beales was not ignored. In following decades Wilsons and


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Moorabool eclipsed Beales to become symbols of the post-gold wealth of Ballarat. This dedicated interest in the more aesthetic and recreational values of the eastern water reserves was an expropriation of a different kind. The reserves were promoted as extensions of Ballarat, as outposts of rustic but civilising values. They were not identified with the less romantic farming community that surrounded them. For the Commission, this new role for the reserves was capitalised on to connect with narratives of visionary founding fathers, to reinforce contemporary assessments of the Commission as a state icon of water supply management, and to strengthen its ideological base for future ventures in the catchment. A less orthodox view would be that Ballarat’s governance of its eastern hinterland was insular and self-serving. From the 1880s, the Ballarat Water Commission became isolated from the wider world of scientific scrutiny and community debate that distinguished water management in nearby Melbourne. It was untouched by the new Department of Water Supply, established in the 1880s as an independent identity more focused on creating irrigation districts in northern Victoria than overseeing provincial water supply management.33 Even with the new identity of the water reserves as picturesque haven, the Commission remained extremely guarded about people freely accessing them. For more years than not, people entered the reserves on request or by invitation only. Importantly, though, Ballarat and local use of the reserves was differentiated. In 1909 a commissioner complained about a ‘disgraceful picnic party’ at Wilsons. The subsequent report by Tolliday, the caretaker, was illuminating. With a clear allegiance to the locals, he explained that picnic parties had different ways of enjoying themselves. That on 7 February there were two parties, one from Ballarat and the other local. As the locals had no permit they, unlike those from Ballarat, had to leave their conveyances outside the reserve. He reported: ‘They were playing the violin and dancing on the green, also racing, and high-jumping, but otherwise well-behaved’.34 For the commissioners, the reserve gates were open to those from Ballarat wishing to indulge in the pastoral idyll. ‘Incidents’ such as the picnic party, along with ongoing vandalism and abuse of by-laws, suggest that local residents felt the gates were more closed than open, even though the eastern reserves were located in ‘their’ Bungaree District, and not in Ballarat.

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Clearly the creation story of the Upper reservoirs is about more than the loss of West Moorabool water across to Ballarat. From the initial expropriation of Beales Swamp there was a ripple effect that extended out from the edge of the dam to the reserve boundaries and beyond into adjoining freehold. It effectively trapped the old forest community in a marginalised existence within its own geographical space. The impact extended beyond economic loss of resources to the loss of an independent profile for its mainly farming population. From the early 1860s, the catchment boundary doubled as a social divide, with those ‘within’ understanding their immediate world largely by reference to the other side. Beales initiated this wider process but it was the much greater agonies of the Moorabool reservation that entrenched division and difference. An understanding of the Moorabool is important in its own right, and will be considered later in a discussion of contemporary water allocation politics. But, in two respects, Moorabool extends the Beales story into the more recent past.

Moorabool Postscript Following the revenue success of the Beales farm experiment, the Commission’s land acquisition policy was more energetically applied to Moorabool. And it was not until 1993 that Central Highlands Water, the modern precursor of Ballarat’s Water Commission, decided to terminate the long-held leases for 530 hectares of its land closest to the Moorabool and Wilsons reservoirs over a period of ten years. Halfa-dozen families were involved in the decision, some with three generations of tenancy. There was considerable local protest for the loss of land that had close ties to the outlying farming community. Resolution was found in part through the establishment of a Demonstration Farm, and through ‘land management discussions’. In what could be considered a final admission of catchment mismanagement that began with the 1880s decision to lease land within the Beales Reserve, a Central Highlands Water spokesperson admitted that: ‘The board has been on the defensive over property that is in our control. It just wouldn’t happen anywhere else’.35 For the landholders and local government concerned, however, it was more land lost. And, in the context of more contemporary water politics, it was perceived as another cost to farmers whose production of potable water for Ballarat remained without serious acknowledgement.


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3.4

Entrance avenue at Wilsons Reserve

3.5 The Lodge at Moorabool Reservoir

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The second dimension linking Beales to a more recent Moorabool is the management of the wider reserve. Moorabool Reservoir became a symbol of a united Ballarat as it moved towards amalgamation of its two councils in 1921. The idea for a new reservoir was part of a vision, articulated from 1910, to promote a provincial city that could adequately supply manufacturing industries, be drought-proof, and enable a sewerage scheme.36 Moorabool Reserve was to outshine Wilsons, established in 1890 on the upper swamp waters at Beales, as the showpiece scenic reserve. To the gold town ideologues, Moorabool offered twentieth-century Ballarat the economic promise that Beales presented in the preceding century. As well as signifying the urban renewal of Ballarat itself, Moorabool came to embody the security and confidence of a Water Commission prepared to invest in ornamental symbols of its management. It was at these Upper reserves, in particular, that the commissioners entertained and toured dignitaries, convened special meetings, and enjoyed well-provisioned annual picnics. Avenues of trees, iron gates and picket fences demarcated grand entrances to both Wilsons and Moorabool. Although there had been a Chairman’s Lodge built at Wilsons, the one at Moorabool received particular acclaim. Built from several species of timber grown and milled by the Commission, it was embroidered with floriferous garden beds that connected to a path, with viewing seats, around the reservoir. A Visitor’s Book, kept at the Lodge, recorded the many compliments from government authorities, water and forestry industries, and highprofile international visitors.37 And perhaps because it was the most distant reserve from Ballarat, and because the Commission began to relax with the security of its assets, Moorabool Reserve became a more accessible local resource than the others. It was used for school, church and family picnics, cross-country events, and weddings. Less officially, more youthful locals played the spillway in daredevil stunts. With the restructure of the water industry in the early 1980s, one which saw the more corporate entity of Central Highlands Water replace the Ballarat Water Commission, there was less scope for managing Moorabool Reserve as a parkland resource. Some commentators, such as the academic Dingle Smith, regretted the loss of these ‘community service obligations’ in the dismantling of the older water authorities.38 The new management bodies, with their skill-based


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Boards, were strictly in the business of supplying water. Over a period of twenty years, Beales, Wilsons and Moorabool reserves became hardly recognisable from earlier photographs. Maintenance was neglected, public safety issues emerged, caretakers were removed and padlocks installed. A sign was hung by the Moorabool gates to pronounce, but not explain, that the reserve was ‘temporarily closed until further notice’. Visitors were redirected to the one water reserve closer to Ballarat that was being maintained. For local landholders it was like Oscar Wilde’s giant closing the gates to his garden. With the public prohibited, the neglect of the immediate reservoir grounds has been largely unseen. In 2003, a local petition prompted lengthy negotiations to reopen the Moorabool Reserve, with clear support from groups such as the Bungaree Historical Society, the local Landcare group, the nearby Springbank school, and local government.39 Reluctant to resume responsibility for the recreational function of the reserve, Central Highlands Water was pressured to negotiate a lease with a ‘Friends of Moorabool’ committee and to reinvest in the grounds. It is not quite the same, though. People have been diverted from the grand tunnelled entrance of mixed ornamental and forestry trees to a new picnic area which offers much

3.6

Entrance gates to Wilsons Reserve, no longer in use as there is ‘No Public Access’

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3.7

One of several seats, overlooking Moorabool Reservoir, once connected to promenade and gardens

better views to the road than the reservoir. The leafy garden around the caretaker’s house has restricted entry. Perhaps more importantly, though, the promenade shadowing the water’s edge and dotted with well-spaced seats is no longer accessible and a former footbridge over the spillway will not be reinstalled. Even before this new agreement to conditionally reopen Moorabool, the reserve was described in natural resource management reports as a ‘social asset’.40 This stand-alone term, designed to meet the required triple bottom-line assessments of social, environmental and economic condition, cannot hope to convey the social value of this reserve. Like Beales, it represents more than the amount of water held by Ballarat, and more than a site, when open, for local recreation. And much more so than Beales, Moorabool Reservoir and its reserve represent the land and water now not held by local landholders, by what is remembered as an unjust process. That process engendered deep resentment for Ballarat water interests and subsequent possessiveness for landholders’ existing water rights. For some, being allowed to picnic in the shady reserve gardens overlooking the ‘lake’ was treasured consolation. The negotiations to have that right


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returned were about retrieving some justice for a wider wrong as much as re-establishing a local amenity. Ballarat interests have extended well beyond the water’s edge at Beales, Wilsons and Moorabool to encompass land on the ‘other’ side of the reserve boundary. We will discover that with the construction of a fourth reservoir at Lal Lal, when the science of water management overrode the more provincial scale of operations, Ballarat’s sphere of influence expanded to reach the catchment perimeter. For the moment, though, it can be said that the reservoirs became integral to the embattled identity of this community. To view them as Ballarat’s economic assets with hydrological properties only is to misrepresent the cultural complexity of what water has come to mean to people living in a waterscape quite transformed by the expanding intrusion of nearby urban interests. The dammed headwaters of Lal Lal Creek and West Moorabool River could not be touched and, for much of their existence, could not be seen by those living nearby. The physical barrier presented by the reservoir reserves is somewhat dwarfed as we follow the unseen waters downstream of the dam walls to the south of where Bullarook Forest once grew.

Notes 1 2

3

4 5 6 7

8

9 10 11 12

BWC, Engineer’s Report, 9.8.1872. Victoria Parliament, ‘Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Assembly, Report from the Select Committee on the Water Reserve, Plenty Ranges’, 1876, debate, pp. 14–21. An 1873 proclamation to ‘close the mountain’ affected three sawmill communities. Evidence quoted by Chief Engineer of Water Supply, p. 17. BWC, Minutes, for Mueller: 18.4.1867, 17.6.1870, 12.4.1878; for Ballarat West: 3.6.1870, 1.7.1870; for Ferguson: 28.7.1871, 26.7.1872, 21.8.1874, 4.9.1874, 16.10.1874. BWC, Engineer’s Report, 9.8.1872. ibid., 6.10.1871. BWC, Minutes 30.12.1870. BWC, Engineer’s Report, 30.10.1874; for Rodier: BWC, Minutes 16.12.1870; for Robson, ibid., 19.4.1872, 3.5.1872; Engineer’s Report, 12.1.1872. Chisholm, ‘The Early Days of the Ballarat Water Supply’, pp. 89–98; The Commission became composed of seven members, two each from the Ballarat councils and three government-appointed, including the Chair. Dingle and Rasmussen, Vital Connections, pp. 39–41. BWC, Minutes 5.1.1884, 30.6.1887. ibid., for summary of litigation: 23.9.1884; most celebrated case: 11.7.1873. ibid., 23.9.1884, 17.10.1884, 14.11.1884.

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13 14

15 16 17

18

19

20 21 22 23

24

25

26

27 28 29

30

31 32

33

34 35 36 37

BWC, Fifth Annual Report, 1885. O’Shaughnessy, ‘Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works Catchment Management Policies’, p. 10; BWC, Minutes 25.1.1895. BWC, Minutes 9.1.1885. ibid., 20.8.1886. ibid., 30.11.1886, 15.8.1890, 6.9, 19.7.1895, 22.12.1899; Family history notes by Helen Law, private collection. BWC, Minutes, Inspections: 13.4.1888, 25.5.1888, 24.3.1893, 19.5.1893, 18.5.1894, 22.2.1895; Farm competition: 16.2.1900; Wilson’s Hall: 9.2.1906. ibid., e.g. deputation from seventeen tenants wanting a rent concession owing to a bad season and expense of land clearing; tenants’ request ‘be not entertained’: 13.4.1888; fences: 9.1.1885, 29.12.1895, 14.1.1896; water access: 7.1.1887; tree incursions: 14.1.1896, 18.12.1896. ibid., tenancy terms: 5.4.1906, 4.5.1906, 19.10.1906. ibid., 25.6.1909. ibid., petition: 28.4.1911; Brawn’s report: 26.5.1911. PROV, VPRS 3844/P0, Unit 8, Letter from Bungaree Shire to Lands Department, 6.11.1910; BWC, Minutes 8.12.1910. Central Highlands Water only recently announced closure (Courier, 29.4.2004), explaining that the ‘mill was unviable and was not part of CHW’s core business…’ PROV, VPRS 6008/P0, Unit 295, Letter from Bungaree Shire to Minister of Local Government, 7.5.1962. ibid., Meeting report between Bungaree Shire and Minister of Water Supply, 2.7.1953. Bate, Lucky City, p. 188. Niven, Niven’s Guide Book and Souvenir of Ballarat, p. 4. BWC, Minutes 19.5.1893; Niven, Ballarat Pictorial Guide, see under ‘Water Reserves’; Niven, Guide to Ballarat; Niven, The Garden City (n.d.); Niven, Cities and Towns of Victoria; Niven, The Garden City (1910); Kimberly, Ballarat and Vicinity, see pp. 206–7 for profile of Niven Company. Jarrett, Ballarat and District in 1901, see Introduction, and pp. 84–95 for Commission history. BWC, Forester’s Report in Minutes 4.2.1887. Family history notes by Helen Law, in her possession; BWC Minutes 2.3.1888, 13.1.1893; Mudd, The Whys and Ways of the Bush and Guide to Bush Plants; Mudd, Tales and Trails of Austral Bush and Plain; Mudd, Ocean Jack and Other Stories of Austral Bush and Plain. Exception was perhaps Bendigo’s Coliban Scheme, Powell, Watering the Garden State, pp. 74–84. BWC, Minutes 5.3.1909. Courier, 25.6.1993, p. 1; Courier, Saturday Magazine, 11.12.1993, p. 33. Bate, Life after Gold, p. 112. BWC, Visitor Book, ‘The Lodge’, 2 vols. This function of the reserves well illustrated in Jones, A Century of Permanent Water Supply. Example of Wilsons: Chairman Wilson reported that the island in Wilson Reservoir was planted with advanced trees of baltic pine and spruce, and described it as a


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38 39 40

‘pretty feature of the new sheet of water’ (30.6.1892); and ‘The Williams Avenue’ was planted at Wilsons to recognise Comissioner Williams interest in growing timber there (23.2.1894); and on 11.5.1911 State Governor Carmichael and party visited Wilsons. He provided motors for the commissioners and their wives on the occasion, and afternoon tea. Smith, Water in Australia, pp. 290–1. These groups were represented on the Friends of Moorabool Committee. Sinclair Knight Merz, ‘Moorabool River Water Resource Assessment, Stage A Report’, ‘List of Social Assets in Moorabool River Catchment’, p. 53.

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4

Unseen Waters

The idea of ‘social flow’, outlined in the Introduction, concerns fluctuating cultural ties that a community has with local water places, as exemplified by the changeable identity of reservoir reserves. For a riverside to be of cultural value it must be a known space that crosses the time span of an individual’s experience, or be understood as a unique blend of natural and cultural change over greater time. Fundamental to this shifting and layered knowledge at the local scale is the opportunity to be by the river. In this chapter I will peel back the real changes in the capacity of West Moorabool’s community to ‘connect’ with local streams and consider how access to, and visibility of, waterways have diminished in the post-gold landscapes of Victoria. Whereas the smaller waterways in cities and towns often disappear under bitumen or are disguised as stormwater drains, in this rural catchment there are different physical barriers to uncover. This investigation will entail leaving, for the moment, the reservoir reserves, but insight into the rest of the river system does accentuate their great potential to be more than an urban water supply. Two family photographs (4.1, 4.2) capture a more accessible past for the West Moorabool River near where Assistant Surveyor Webster marked a ‘small cascade’ in 1856 and, one year earlier, Surveyor Bellairs noted a spring.1 The parties are most likely gathered at a

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4.1 ‘Millbrook residents beside the Moorabool River’

4.2 ‘Millbrook ladies playing bridge by the Moorabool’

streamside clearing just downstream of Moorabool Creek (now Millbrook) bridge. Locals could reach this part of the river from an unused road delineated by unploughed farmland. Few people now

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know that a streamside reserve exists on this part of the river. It is extraordinary that so much of a once generous public resource, at least half of Victoria’s inland water frontage, has been allowed to disappear from view and memory. Explanation lies in part with the slow and uneven pace of the process, allowing community knowledge to slip away gradually. The frontage remnant associated with the photographs was formalised as a reserve under 1881 legislation. Like so much of Victoria’s frontage, it remained unlicensed, but not ungrazed. In the late 1940s an adjoining landowner tried to secure rights to this frontage by purchasing the connecting road, which he described as ‘unused’ and running into ‘a dead end containing about 4 acres’.2 The Lands Department was unwilling to sell and issued a grazing licence. In 1961, the same licensee cultivated the road, previously pasture, which effectively blocked easy vehicular access to the river reserve. The Department received a letter of protest, penned by an ‘anonymous ratepayer’, which referred to the consequent loss of swimming and fishing opportunities: May I draw your attention to a road leading down to Moorabool River commonly known to a lot of people who use it very frequently in fishing season in summer months. It has been ploughed up with the intention of growing potatoes by PL whose property adjoins it, he has rented the lane for grazing and had a gate to get in and out, but this year broke it up as previously mentioned. That is the only road to the Moorabool you can drive, it has a beautiful place for children to learn to swim, clear running water and lovely toddlers pool and is most unjust to other ratepayers to have their and their children’s recreation taken from them. So hope you will take steps to have fence put back and give the public back their road to the ‘pump hole’ and people who come from all parts of surrounding districts and Ballarat. You often meet two cars coming away and perhaps two cars going down in front of you. So why was he allowed to plough it with intent to water the potatoes seem very unfair and did not think it could be done. So hoping you will see into the matter as soon as you can.

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Allowing for exaggeration perhaps arising from more personal agendas, the author wanted his rights regarding frontage safeguarded. Unlike so many people now, he knew that an area abutting the water had once been reserved, in part, for his enjoyment, and that a connecting road was surveyed to allow him easy access. Irregular access by a community itself changing became no access following a 1980s subdivision development prompted a 99-year licence for the associated unused road. This was subsequently transferred to the company building the Ballarat-to-Melbourne ‘fast train’ rail which bridges the river at the reserve. There was no talk of compensation with replacement frontage because it was largely a forgotten and changed place.

English Landscape, Australian Environment Questions of visibility and access are central to landscape debates in the United Kingdom, and in Scandinavian countries, but are quite peripheral to environmental thinking in Australia despite its colonial legacy in land settlement and natural history. In England, especially, there have been decades of multidisciplinary discourse about rural landscape that moves well beyond a preoccupation with the biophysical condition of the environment.3 ‘Landscape’ employs a quite different language and is used by people both within and outside resource conservancy agencies. A keyword in this language is ‘countryside’, warmly inclusive of people. The capacity to shape rural landscape and roam on mountain, moor, down land and riverside is central to the wider cultural identity of its people. Landscape degradation and loss relate more strongly to heritage than biodiversity. Moorland management, for instance, must incorporate the strong walking, hunting and farming traditions that give easy acceptance to the moors as a cultural landscape. Encouragement of the heath land vegetation and its wildlife becomes integrated with people outcomes, whether it is to subsidise uneconomic hill farmers to retain an historic landscape or to provide dog-walking areas near the more vulnerable parts of the moors. Without leverage of the landscape notion to heave land and water to the centre of people’s lives, the environment is too easily discussed as an object which people act on, nearly always to its detriment. Conceptually people are placed outside the environment, as recipients of resources and as destroyers of habitat. In many parts of

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Australia, especially around rivers, people are literally positioned ‘outside’, because there is no way in, and a declining knowledge of what is there anyway. Roads to water have been closed, incorporated into farms, or leased to adjoining landholders for periods of up to ninety-nine years. There is no contemporary public outcry about this, in part because waterscape connections have been severed for many years. In the United Kingdom, however, public protest about restricted access to the countryside is vigorous. It feeds a policy debate concerning the right to roam, not just seek passage, across private, rather than public, land. The retrieval of more ‘open country’, traditionally moors and mountains, but increasingly land by rivers and sea, is considered politically mainstream.4 It is rooted in the bitter history of enclosure and supports a collective memory of more communal land rights enjoyed before huge chunks of land were closed to commoners, in both senses of the word. This history has blurred the public–private land divide. When miners from the north of England organised mass trespasses in the Peak District during the 1930s, they did so with the conviction that private land tenure does not necessarily equate with complete rights of exclusion. More recently, the well-supported Forbidden Britain campaign with its protest walks and trespass events demonstrated the fundamental right for all to enjoy countryside. ‘Access to the countryside is something which ought to be ours by right, like the vote or trial by jury’, according to long-time campaigner Marion Shoard.5 Writer-journalist George Monbiot proclaimed in his 1995 land manifesto that ‘the man who holds the deeds to a stretch of countryside has no greater moral right to that land than the man who wishes to visit it’.6 In Scandinavian countries a right of universal access is enshrined in custom and law. It is open access that is assumed, with only the exceptions requiring definition. This fundamental questioning of private property rights is not discernible in Australia, where a landowner’s right of exclusion is held in relative sanctity, especially in rural areas. The right to access inland waterways in Australia is determined by ownership rights of riparian land.7 For someone with legal title to land adjoining waterways, there may be associated rights to the bed and bank of the river, but more commonly just to the bank. The farmer’s fence divides the country into green and red, one side go, the other stop, with little orange

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in between. There is almost no public right of access to private riparian land, such as the provision of public footpaths, permissive access agreements or open access legislation. There is no societal expectation that such rights could be considered fairly within the private property framework. Incredibly, if access became an ‘issue’ for public debate in Australia, it would largely concern entry to public or Crown land. Unlike England, where even the national parks occupy private land, there is an extensive hierarchy of national and state reservations that remain in the public domain, with a particularly generous reservation of land around inland waterways in Victoria. One would think, therefore, that accessing riparian land and lakes would not be a problem. But recognition of what constitutes public land in rural areas, even for quite localised communities, is poor. Rights of access to public land along rivers licensed to adjoining landholders are especially confusing.

Crown Water Frontage in Victoria The bureaucratic term for the linear, and often interrupted, strip of land along inland waterways reserved for the public is ‘Crown water frontage’. In Victoria the resource encompasses more than harbours and navigable rivers to include 20–60 metres out from the water’s edge of many waterways. And punctuating this riparian margin are more generous bulges of streamside reserved for various purposes. In theory, this relatively generous public water frontage resource allows access to rivers, streams and lakes. If a waterway can be easily accessed, it has greater visibility and a more distinctive profile than those streams landlocked by farmers’ paddocks or industrial estates. There is a difference between city and country in the acknowledgement of rivers, and in how they are accessed. Many cities around the world, including those in southern Australia, have in recent decades embraced the landscape and recreational potential of their rivers. Environmental imperatives have been incorporated into this essentially urban vision. Melbourne’s 1980s ‘Save the Yarra’ campaign was as much about rescuing the river from further degradation as about retrieving a scenic resource for the people of Melbourne. The Yarra continues to give strong definition to the city, with its new Federation Square featuring a cobbled riverbed path leading visitors

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from bitumen to water. Ballarat now has distinctive road signage at waterway crossings, even when little more than a drain of bluestone pitchers. And its main waterways, the Yarrowee and Canadian creeks, are bordered, in part, by revegetated walking trails. For both the Yarra and Yarrowee, and for rivers that enjoy more than a regional profile—such as the Murray and the Snowy—access is clearly delineated. This is not the case for waterways of the predominantly rural West Moorabool catchment. Away from the cities and the national parks, the legal reality of the resource for much of rural Victoria does not equate with its on-ground reality, or with its accessibility to local and regional communities. Crown water frontage and streamside reserves that appear on Lands Department maps and files cannot always be found to exist because, as will be shown for West Moorabool, they have been absorbed into freehold, stranded by closed roads, or have no contemporary identity as public land. One basic and perhaps surprising hindrance to accessing waterways is the absence of a Victorian map or register that depicts Crown water frontage. It is not just that the general public is ignorant of the reserved land along our rivers, the state managers of Crown land have uncertain knowledge. This embarrassing state of affairs was revealed most recently during an internal Lands Department investigation of Crown water frontage. Although hampered by the absence of a Crown Reserve register, the findings of this investigation, conducted in 1983, do give some definition to the resource.8 After careful scrutiny of parish maps and the Government Gazette it was estimated that 30–40 per cent of Victoria’s total major river margins had at various stages been sold, leaving a potential Crown water frontage of 60–70 per cent. On paper, this constituted a generous public land reservation. The estimate absorbed the extremes of Central Victorian gold settlement and Western Victorian pastoralism—both with a higher percentage of sold margins—and later settled areas with a lower percentage. Of this Crown water frontage resource, comfortably over half of Victoria’s total streamside, it was estimated that 50 per cent was under grazing licence to adjoining landholders, 20 per cent was illegally grazed, and 30 per cent was ‘fenced out’, that is, ‘fenced in’ to private farms. Despite a departmental effort in the mid-1980s to legalise the 50 per cent of frontage not earning revenue, the legal versus actual status of much streamside land remains blurred.

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Before attempting to understand this seemingly casual disregard for public land around inland water, the example of Lal Lal Creek illustrates the continuing confusion for bureaucrats and community alike. In the 1983 review it was calculated that almost seven kilometres of frontage along Lal Lal Creek, itself about thirty kilometres in length, was once reserved for the public.9 The only distinguishable Crown water frontage along this creek now is that beyond ‘No Access’ fencing at Lal Lal Falls Reserve. Of the remaining six kilometres, it can be verified that two landholders purchased adjoining streamside reserves which featured reliable waterholes. Another three reserves were effectively incorporated into farms, with the Lands Department only recognising this for two of the three in 1984.10 This leaves two lengths of potential Crown water frontage along Lal Lal Creek, one of which is known to locals as the Rockies. The Rockies reserve adjoins two deep waterholes in Lal Lal Creek. These are overshadowed by a granite rise scattered with rounded boulders that bring to life the Toolara geography of the site. Shading the boulders and the creek, itself full of in-stream plants, stand a cluster of the graceful peppermint eucalypts. The Rockies was gazetted, quite unusually, as a permanent, rather than temporary, water reserve of 13 acres in the 1860s. Over many years it was fought

4.3

Rockies reserve, Lal Lal

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for as a community space and resource. Both a petition from sixteen nearby landholders and a letter to the Ballarat Star from ‘Thirsty’ did not prevent an 8-acre revocation in 1874. They objected when Mary Frazer, a dairy farmer next to the reserve, attempted to charge them a levy to draw water from the creek. Two later revocations further reduced the reserve.11 Nowadays, the Rockies has partial identity as public land for the community, but is no longer recognised by the Lands bureaucracy, which holds ‘No related files’ on this parcel of Crown land. It is unclear whether a grazing licence for an associated unused road incorporates the water reserve. Older local residents, who know it as public land, and like to walk, swim, fish, shoot, and extract water from the creek, are uncertain of their rights. The second area of Crown water frontage along Lal Lal Creek of dubious status is a generous two kilometres in length. Unlike the Rockies, it has partial bureaucratic identity but no on-ground reality for the contemporary local community. This frontage once constituted part of ‘Fisken’s Dam’, built by the Lal Lal Waterworks Association, and otherwise known as the ‘Lower Lake’ by the Fiskens. Before the dam was destroyed in the late 1880s, it was a substantial recreational

4.4

The Lake at Lal Lal, A. Smith, 1866

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resource, large enough to be used for boating and sailing. Apart from one record of Fisken’s application to purchase, in 1877, being referred to the Melbourne Lands office, it is not clear how it became absorbed into freehold.12 On departmental maps it remains distinguished as public land. The frontage is not licensed, or fenced out from adjoining farmland in a manner that signals its public land status. For the local community it is considered part of the freehold farmscape not accessible to the public.

Colonial Context for Riparian Reservation As well as land bureaucrats and the general public finding it difficult to determine the status of riparian land, lawyers have struggled to clearly define the associated rights. In a recent legal summation concerning frontage access to Victoria’s inland waterways, it was asserted that ‘The legislative framework encompassing proprietorship of the lands abutting and adjacent to watercourses is somewhat contradictory and confusing’.13 There was no one item of inland water frontage legislation that preceded and clearly defined land alienation. Rather, the two processes intertwined to produce myriad frontage patterns across the state. Continuity of public frontage across Victoria varies according to when it was reserved, with the first pastoral districts and goldmining areas having much frontage committed to freehold prior to legislative provisions to protect the resource. Compared to the Western and Central districts, the later-settled East Gippsland and Wimmera have a less fragmented streamside reservation. Directives to reserve frontage were changeable before 1881, with a mix of firstly Imperial Orders, then Victorian Orders in Council and departmental initiatives preceding the permanent reservation of remaining frontage to many major waterways. This 1881 frontage reservation for ‘public purposes’ has been identified as distinguishing Victoria’s democratic legislative stance relative to other Australian states.14 Debate regarding the extent and value of Crown water frontage was most required during the immediate post-gold settlement crisis, but political instability worked against principled debating. In 1858 Surveyor-General Charles Ligar was seven months into his new position when interviewed by a committee assessing the Lands Department’s much criticised performance in facilitating the settlement of Victoria’s soaring population. On being questioned about the

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many waterway exclusion complaints, he explained to the review committee that surveyors were instructed to provide access to water at least every mile along creeks, and to reserve 100 yards back from navigable (both actual and potential) rivers. He asserted that future settlers should be denied exclusive access to the big rivers but be given partial access to streams. Part freehold and part reserve would allow land improvement, whereas total reservation of stream frontage would mean that ‘each man would be near it and no man on it’.15 Access to intermittent reserves by those settlers living back one allotment from a waterway, together with transient users such as carters, would, he believed, suffice. There was no serious consideration of how settlers might manage with a more communal resource. Ligar was non-committal in asserting a principle of value for Crown water frontage. Despite being pressed on contemporary inequities in waterway access, his baseline defence was, quite simply, ‘you must give the natural advantage to someone’. In the West Moorabool catchment, the ‘natural advantage’ was very clearly given to ‘someone’. This part of the story takes us into the heartland of the pastoral landscape south of Bullarook Forest. Before venturing there it is important to appreciate that the catchment community’s opportunity for direct contact with waterways differed according to local land use. Three broad landscape types—agricultural, pastoral and forest—best characterise West Moorabool’s 355 square kilometres. They emerged from the period of goldmining that both shaped Bullarook Forest and put Ballarat on the map. They are represented overleaf (figure 4.5) with annotations of changing signature traits. Across these three landscapes the extent of reserved frontage differs, as does access and accessibility, with a dominant invisibility factor evident in each. For the pastoral landscape, waterway visibility is blocked predominantly by closed roads. For the agricultural landscape of old Bullarook Forest, most waterways have blended with the surrounding farmscapes without retaining a distinctive physical or visual identity, except perhaps willows. And for the landscape dominated by State Forest, in the south of the catchment, the rough terrain makes it difficult to reach what is the longest length of Crown water frontage, without the impetus of significant community revaluing. These invisibility factors explain how waterways, once generously reserved for public access, are now relatively unseen.

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4.5

Landscapes of West Moorabool catchment, with signature traits: Agricultural: Quaternary basalt, scoria cones; red gradational soils; gently sloped land; small land units (dairying, grazing, cropping) Pastoral: Tertiary basalt, Devonian granite outcrops, Quaternary sedimentary deposits; grey basalt soils, granite sands, silty clays; moderately timbered; remnants of large pastoral units; grazing and light cropping Forest: Ordovician sandstones and mudstones; steep slopes and escarpments; forest reserve; marginal small-acre farming

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With that land use framework in mind let us return to the pastoral landscape with its story of ‘natural advantage’ being privileged to the few, and then sustained by a history of closed roads. South of Bullarook Forest the pastoral families of Bacchus and Fisken acquired many thousands of acres beyond their pre-emptive right blocks to include, in the case of Fisken, land along both sides of Lal Lal Creek, Granite Creek and West Moorabool River.16 Most land was purchased in 1855, 1857 and 1858, when only navigable rivers had continuous frontage protected. There was, however, community pressure to have one particularly well-watered section of the Fisken estate retained for the public domain. The disputed water frontage was, like most of the Fisken estate, part of Lal Lal parish, surveyed by Webster in 1856 in preparation for the land sale. The Fiskens were leasees of the land to be sold and were, like many early pastoralists, keen to secure freehold of what they already considered to be their family estate. The temptation, and opportunities, for a surveyor to subdivide in a way that was favourable to large landholders were considerable. Although an earlier

4.6

Portion of Section Eight, Parish of Lal Lal and Peereweerh

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parish survey of Lal Lal had been discredited, Webster claimed unconvincingly that any change to the subdivisional boundaries would ‘have led to confusion’.17 Only in Section One did he reduce the allotment size to accommodate better soil quality fringing the West Moorabool River. More importantly, he did not alter the generous Section Eight allotment, an area of 537 acres that was bound on two sides by several miles of West Moorabool River and Lal Lal Creek, and incorporated two ‘most picturesque’ waterfalls. It can be seen from Webster’s survey that the allotment’s southern boundary extended across the creek to where Fisken had fenced in the waterhole, the one that the family called the Rockies. To purchase his leased land, Fisken was aided by more than the prohibitively expensive size of the allotments. As pastoral lessee, he had improvements, such as the ‘substantial stockyard, cultivation, and mustering paddock’ near the waterfalls. Improvements would boost the sale price for others, but not for him. In his survey report Webster noted Fisken’s investments in Section Eight, but failed to describe the extraordinary water frontage abutting this one unit of land. In the weeks preceding the land sale, when the details of the parish subdivision became more widely known, two Ballarat newspapers condemned this local show of ‘land jobbing’.18 This was not a new story for Ballarat newspapers. Almost one year before Section Eight of Lal Lal parish became a matter for media scrutiny, the generous subdivisions of Learmonth’s land to the west of Ballarat were similarly exposed prior to auction. The involvement of Ballarat District’s Acting Surveyor was investigated and the Learmonth survey was partially altered to include smaller, more affordable allotments. Excluding terms of sale were also exposed for Hepburn’s estate near Creswick, north of Ballarat. According to the editor of the Ballarat Star, Section Eight ‘should be re-surveyed in smaller lots’ and the beautiful waterfalls ‘preserved’ for the public.19 Both reasoned concern and deep resentment were expressed for the financial privilege held by the ‘pastoral fraternity … and his heirs’. A matter of principle was extracted from the specifics of the case: Water is not so plentiful, or streams so abundant, that we can afford in this country to sell the fee simple of them for

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a paltry consideration to the general revenue, when in the course of a few years the interests of thousands may be sacrificed, and one may obtain the power to levy tribute for the use of the water so much coveted.20 This editorial foreshadowed the Lal Lal Waterworks Association dispute by five years. The editor advocated transparent survey principles for water sources and water frontages. It was a time when Ballarat’s water supply approached its tightest, with mining and domestic demands far outstripping a virtually unmanipulated resource. Section Eight was withdrawn from sale to be held, as part of 1200 acres, in temporary reservation. Although only Section Eight was marked by media controversy, this does not of course exclude local resentment over the extensive waterway frontage monopolised by two families. It is more than likely that, without intermittent media coverage of ‘land jobbing’, the large, excluding subdivision of Section Eight would have been absorbed into the rest of Fisken’s generously watered estate. The Fisken family

4.7

Bacchus Family at Falls below Homestead, A. Smith, 1866

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purchased all other allotments in this parish survey, excepting those in Peerewerrh parish.21 The Bacchus family dominated in Peerewerrh (Peerewur), which included a particularly scenic portion of the Lal Lal Creek. Section Eight was fought for primarily on economic grounds, but an appreciation of what became known as Moorabool and Lal Lal Falls added to the expression of injustice articulated in the popular press. Much of the history, like the resource itself, remains hidden or forgotten. One hundred years on from the proposed land sale of Section Eight, Councillor Fisken, when opening a state orchestra concert at the Falls in 1967, suggested ‘that residents of the municipality should be grateful for the foresight of pioneers in providing such a park …’22

Reaching the River in Pastoral Landscapes The retention of so much land, especially in western Victoria, by early pastoral families does not in itself explain reduced access to waterways. Surveyors were required to incorporate road access to water in their parish plans. There is a largely forgotten saga concerning ‘closed roads’ that gives essential context for understanding the West Moorabool experience. For some readers this excursion into the legislative thickets of the past may seem diversionary, but bringing back this wider history of lost access to so many of our inland streams can itself be fundamental to reinvigorating cultural connections with water. For the United States, Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert with its history of water partitioning and tangled vested interest encouraged new perspectives for environmental activity particularly related to dammed rivers. With a lighter but more imaginative touch, English author Roger Deakin spiked his contemporary tales of swimming across Britain with revealing snapshots from the past.23 And although there are valuable books being published in Australia about particular rivers, water settlement history that provides an understanding of change beyond institutional environments has been lagging behind current interest. To understand why it is difficult to reach rivers in so much of pastoral Victoria we need to, perhaps surprisingly, understand the link between closed roads and water frontage. One century ago this link would not have had to be elucidated. It was a popular issue in much the same way that water conservation is now. By the late 1870s

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disquiet concerning access to inland waterways escalated from departmental reviews and regional politics into a parliamentary forum and a Royal Commission into Closed Roads.24 Politicians were compelled to reflect on the inequitable landscape reality produced by Victoria’s goldfield land sales of the late 1850s, which, despite the first Land Acts of the 1860s and the more subtle refinements that followed during the 1870s, did not liberate enough land. And although settlement pressure to weaken land monopolisation by squatter families continued to fuel a major political divide, the practice of selectors ignoring Crown water frontage by taking fences down to the river introduced not only a new pressure on the frontage resource, but also a less polarised debate. An 1870 Order in Council to ‘withhold from sale’, but not actually reserve, existing Crown water frontage did not deter widespread abuse and created a resource of uncertain status.25 It is this category of frontage that has been most vulnerable to inclusion by neighbouring farmers. Even though selector defiance of Crown water frontage was not ignored, it was older pastoral interests that dominated the land scandal exposed during the 1878 Royal Commission into Closed Roads. Earlier in this chapter I referred to an invisibility factor that dominated differently in each landscape type of West Moorabool. For the pastoral landscape, it was the strategic incidence of ‘closed roads’ that became a major barrier between local people and their waterways. This Royal Commission sharpened the realisation that much public estate had in fact been lost to the public. It highlighted the connection between the closing of roads and the monopoly of land: ‘Where the latter is found, the former exists’.26 The commissioners investigated the often blatant abuse by squatter-dominated municipal councils of their responsibility to reopen closed roads, many of which led to waterways, on the request of ratepayers. Twenty-two shires across the colony were canvassed and interviewed concerning the 13 000 miles (almost) of roads on maps but not on the ground. To understand the significance of road closures in West Moorabool, the term ‘closed road’ requires clarification. ‘Closed’ was better understood than ‘road’. The commissioners learned that no easy distinction could be made between roads that had been surveyed, reserved and proclaimed. Local government was authorised to alter proclaimed roads only, although there was no reliable

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cartographic or written record of such proclamations held by the Melbourne office of the Lands Department, let alone available for regional distribution. In court a magistrate would not enforce cases of trespass if a road was not proclaimed, as was usually the case. The commissioners agreed that the significant time lag, given as twenty to thirty years on some occasions, between a road being marked out by a surveyor and then proclaimed was a serious impediment for local government. Legal distinctions aside, closed roads were generally considered to be those that had been included in parish surveys but had never actually been fenced out by large landholders, those that had been used but had since been enclosed into freehold, and those that had never been used because they didn’t ‘go anywhere’. Often ‘anywhere’ meant into the heart of a large property that had escaped subdivision. There was considerable discussion about the intent of the original road surveys to facilitate subdivision of pastoral estates. The commissioners clearly sided with the view that under the Land Acts of the 1860s, the requirement to ‘run a road round every square mile’ was established to ensure access to land and water for smaller landholders.27 As well as clarifying what was meant by ‘closed roads’, or ‘paper roads’ as they are known to surveyors, the commissioners articulated the loss consequent to closure. Clearly roads were valued beyond the traffic they could direct. For selectors they were valued in a secondary manner for commonage, for their prospective mining value, as an area of sport and recreation and, in a more limited way, for their agricultural value. However, the commissioners referred to their ‘special value’ of providing access to water.28 During the receipt of evidence and in summation, the commissioners expressed considerable angst for the loss of access to waterways, despite the generosity of initial reservation in some instances. They were intolerant of Shire representatives who argued that roads leading to dangerous stream crossings required costly bridges, and so may as well be closed. They countered the pragmatism of local government with a waterscape aesthetic. This tack was lost on Colac’s Shire President, who defended the 13 miles around the freshwaters of Lake Colac to which the public was denied access, following an altered parish survey and an infamous ‘road exchange’ by a councillor-pastoralist. In frustration one commissioner asked, ‘But is not every piece of water necessary for the

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public in this colony, even if it were for nothing more than that those are beautiful places, and are wanted for picnics and so on?’ Only in the ‘great centres of population’, returned the Shire President.29 The commissioners questioned whether provision for sport and passive recreation along waterways was adequate, and endorsed the testament of the very experienced Surveyor Nixon from Gippsland. Nixon knew that even when frontage reservation guidelines were consistent for a reasonable period of time, surveyors had practical difficulties in translating survey principles into site-specific space, which was itself subject to physical change. He explained how surveyors progressed from the unworkable 20-chain frontage, ‘which forced us two miles back into the country’, to the excision of all frontage abutted by square allotments, and then to the more generous chain-and-a-half road frontage along some rivers ‘for the use of fishers and fowlers and the public’. Nixon believed all frontage should be reserved—‘Knowing the inconvenience people have been put to in the old country, by having to pay for leave to fish or fowl, being unable to follow the course of a river’.30 Most scandalous of all municipal transgressions to come before the commissioners was the 248 miles of road that remained closed, despite public pressure, in the Shire of Wyndham. Relative to other shires, the extent of Wyndham roads closed was not great, but the closures were particularly strategic in denying access to inland and coastal waters. The ‘closed’ roads that were surveyed to ensure public access to water, but not fenced out to actually provide it, were part of the Chirnside family’s estate. Wyndham Council, which included a Chirnside representative, voted not to open the closed roads.31 The many acres of closed roads absorbed by large estates, such as Chirnside’s, were not subject to council rating and constituted a significant grazing asset usually denied smaller landholders, who were expected to fence out surveyed roads. Astounding statistics were put before the Royal Commission. Eight of the twenty-two shires investigated had more than 500 miles of closed roads within their boundaries; all but three shire councils were composed of some councillors who had a personal interest in the question of closed roads; and five shires had a majority of ‘interested’ councillors. It was a surprise to read that the commissioners singled out the shires of Bungaree and Buninyong, which under

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former municipal boundaries comprised almost all of the West Moorabool catchment, for favourable comment.32 This commendation was misleading, however, and it should not be assumed that access to water was particularly equitable in this part of Victoria. In the Bullarook Forest country of Bungaree Shire, road closure and the associated loss in water access was not related to traditional landholder monopoly. Bungaree’s Return listed approximately sixtytwo acres (about six miles) of closed roads. The roads traversed the land held by the Shire’s largest landholder—Ballarat Water Commission. Bungaree Shire was praised for not having any ‘interested’ councillors, but the reality was that the Water Commission constituted the only large landholder in the Shire. An 1897 report on closed roads for the parishes of Warrenheip and Bungaree, although not quite the same boundary as the earlier Bungaree Shire, exposed seventy-five road transgressions. The maximum amount of land enclosed was 10 acres, with almost all cases of unauthorised closure involving less than 3 acres of land. Few involved access to water. The waterways had already been claimed.33 It was different in Buninyong Shire, which encompassed land in the south of the catchment. Here road closure was clearly aligned to pastoral interests. The Shire declared 41 miles, or 357 acres, of closed roads to the Royal Commission. Fisken was the largest Shire landholder, and a councillor, but curiously was not declared as one with ‘interests’.34 Perhaps because Fisken had been able to purchase the bulk of his estate in the late 1850s, pressure to open a number of strategic roads was not openly expressed, or the roads had been hidden for so long that community knowledge was lost. Or perhaps, as one commissioner suggested, people were not forthcoming with evidence because they were afraid of the ‘big landowners’. Fisken’s surveyed roads that met at Lal Lal Creek, West Moorabool River, Granite Creek and Spring Creek, ones that could have been a lever for subdivision, were never open to be closed. Just prior to the Royal Commission, Fisken complained about the extent of poaching on his estate and made moves to purchase the 2 kilometres of Crown water frontage along Lal Lal Creek referred to earlier in this chapter.35 Although the sale was apparently unsuccessful, two roads that accessed this area were closed. A contemporary map that incorporates part of the Fisken estate shows how invisibility can be locked into the pastoral geography

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largely by the configuration of roads, or lack thereof. In an area of approximately thirty-five square kilometres surrounding the Lal Lal Creek and West Moorabool River, there are only four points, at the crossing of two east–west roads, from which the waterways, flowing north–south, can be seen by the public. There are no points that give actual rather than visual access. By contrast, Webster’s original parish plan shows several surveyed roads meeting at waterways. Paddock gates only now distinguish some of these, and it is difficult to establish when community knowledge of them faded. They are truly paper roads. Departmental files show that complaints about closures were mainly localised and, as such, the identity of roads was easily masked with a turnover of landholders. Although largely unseen and rarely accessed, except by livestock, the two major waterways have retained a landscape visibility. They are bordered with eucalypts, mainly manna gums, for much of their length, with indigenous understorey and in-stream vegetation more variable. The Royal Commission into Closed Roads did not produce substantial reforms. For the next twenty years, systematic abuse of the water frontage resource continued despite attempted revision in a few Private Members’ Bills. In the early 1880s, grazing, and just a few

4.8

Contemporary road access to major waterways in a portion of Lal Lal Parish. Note: Four viewing points marked with a cross.

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4.9

Parishes of Lal Lal and Peereweerh, with closed roads marked

cultivation licences, were introduced as a means to legalise the enclosure of frontages.36 Although some landholders were prepared to pay for increased security, many more ignored formalities. By not accepting a licence, landholders were required, supposedly, to fence the frontage. It was enforcing this obligation to fence that was so politically unpalatable. And, without fencing, frontage became increasingly difficult to detect. By the time of the next serious debate, in 1903, the political issue was lost revenue, not lost frontage. Our current valuing of Crown frontage has a direct legacy to the legislative outcomes of that debate. It has been suggested that closed roads and water frontage were co-joined as land use entities from at least the time of the 1878 Royal

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4.10a Departmental plan showing road reservation between Spreadeagle Road and West Moorabool River. This road (2.4 ha) is now licensed until 2093, at a cost of less than $10 per annum.

4.10b Farm gate that marks closed road (one of several) from Spreadeagle Road to West Moorabool River

Commission.37 Both were linear reserves, and, without fences, were often ambivalent spatial entities. The availability of grazing licences for both reserve types strengthened the connection, especially for roads leading to water. The 1903 Unused Roads and Water Frontages Bill cemented the administrative union of the two resources already

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4.11 View of eucalypt-lined West Moorabool River, upstream from Blue Bridge, Mt Egerton Road

entwined in real terms. This legislation very clearly assigned to Crown water frontage an almost exclusive farming value that has not been effectively challenged 100 years on. Even the change from ‘closed’, used by the Royal Commission, to ‘unused’ roads, adopted in all later legislation, signified a narrowing finality. The first admits a process that could be reversed, the second a fait accompli. The question as to whether roads closed were actually wanted for use becomes silenced. MLA David Kerr, representing Grenville, just south of West Moorabool, argued for gates on every licensed road and frontage because, without them, they were ‘cloaked’.38 He continued: ‘It was well known that in many cases roads were now so closed in that the public did not know of their existence, and if by any chance they trespassed on them they were quickly sent off’. Generally, the greater time that elapsed after a road closure, the greater confusion as to the original status of the reserve. A conservative government introduced the 1903 Bill. The Opposition tried, without success, to postpone the Bill until after the general election, arguing that an issue of principle—the rights of people to retain and access public land ‘gradually being filched away … and sold in little patches’—was being debated without

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electoral support. The Opposition delivered its protest around six main points. First, that tenancy of unused roads and/or water frontage by adjoining landholders was the first step towards alienation of that land. Second, that the proposed return to municipal councils of half of the revenue raised would further encourage a vested interest in keeping roads closed. Furthermore, the provision for these councils to be the only power authorised to seek ministerial permission to open an unused road robbed ratepayers of a fair right of appeal. The third point was the necessity for rights of public access to be embodied in the principle of the legislation, rather than delivered in changeable regulations pursuant to the legislation. These rights concerned right of way and recreational activities such as fishing and shooting. Fourth, they stressed the importance of preserving the resource for a future, more populous rural Victoria. Fifth, recent drought conditions highlighted the significance of the resource asset. And, last, the Opposition argued that administration of a licence to graze frontage would be problematical and cancel any revenue gains. Environmental concerns, such as riparian tree clearing and erosion associated with possible cultivation licences, were peripheral to the main debate.39 The Unused Roads and Water Frontages Bill was passed with few amendments to reassure the Opposition. Although the government was forced to distinguish between water frontage and water reserve, leaving the latter exempt from licensing, the new legislation confirmed a narrowing of purpose. The parliamentary assurance that regulations encompassing recreational rights would follow legislation was never kept. For the generation between the 1878 Royal Commission and the 1903 legislation, knowledge of Crown water frontage had become further blurred, or ‘cloaked’, as farming interests expanded and developed established district conventions. The forecasted expansion of rural populations, which may have challenged restricted access, did not eventuate, leaving the full potential of water frontage as a public resource to become buried under a joint departmental and municipal administrative system aimed at farmers with adjoining land. Two Lands Department reviews, some eighty years later, vindicated many of the concerns raised in the 1903 debate. Indeed, the reviews were prompted by the problem of administration costs outstripping licence revenue. And echoing Opposition predictions that

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licensed tenure was a step towards freehold, the reviewers explained that riparian ‘loss of vegetation, visual identity and public values contributed to an attitude of “ownership” by adjoining landholders’. The close association with ‘unused’ roads devalued water frontage reserves as an asset with recreational and, more recently, conservation value. The authors viewed the licensing of frontage as an admission of departmental failure, over a period of 100 years, to enforce fencing and promote positive management. Administrative procedures, they suggested, always had precedence over management principles. They conceded that linear reservations were particularly challenging to manage and argued that the 1881 reservation status of ‘public purposes’ for frontage hindered more targeted approaches.40 Although the 1980s reviews themselves opened an opportunity to integrate administration of the resource with a range of management goals, there was no concerted attempt to make licensees more accountable. However, the Lands Department did try and reclaim lost Crown water frontage. Newly discovered illegal occupants were advised that a water frontage licence was now ‘available’ and if not taken, they were reminded of their responsibility to fence out frontage from their land.41 Only the adjoining landholder was specifically notified. With the exception of a notice declaring the licence application in the back pages of the local newspaper, this was not a public process and was unfairly incomplete. Many water frontage files examined for West Moorabool began with this standard ‘1984’ letter, which suggests that licences had lapsed or never been held. More recently the 99-year tenure option for unused roads, including those with generous portions abutting streams, has effectively transformed grazing licences into leases offering exclusive rights. Frontage that was reclaimed became a departmental, not a public, resource, with revenue collection clearly the aim. A Lands Department evaluation in the mid-1990s found all licensed roads in this pastoral section of West Moorabool to have ‘no conservation or public land values’, with their grazing value assumed. Licence fees have been derived from a productivity formula based on dry sheep equivalents, and can be appealed by landholders. For one road that reached the West Moorabool River, there were two downward rental adjustments owing to a steep rocky escarpment that required particular rabbit control, and a rush-infested spring-fed

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swamp that was of no grazing value.42 Values of conservation, landscape aesthetics, and water quality have not been acknowledged in licence contracts, only the capacity to carry stock belonging to adjoining landholders. There has been no broadening of values by which the ‘public’ land has been assessed. The waterways in this pastoral landscape became difficult to access because roads leading to them were effectively removed from the public domain. This difficulty intensified once Crown water frontage became indistinguishable from closed roads. Without community knowledge of these roads, the potential for residents to connect with the watered landscape, one which retains significant natural values, has been diminished. The very expectation of being able to reach the river has been lost, creating a culture of estrangement itself not widely recognised.

Seeing the River in Agricultural Landscapes The invisibility factor worked differently in the landscape of agricultural smallholdings that replaced Bullarook Forest in the northern part of the catchment. Although river frontage became cloaked by road closures, even more significant was its fusion with the surrounding farmscape. In this waterscape there remain few eucalypts to mark the river, and no deep incision to mark the ground. Clumps of tussock grass and intermittent willows provide an occasional visual key. Once heavily forested, there was extensive tree clearance, introduction of exotic pasture, removal of boulders, cultivation of the volcanic soil, de-silting and partial channelisation of the waterways.43 There was more frontage reserved than in the country dominated by pastoral estates because freehold settlement occurred a decade later when legislative provisions to protect frontage were more evident. Because the soil was valued so highly, public water frontage acquired added value. By accessing frontage to the river, a farmer could save not only his own valuable land from use as an internal road, but also the expense of dams, which were less reliable in the highly permeable soil. Frontage disputes were sometimes fierce in this part of the catchment owing to greater land settlement pressure. They often involved a cocktail of bureaucratic, legal and political intervention. An example from West Moorabool River just north and south of Butter Factory Road, Wallace, gives a taste of these disputes.

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4.12a

Plan of disputed Crown water frontage north of Butter Factory Road (Wallace), Parish of Kerrit Bareet

Today there is no echo of the 60-year tussle over the streamside reserve north of Butter Factory Road for there is no indication that public land abuts the river. Two families—Higgins and Conroy— claimed prior rights dating back to the 1870s.44 Tension escalated in 1909 when Higgins, the son turned breadwinner, wanted to cultivate as much frontage as possible to supplement his 17-acre allotment which supported his wife, eight children under eleven years, and his elderly parents. His father had enclosed the reserve more than thirty years ago, although, according to Higgins, no one was ever stopped from camping. Over this same period the Conroy family expanded its holding. By 1909 Conroy did not seek access to the river, which he could gain from one of his own allotments, and he was not as needy

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4.12b

Licensed Crown water frontage south of Butter Factory Road, Wallace

of frontage as a land resource. He wanted the frontage as a road, but not because one paddock was landlocked as previously. He resented using some of his own land for a road when public land was available. Both a road for Conroy and a cultivation area for Higgins could not be sensibly accommodated, so Lands Department officers, Shire councillors, solicitors and politicians became involved. After sale to Higgins was refused, he was offered a licence with an access provision for Conroy. In the midst of the licence negotiation the land’s status as streamside reserve, not mere frontage, suddenly became important. Legal opinion questioned whether under the 1903 Act the area, being a water reserve, could be licensed. Eventually Higgins obtained his conditional licence, although continuing abuses and obstructions fuelled the conflict for another twenty years. This frontage was contested as potential farming ground, not public space, and in appearance it became just that. The conflict between Higgins and Conroy over frontage north of Butter Factory Road was entwined with a wider dispute over frontage south of the road, one involving those who lived on allotments set back from the river. Just prior to Higgins applying to purchase the northern water reserve, Conroy and Carey, as owners of allotments

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adjoining reserved frontage south of the road, applied for its licence in 1908. The protest from nearby locals, including Higgins of course, was immediate and loud. They used the frontage as a road to the Butter Factory at Wallace, to transport goods to Millbrook, to access allotments back from the river, and as a watering point for local and travelling stock. For the previous fifty years they had lobbied Buninyong Council to construct pipe crossings and repair the road. Being denied this access was, they argued, ‘not at all fair’.45 Both Conroy and Carey were relatively large landholders with at least one allotment south of Butter Factory Road that incorporated public frontage illegally. At a Land Board inquiry, Carey claimed he needed the disputed frontage for direct water access as the spring on his adjoining allotment ‘gave out in the month of January’. His supply of water, sourced from holes ‘not cemented or otherwise constructed to prevent soaking away’, was insufficient for cattle. The compromise option of licensed frontage with swing gate access was rejected as unworkable. It was finally recommended, in 1909, that grazing licences be refused, and that ‘steps be taken to have a road surveyed and reserved …’ The archived record ends at this point, and the active departmental record resumes in 1994.46 No road was ever surveyed. Part of the contested frontage has been licensed from 1994, the other remains enclosed but unlicensed. The closed road that accessed this frontage was, in 1995, found to be illegally occupied and cultivated. It is now under an unused road licence for ninety-nine years. The public resource value of this West Moorabool River frontage either side of Butter Factory Road has not been debated for close to a hundred years. Agricultural landholders valued water frontage, including streamside reserves, primarily as an extension of the paddock. It was regarded as extra land for cultivation, as a means to maximise freehold, and as a source of water without costs. Valued in this way, frontage acquired a cloak of invisibility as it became integrated with an agricultural landscape. It was a different story in the forested landscape in the south of the catchment where more frontage was reserved than in either the pastoral or agricultural areas.

Finding the River in the Forest The southern portion of West Moorabool catchment remains forested by native trees on steep country that once supported the mining of

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gold, iron ore, and coal. Timber was in great demand from the 1850s. For a time the market, which included mining props and firewood for Ballarat, was so strong that Victoria’s Forest Conservator allowed timber down to a diameter of 12 inches, not the usual 15 inches, to be cut. What began as a timber reserve primarily to support the Lal Lal Iron Company’s furnace, perched above West Moorabool River, became a much enlarged State Forest.47 The forest reservation at Lal Lal explains why significant Crown water frontage remained available for protection under 1881 ‘public purposes’ legislation. It was frontage that was regularly accessed by a network of tracks, including rail, that serviced the mining communities and the subsistence farmers who intruded at the edge of the forests, some with grazing leases. Economic imperatives forced access into country that was, in its physical form, difficult to negotiate, especially towards the river. The Mines Department held considerable influence in this area from the time of timber reservation. It ensured that the mining activities concentrated on the west bank of West Moorabool River received priority over land available for selection on the east side. For example, in 1870 a selector had to provide road access to miners who worked the quartz on the western bank but who then brought the material across the river to use a crusher situated near his block.48 A swing bridge was erected to facilitate the traffic, which eventually became an important link between the east bank Bungal community and Lal Lal township. Interest in farming at the forest margins also helped configure connections with the river. Selectors were vigilant in pursuing equitable access to water. In 1876 Charles Diamond applied, under Section 42, for 18 acres of land wedged between West Moorabool River and a road running parallel, along which five landholders accessed the water and the timber resource. Although there was a water reserve to the north of the proposed selection, it was not considered reliable in summer, and there was no connecting road to the timbered ranges. Twenty-seven petitioners, of which eighteen were farmers, three were carriers, five were miners and one a drover, objected to Diamond’s selection. The Lands Department attempted to pacify the petitioners with a new road survey before granting Diamond his licence in 1877. At this point it was discovered that the Mines Department had not given its approval and, following strong objections, Diamond

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4.13

Survey for C. Diamond’s application, 1876. Note position of road originally surveyed to protect and service frontage.

eventually received a grazing permit only. This permit also created problems of access and the nearby landholders pressured for a reserve to be proclaimed. Another compromise was reached but no doubt tensions simmered.49 Water frontage became less coveted once interest in mining declined and the politics of land selection more subdued. By 1902 there was no recorded public outcry when John Hunt applied for a grazing licence for forested frontage along West Moorabool River. In 1916 he applied to select the land he had cleared and fenced, leaving about one-and-a-half acres ‘open’ around the bridge. Although one Lands officer more familiar with the country recalled that the frontage would be highly suitable as a camping and watering reserve, his

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colleague reported otherwise because it was ‘in such an isolated position and very difficult to access’.50 Three faulty surveys in part explain why the sale of the frontage did not occur until 1930. The remaining frontage, known as ‘Hunt’s Bridge’, connects with the only road, albeit without signage, that gives easy access to the river through this forested reach. Although known and used by locals, the area is not managed actively. At the northern end of this forest, river frontage has been either lost under Lal Lal Reservoir, or fenced out within Lal Lal Falls Scenic Reserve. Parks Victoria now manages the forest area below the reservoir, and there has been some work to improve two unmade roads that lead to the river. However, West Moorabool River remains relatively unseen compared with the nineteenth-century traffic of miners, woodcutters, charcoal burners and selectors. The network of river and forest tracks has become fragmented and without strong purpose. In this landscape the river is unseen because there is no community imperative to increase its accessibility. Compared with the northern river reaches, this section abounds with natural interest and beauty. Without a new valuing of this relatively wild stretch of water, access to the river is unlikely to change dramatically.

4.14 West Moorabool River, Lal Lal Forest, 1990

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Recent Valuing of Crown Frontage Resource Although the physical barriers between people and the waterways of West Moorabool differ across the three landscapes, protesting the loss of access to Crown water frontage has been uniformly a localised and sporadic affair. For Victorian river frontage taken as a whole, there has been one segment of the wider community that has mounted organised resistance against the effective privatisation of the resource. This is the fishing lobby. It was the introduction of inland fishing licences in Victoria during the 1960s that coalesced an existing undercurrent of protest. For many anglers, the levy of a fee aggravated the muddy waters of respective rights and responsibilities on Crown water frontage, particularly areas under grazing licence. The Piscatorial Council—an umbrella group for anglers—transmitted the pressure felt by its member clubs and associations to politicians and Lands Department officers. Dunbar Butcher, as director of the new Fisheries and Game Branch, received much of the correspondence. Fearful that tensions would escalate to a scale he had observed in the United States, he strongly recommended that the question of frontage access be clarified. He knew that his New South Wales counterpart was under greater pressure from anglers trying to access an even more limited resource. By 1969 the Piscatorial Council represented 80 000 Inland Fishing licensees trying to negotiate ‘the presence of No Fishing, No Shooting, No Camping, Trespassers Prosecuted, and Keep Out signs …’51 Grazier associations reacted by defending the rights of riparian landholders fearful of farm gates left open and fires not extinguished. The Lands Department had sought legal clarification regarding access in the 1940s and 1950s, with interpretation by the Crown solicitor diverging from legal advice received by the Piscatorial Council.52 Debate around the grounds for prosecution for those entering licensed Crown water frontage was unresolved, with some agreement that legislative change was needed to clarify both the rights of licensed anglers and the responsibilities of landholders, such as the provision of stiles and gates. Assuming people could recognise licensed water frontage they could walk along a river, but could not stop to fish, picnic or camp unless the grazing licensee gave permission. Much emphasis, therefore, was put on the need for all parties to co-operate. There was disagreement about the rights of people accompanying

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licensed anglers and the line to be drawn between car access and camping. It was then debated whether investigating licence compliance on the occasion of conflict might be a more flexible approach than legislative change. Confusion still dominates. Most recently, VRFish, a body representing recreational anglers in Victoria since 1995, held an Access Forum. This group wants to ‘identify and have mapped all Crown frontages’ and ‘promote and negotiate with Government and Landholders the implementation of recreational fishing access policies’.53 Only a few other groups have taken up the issue of enclosed public frontage. At their 1967 annual conference, the Australian Natives Association moved ‘that the legislation regarding free access and right of way on all natural lakes, rivers and the sea should be strictly enforced’. A few years later the Public Reserves Protection League complained of ‘not being able to walk along the banks of almost any Victorian river without risking prosecution for trespassing’. The Secretary of the League attributed this predicament to ‘the government system of granting licences to private people over Crown water frontage reserves and so-called unused roads, many of which were the only access available to the river frontage’.54 No records of this League could be found, but it is likely to be one of many that mushroomed from Victoria’s Little Desert dispute and then regrouped. By the mid-1970s a senior Lands Department bureaucrat could write, in a publication geared to community education, that the primary purpose of frontage reservation was ‘to ensure that the frontage could not be sold. The question of whether or not it is necessary or desirable for any frontage to be completely open to the public depends on the particular circumstances’.55 Obviously the heat was out of the issue. And although angler pressure has never disappeared completely, protest is inaudible compared with the broad access lobby in England. When the ‘State of the Rivers’ report was published on the eve of the State Rivers and Water Supply Commission’s demise in 1983, it was a time of extensive water reform in Victoria. River frontages were presented as a mismanaged resource of great potential, one that required a ‘new approach’ to integrate environmental values with a clearer determination of public and private benefit. In turn, this report informed investigations by the Land Conservation Council a

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few years later. Much of the preamble relating to frontage was repeated, but with one difference. The LCC stated that, although illegal occupation was ‘not uncommon in the past … only about five per cent of frontages are now grazed without a licence’.56 This implied that Lands Department efforts to legalise frontage infringements were almost complete. However, as demonstrated by the earlier examples along Lal Lal Creek, the task of clarifying frontage tenure was an under-resourced operation, making the LCC’s estimation of 5 per cent illegally privatised frontage highly questionable. The LCC report in its turn engendered regional reviews of Crown water frontage by an emerging brigade of consulting professionals. Although the focus was primarily the environmental condition of frontage under various tenure, the potential of the entire resource to be redefined was expressed.57 This has not occurred. Rather, the resource has become even more confined by its grazing function. In the early 1990s the Department attempted greater administrative efficiencies by extending the annual or biennial licence term for frontage to five years, renewable for a maximum period of thirty-five years.58 This time span is considerably less than the 99-year licence option available for unused roads, but it does significantly lessen the opportunity for management requirements to be attached to the licence, or for public to protest against an application. Some departmental staff might argue that longer tenure encourages better land use practices, but without greater manipulation of licence conditions and a commitment to monitoring, this is not convincing. It seems that the lost public resource, or that which was detected, was found only to be lost again. The process whereby West Moorabool’s waterways south of Water Commission reservations became largely inaccessible was an uncertain one with few clearly defined moments. The result was, however, conclusive. Poor visibility and limited contact have become entrenched in this rural catchment, contributing to a restricted experience of waterways for the residents of West Moorabool. Only the few that own, license or occupy water frontage have the opportunity to know the streams. Contemporary environmental interest does not admit this estrangement from rural waterscapes, even though the conservation of both water and rivers is of increasing concern. Left unseen, connections between people and river are

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weakened. There is inadequate social flow to reinstate fresh meaning to local waters.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8 9 10

11

12

13

14

Assistant Surveyor Webster, ‘Country Lands in the Parishes of Lal Lal & Peerewerrh, County of Grant’, 1856, Ballarat Gold Museum, 820 BJE; PROV, VPRS 242/P0, Unit 4, File 10383, ‘Plan shewing the Subdivision of Land in and about Moorabool Creek’, Surveyor E. Bellairs, 1855. DSE, Unused Road and Water Frontage File 050286, correspondence, 7.10.1947, 4.2.1961, 7.3.1995, transfer completed 2002. Within the natural history tradition there was a new emphasis on the influence of ‘man’ on landscape from the 1930s, with books such as The English Countryside, A Survey of its Chief Features, Batsford Ltd, London, 1939, containing a minority of writers that believed ‘that the canvas is incomplete unless the painter be taken with the picture’. Legislation for ‘open’ access to countryside debated, policy introduced in staged process across eight regions, 2004–5, see <www.countrysideaccess. gov.uk>. Shoard, A Right To Roam, p. 256. Also gives history of Scandinavian access arrangements. Monbiot, The Guardian, ‘A Land Reform Manifesto’, 22.2.1995. Campaign ran through newspaper in lead up to new access legislation, with articles such as ‘Go on, Trespass’, 6.2.1998. Clark and Renard, The Framework of Australian Water Legislation and Private Rights, ch. 3, ‘The Australian System of Administrative Rights’, pp. 141–270; Terrill, ‘My Land, Our River’, pp. 104–09. Cabena, ‘Victoria’s Water Frontage’. ibid., Appendix B. PROV, VPRS 441/P0, Unit 32, Correspondence around 1893 application for purchase of 6-acre reserve near intersection with Two Mile Creek; VPRS 44/ P0, Unit 501, Dunne’s Residence and Occupation application, 25.6.1861, and later selection to include CA 9 Sec. 4A, Parish of Warrenheip; Licensed frontage: DSE, UR & WF Files 502318, 507234, P104590. Victoria Parliament, ‘Government Gazette’, 1868, p. 2518, 1874, p. 1847, 1889, p. 256; PROV, VPRS 439/P, Unit 34, Unit 36, Fraser dispute; VPRS 242/ P0, Unit 304. Fisken Papers, MS 9124, Manuscripts Collection, LaTrobe SLV; PROV, VPRS 242/P0, Unit 102, Mathews to Lands Department re Fisken’s Dam, 2.3.1888; PROV, VPRS 3844/P0, Unit 8, Inspection of Fisken’s Dam, 6.1.1888; PROV, VPRS 6420/P0, Unit 3, Suburban Allotments Buninyong East, Fisken applies for sale 19.6.1877. VRFish (Victorian Recreational Fishing Peak Body), letter from Hall & Wilcox Lawyers, 13.5.2003, in preparation for developing an access policy, ‘Fishing Lines’, July 2003. Wright, The Bureaucrats’ Domain, pp. 42, 122; Cabena, ‘Victoria’s Water Frontage’, pp. 4–5, see p. 40 for a table of ‘The Evolution of Water Frontage

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15

16 17

18

19 20 21

22 23 24

25

26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33

34

35

36

Policy in Victoria: A summary to 1881’. Victoria Parliament, ‘Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Council, Victoria Progress Report: Select Committee of the Legislative Council on the Management of the Board of Land and Works’, vol. 1, Evidence given by Surveyor-General C. Ligar, pp. 12–13. Griffiths, Three Times Blest, pp. 34–5. PROV, VPRS 44/P0, Unit 594, File 621, Report from Webster to Taylor, 1.9.1856; Assistant Surveyor Webster, ‘Country Lands in the Parishes of Lal Lal & Peerewerrh, County of Grant’, 1856, Ballarat Gold Museum. Barrett, The Civic Frontier. Barrett notes that ‘jobbery’ was very much a nineteenth-century word: ‘practice of corruptly turning a public office or trust to private gain or advantage’, pp. 30–2. Ballarat Star, 30.8.1856, p. 2, 2.9.1856, p. 2; Miner & Weekly Star, 25.9.1857, p. 118. Ballarat Star, 19.9.1857, p. 2. ibid., 26.9.1857, p. 2. It was in Section Eight that Fisken unsuccessfully applied for a 20-acre Residence and Occupation Licence (near cultivation paddock and waterhole) in 1861 (PROV, VPRS 44/P0, Unit 486). Courier, 20.2.1967, p. 3. Reisner, Cadillac Desert; Deakin, Waterlog. Victoria Parliament, ‘Victorian Parliamentary Papers, Closed Roads: Final Report of the Royal Commission’, vol. 3, no. 82, Minutes of Evidence, pp. 1–346. Wright, The Bureaucrats’ Domain, pp. 160, 194; Cabena, ‘Victoria’s Water Frontage’, p. 45. Victoria Parliament, ‘Final Report’, Summary, p. viii. Victoria Parliament, ‘Victorian Parliamentary Papers, Closed Roads: Progress Report of the Royal Commission’, vol. 3, no. 72, Evidence by Acting Surveyor-General A. J. Skene, pp. 1–8; Victoria Parliament, ‘Final Report’, pp. viii, 91, 97–101, 186, 252, 321. Victoria Parliament, ‘Final Report’, pp. vi, xiii. ibid., pp. 11, 63, 78; Wright, The Bureaucrats’ Domain, p. 90. Victoria Parliament, ‘Final Report’, p. 186. ibid., p. 332. Victoria Parliament, ‘Progress Report’, p. viii. Victoria Parliament, ‘Final Report’, Appendix G Summary of Returns of Length, Area and Value of Closed Roads, pp. 343–4; PROV, VPRS 44/P0, Unit 457, Return of Holders of 1000 acres or more of land: Bungaree Shire, one only, Ballarat Water Commission, March 1875; PROV, VPRS 5357/P0, Unit 1634, File 265, Closed Roads Report Bungaree, 1.10.1896; Unit 3180, File 574, Closed Roads Report Warrenheip, 14.1.1897. Victoria Parliament, ‘Progress Report’, p. 51; Victoria Parliament, ‘Final Report’, p. 91. Courier, 6.1.1879: ‘There has been so much poaching throughout the Yendon-Lal Lal Estate that the owner, Mr. A. Fisken, has decided to close it [the lake] altogether against sportsmen’. Wright, The Bureaucrats’ Domain, pp. 224–5. Victorian Parliamentary

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37 38

39 40

41

42

43

44

45

46 47

48 49

50

51

52

53

Debates, 1885, p. 85; 1794–1819; 1901, pp. 955–9, 2388–95; 1902, pp. 168–73. Cabena, ‘Victoria’s Water Frontage’, pp. 55–6. Victoria Parliament, ‘Parliamentary Debates, Unused Roads Bill’, 1903, p. 1642. ibid., pp. 1629–30, 1633, 1640, 1644–6, 1669–70. Cabena, ‘Victoria’s Water Frontage’, pp. 49, 55–6, 61, 70; Hollingsworth and Northey, ‘Crown Land in Victoria’, pp. 12–15. DSE Unused Road and Water Frontage files relevant to West Moorabool catchment were examined. The standard letter reminding landholders of their responsibility emanated from the Land Act 1984 No. 223. Example of files with this letter: NRE, 051528, 059057, 058938, 057425, 057234, 051047. These were statewide assessments conducted regionally, emanating from 1994 Crown Lands Act. Assessors required to state public land values, and whether site ‘Surplus’ or ‘Not Surplus’ to ‘Public Land Portfolio’; DSE, UR & WF File 058994. VPRS 6009/P1 (State Rivers and Water Supply, General Correspondence), Unit 72 (Watercourses General 1909–1922; Watercourses Pollution 1908– 1946; Mining), Unit 71 (Watercourses General 1922). The unit numbers in the 6009 Series are taken from a subject-correspondence index which have a weak link to actual files, but nature of correspondence/report clearly stated. DSE, UR & WF File 058972, Correspondence and reports relating to frontage north of Butter Factory Road 1909–1937; PROV, VPRS 441/P0, Unit 32, Dispute south of Butter Factory Road, correspondence and reports 1908–1910. PROV, VPRS 441/P0, Unit 32, For quotations see Local Land Board, Notes of Evidence 13.5.1909. DSE, UR & WF Files 109180, 109181. Staughton and Ashley, ‘Lal Lal Blast Furnace Report’. Gives comprehensive background to all aspects of nineteenth-century mining in this area. PROV, VPRS 242/P0, Unit 16, Brough Smyth to Minister of Lands, summarises mining surveyors reports and makes forest recommendations, 30.12.1874, 8.1.1875, 8.3.1875; PROV, VPRS 242/P0, Unit 460, Report by Crown Lands Bailiff, Bannerman, 5.7.1883. PROV, VPRS 439/P0, Unit 40, Walsh-Silvester correspondence. PROV, VPRS 5357/P0, Unit 1471, File 120, Diamond correspondence, 1875– 1883, petition 11.12.1876, Plan 5.4.1876. PROV, VPRS 440/P, Unit 363, Hunt correspondence, 1902 (initial application), 1930 (purchase), Semmen’s report, 5.5.1917; DSE database records ‘No related file’ for Hunt’s Bridge. Butcher correspondence, 17.10.1956, 24.3.1958, 28.4.1958; newspaper clippings in ‘Access to water frontage, Fisheries’; quotation, Southern Fly Fishers to Sir Arthur Rylah, 14.10.1969. ibid., Re The Victorian Piscatorial Council (Water Frontages) Opinion, 27.12.1944; re Access to water frontages for the purpose of angling, 9.8.1957; reference to further legal opinion given in these. VRFish, Five-Year Vision, September 2002, p. 4.

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54

55 56

57

58

PROV, VPRS 12011/P1, Unit 224, ANA Secretary to Premier Bolte, 27.6.1967; newspaper clippings, quotes taken from Herald, ‘The Right to Rivers’, 11.11.1969. Holt, ‘Public Access to Rivers, Creeks and Lakes in Victoria’, p. 14. Standing Consultative Committee on River Improvement, ‘The State of the Rivers’, p. 22; Land Conservation Council, ‘Rivers and Streams Special Investigation’, p. 64. For example, Sinclair Knight Merz, ‘Assessment and Review of Crown Water Frontages in the Corangamite Region’, p. 7. ibid., p. 52, changes emanated from 1994 Crown Lands Act.

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5

Local Springs

Contributing to the largely unseen river and streams of West Moorabool are freshwater springs, especially prevalent in the north of the catchment. Do not imagine mineral springs plumbed for bottling, or a revered alcove inviting religious ritual, or even a gushing source to a river concealed somewhere in the mountains. Rather, picture a concentrated dribble that oozes, and sometimes gurgles, its way into a stream from strategic points in the landscape. ‘Springs’ have lost much of their past meaning for the early land settlers of West Moorabool. Freshwater springs once burst with imagined, and sometimes realised, prosperity as an alternative water supply to costly dams or unreachable streams. Storeowners as well as subsistence farmers living near a spring would petition for its reservation, with a sense of guardianship often persisting. Sometimes these local springs developed greater social value as the reserves diversified beyond stock watering points. Very few now exist. Some have been sold, others have been absorbed into freehold, or become such weedy inaccessible sites from lack of use or management that they hold few positive values. Understanding the process whereby this once vital water resource and landscape feature diminished, but did not disappear, extends the wider theme of a catchment community’s estrangement from its waterscape.


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At the time of colonial settlement, springs were clearly visible. Apart from the likely network of Aboriginal camps and tracks, they were distinguished by ‘ti-tree’. Both vegetation remnants and early surveyor plans suggest that the grey leaves and woolly buds of Leptospermum lanigerum—woolly tea-tree—signposted these sites. Furthermore, springs have a certain geological predictability. They erupt when groundwater pushes to the surface, usually along pathways defined by an abrupt transition to less permeable rock such as granite or basalt. They are the main source of a number of creeks, with less productive springs contributing along the length of a waterway. The output, quality, permanence and pressure of springs can be highly variable. In the young volcanic terrain of the northern West Moorabool catchment, springs were particularly valued as reliable sources of excellent quality water. Even with the river forming one boundary of Moorabool Creek (Millbrook), an 1855 survey included three springs within the town reserve.1 Multiple springs were identified with the sizeable scoria cones of Mts Warrenheip and Buninyong, and to the lesser Black Hill. Towns evolved at the base of these landmark features; for example, Dunnstown and Warrenheip are sited at the western and southern base of Mt Warrenheip. Springs attracted industry. In 1854 the Trial Sawmill was first in the Ballarat district to employ a steam engine with water sourced from a particularly productive spring at the eastern base of Mt Buninyong. Immediately to its north was one that watered Buninyong’s first municipal pound, and just to the south there were six others under different tenure. During the 1850s springs at the base of Mt Warrenheip attracted three sawmills, a soft drink factory and two breweries, which in turn fielded two rival football teams. Dunnstown’s award-winning spirit distillery was founded in 1865. All utilised spring water. Bluestone quarrying was another industry associated with springs, sometimes formalised in one reserve. In the early 1890s, before dairy farmers owned separators, creameries were established on at least five spring reserves in the catchment.2 Springs were a highly valued economic resource, whether in freehold, under business licence on Crown land, or reserved more generally for public use. In the same way extensive tracts of land held by pastoralists and Ballarat’s Water Commission put a premium on remaining water frontage, springs that escaped these same boundaries were highly

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prized by small landholders. Petitions to reserve springs increased in the early 1860s once Residence and Cultivation licensees, who at best incorporated only minor streams on their small blocks, wanted to secure existing sites into the public domain. Sometimes, however, as in the case to be discussed at Warrenheip, licence applicants could infringe on these respected, but not always reserved, springs. A second round of reservation occurred in association with Section 42 selections from 1865, with springs acting as a safety valve during the initial settlement process. Surveyors had a challenging task to accommodate prior interests around water into surveyed allotments, with the often irregular and smaller allotments surrounding a spring reserve designed to facilitate access to the shared resource.3 Even after landholders developed greater independence in meeting their own water requirements, access to a communal resource could remain important. A forty-year dispute around Mollonghip’s town spring demonstrates its significance as a resource beyond the initial settlement period. One family had been trying to monopolise the reserve since the 1870s. Ongoing tensions in the town flared following the 1902–3 drought when Ballarat Water Commission closed access to the West Moorabool River in preparation for a new pipeline. With the Mollonghip spring apparently outlasting nearby

5.1

Departmental plan for reservation of West Spring near Black Hill, 1868

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5.2

Allotments designed to maximise frontage to springwater reserve near Wallace, 1872

wells and streams, and with upper West Moorabool River now closed, petitioners claimed they had ‘no other water for several miles ...’4 They wanted full access to the reserve, which was licensed in part under a Miner’s Right. Victory seemed assured once permanent reservation status was granted in 1906, but inventive diversions and obstructions to the spring line, devised by the former occupant, meant conflict continued. It was the combined efforts of two Land Board investigations, the Creswick Shire Council, MLA Holden, the Minister for Mines (who visited the site), the Surveyor-General (who also visited the site), and the Minister for Lands and several of his staff, that led to a shaky compromise by 1911. Ironically, Central Highlands Water (Ballarat Water Commission) now manages the spring and the reserve is no longer under local stewardship. It is unavailable for revaluing by the increasingly non-farming residents of Mollonghip township. The spring reserves were not a uniform physical resource distributed evenly across the catchment. They varied in size and

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condition, and in how they were valued. The larger of the spring reserves encompassed 20 acres but, more usually, initial reservation was about 10 acres. 5 It is difficult to calculate the number of spring sites that were reserved because the Lands Department did not maintain a reliable and continuing Crown land register. Parish maps for the West Moorabool catchment indicate that approximately fifty water reserves associated with springs existed during the period of greatest land settlement and refinement—the 1860s and 1870s. It was not until the early 1880s that the Department first made an attempt to document all Crown reserves, including the numerically and spatially significant water reserves. The 1884 inventory was the most informative of three attempts, but even so it was clearly inadequate as a representation of what land was reserved for what purpose.6 As with Crown water frontage, the Melbourne-based land administrators did not know what they had, with some survey districts better represented than others. Those districts serviced by longstanding surveyors gave parts of the inventory much greater credibility. Unfortunately the Ballarat district had been absorbed into the more remote Melbourne one by 1884, and the level of information transfer was minimal. For the West Moorabool study area, a number of reserves were not acknowledged in the inventory, and of those that were, few were given accurate cadastral or acreage notation. Seventy years after the first of these inventories, confusion lingered. In 1951 the Shire of Bungaree wrote to the Lands Department enquiring as to the status of eight water reserves within its municipal boundary.7 A contemporary picture of the resource reveals a continuum, ranging from those few reserves that have current water and conservation value for the local community, to those more numerous undervalued, highly degraded reserves, and finally to the many that have lost reserve status altogether. Spring reserves were never a bureaucratic entity in themselves, but were incorporated into the reservation categories of Water, Water Supply, Watering, Watering Purposes, Camping and Watering, Access to Water, or cross-variations of these. For Victoria there was an escalation in general Crown land reservation from the late 1850s that tapered off by 1870. As a proportion of total reserve acreage, water reserves were second only to timber reserves in the period of postgold settlement. Reservation was usually temporary, or the even less

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secure ‘Departmental’, rather than permanent. Compared with the town and village reserves sited at waterway crossings, such as Moorabool Creek, the reservation of most springs was a ‘bottom-up’ process. Wright has argued convincingly that during the Clement Hodgkinson years of land administration (1857–1874), Melbourne land bureaucrats ‘responded primarily to highly localised expressions of need’ and that any pattern in the seemingly ad hoc process could best be detected at a parish scale.8 He revealed that, for reservations in general, no well-defined qualifying criteria were applied in a systematic manner. A sample of the record for West Moorabool confirms spring reserves as a product of the changing dynamic between population density and resource availability, with bureaucratic intervention giving formal expression to this process. The viability of these reserves as a public resource fluctuated with changes in the settlement experience. As the resource became devalued, and consequently degraded, its connection to the local community largely dissipated. Most spring reserves developed an official identity following prior use, and later petition, when that use was threatened. Decisions made in Melbourne about specific reservations were often not communicated to district surveyors and field staff, except through a confusing sequence of notices in the Government Gazette. Communication was more effective if a petition for reservation was denied rather than granted, as the principal signatory was contacted directly.9 Although the bureaucratic reality of water reservation was slippery, it does not follow that reserves were not known and guarded by locals who valued access to the resource. A number of disputes confirm a greater grasp of reservation reality at the more local level, in defiance almost of the ambiguous official status of some reserves. Understanding how a selection of these spring reserves came to be reinforces the particular intimacy that local communities acquired, and then largely lost. In some instances the story is continued to give a contemporary snapshot, so that changes in value are highlighted.

Warrenheip Spring A spring on the south flank of Mt Warrenheip demonstrates the strong sense of local ownership that contributed to its essential shaping and later management as a reserve. When two applicants for the Residence and Cultivation Licence tried to dominate access to the spring in

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1863, existing users petitioned for its reservation.10 The petitioners— eighteen carriers, three farmers, a hotelkeeper and a few storekeepers—wanted land around the spring formally gazetted as

5.3

Plan for 10-acre reservation of spring near Mt Warrenheip, 1863

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5.4

Portion of ‘Design for Township of the Warrenheip Railway Station’, 1862

protection against further applications. They may have met in the Saw Mill Hotel, opposite the spring, to draft their request. This spring, as with many others, functioned as an important buffer between a transient gold population and an emerging settler-miner community. Warrenheip was in transition from timber town, with its three steam sawmills, to agricultural settlement, increasingly populated by

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Residence and Cultivation licensees. In 1862 a surveyor characterised the emerging landscape as one of ‘loosely connected’ tillage paddocks, ‘very irregular in shape’, next to a hut, sometimes a house, and maybe a grass paddock.11 Ground was reconfigured to place existing huts and partially logged fences into the neater arrangement of surveyed allotments. According to the petitioners, the spring was the most convenient camping ground in the immediate neighbourhood. The South Melbourne Road, one of the main colonial thoroughfares, separated the spring from Mt Warrenheip timber reserve. The Residence and Cultivation applicants tried to suggest that spring water could be accessed where it crossed this road, and that a better camping ground existed one mile towards Ballarat. The Lands Department inspector was not convinced. The applicants lost some of their proposed acreage while the petitioners won a temporary reserve of 10 acres, only four months after putting pen to paper. This remained the case for almost ten years, until a rival of the Saw Mill Hotel proprietor applied to establish a business on the Warrenheip spring reserve. The ensuing inspection by District Surveyor Black revealed an entrenched and largely illegal occupancy of the 10-acre water reserve. He was sympathetic to the families that had been living there ‘for many years’ and noted that a prior attempt to ‘remove’ them had been foiled by a petition ‘setting forth the great hardship involved if they had to move’.12 Importantly, the occupants claimed they did not interfere with access to water. Black recommended that the 10-acre reservation be reduced to 2 acres around the spring line, thereby allowing seven families to remain. A sketch plan shows that their respective portions were fenced, leaving the unfenced lower ground to embrace the main road. Accommodation of these families formed the basis of a new cadastral subdivision. Six of the seven families worked adjoining land, while the seventh lived entirely within the reserve in a tworoomed slab hut on enclosed ground measuring 30 feet x 30 feet. Over the following two years the family’s chief provider was summoned and fined twice. He then went ‘up country’ to escape further prosecution.13 In 1881 Crown Lands Bailiff Bannerman recommended that he not be pursued, given the extreme poverty of the family. Nineteenth-century land files for this district reveal that Lands Department officers regularly handled families squatting on Crown

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5.5

Sketch plan of amended reserve boundary to accommodate illegal occupation of Warrenheip Spring, c. 1872

land in impoverished circumstances with sympathy, especially if occupants were persistent. One of the most blatant breaches of legality occurred on the south-east corner of Mt Warrenheip timber reserve, almost opposite the Warrenheip Spring reserve being discussed.14 Here, in 1873, the O’Toole family erected a small slab and bark hut and cultivated three acres. It is likely that they depended on the spring reserve for their water. Upon being challenged by the Lands Department, Mr O’Toole, the father of seven children, requested a lease. Although unsuccessful, a number of locals supported his cause and in 1878 the Lands officer found a temporary solution: O’Toole became caretaker of the Mt Warrenheip Reserve, with nominal rental in lieu of his wage. In 1889, the local branch of the Australian Natives Association lobbied to have O’Toole ‘ejected’, although by now he had resided on the reserve for seventeen years. A weatherboard house had replaced the hut and there was a well ‘said to be over eighty feet deep’. Local petitioners supported his application to purchase four acres of what had become a permanent reserve, citing his length of occupation and old age. After a second altercation with fencing contractors at work on the reserve, the bailiff prosecuted. A cat-and-mouse game ensued, with the matter finally settled in 1916 when a survey report by the new managers of Mt Warrenheip, the Forest Commission, drew attention to the extent of encroachments all around the Mount. It was decided to recognise the 50-year-old son of the original squatter as a

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legal occupant, with some financial reckoning made a few years later. His family continued to live on this site. Illegal occupation of the reduced Warrenheip Spring reserve continued also, with occasional protestations that trespass ‘would be for the benefit of one ...’ and ‘deprive many of a supply of water’. Sometimes, as in 1879, those farmers who requested that the district surveyor ‘remove all obstructions from off the Water Reserve’ were as culpable as those implicated in trespass.15 Once the boundaries of a reserve ‘settled’, however, a sense of fair usage did seem to evolve in the immediate community of users, especially amongst adjoining landowners. The four landowners surrounding the spring all encroached on the reserve but allowed access for those needing to water stock from further afield. This notion of fair usage was more likely to be challenged in dry conditions when the resource was under pressure. This occurred in the summer of 1926. The complainant, John Hartigan, lived about a quarter of a mile from the spring. He argued that an access point blocked some years ago meant an extra ‘dinner time’ trip with the cattle because he could not get in with his water cart.16 Following a Lands Department inspection, the four adjoining landowners received fourteen days notice to return their fencing to the correct line. One of these four, an elderly Mr Murphy, had lived on his allotment for sixty years. Furthermore, he had inherited an adjoining allotment from his fatherin-law who had settled there in the late 1850s. This allotment included a more serious encroachment, with ‘a portion of an iron stable on the reserve, and other outbuildings …’, and part of a cypress hedge was over the survey line. The complainant required that the hedge and fence be removed to allow more direct access from his property. In his own defence, Murphy claimed he had no knowledge of the encroachment, that he was 80 years old, and had kept the land ‘clean’. It seems that the wider community and their local politician, Ned Hogan, were in support of the ‘poor old man’. An explanatory letter to Hogan stated that ‘… every resident of Dunnstown and District with the exception of John Hartigan is prepared to sign a petition to ask that the reserve remain as at present’. The agreed strategy was that Hogan would apply pressure on the Lands Department not to take any action and hope ‘things might then blow over’. This seems to have worked, as later letters of complaint were ignored, assisted by a

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departmental note in the file that ‘orders to clear obstructions were negatived from up high’. As neighbouring farmers consolidated original allotments and developed greater water self-sufficiency through the use of bores and winterfill dams, the spring near Mt Warrenheip came to be viewed more as waste ground than water reserve. Perhaps it was during these years that its name disappeared from the local memory bank. The State Electricity Commission put an easement over part of the land (1941), the main road was deviated through a portion of the reserve (1967), and in 1954 Buninyong Council was granted conditional approval to locate a depot on the site. Although the council later withdrew the application, a recent complaint, in 2000, that the ‘Council are continuing to use [the Reserve] as a dumping ground for waste …’ suggests that, unofficially, it has been used as such.17 This practice has reportedly encouraged others to dump rubbish there: ‘… it is now local knowledge that this is being accepted as a rubbish tip …’ One departmental inspection of the reserve revealed household waste, old hot water services, soil, fill, and garden refuse. This Warrenheip spring, like most others in the district, was not identified and processed by the Land Conservation Council’s review of Crown land in the early 1980s. A later review of Crown land ‘assets’ by the Lands Department was undertaken, in 1994, to determine whether water reserves were ‘surplus to NRE requirements’ and therefore ‘saleable’. Assessors made initial recommendations based on whether a site held ‘Conservation and/or Public land values’. Of the spring reserves examined within this catchment, only one was recommended for retention. This ‘one’ was not the Warrenheip spring. Blackberries and woody weeds, almost choking the spring, were noted, along with the landfill. Encroachment was still evident. The value of the water and the buffer potential of the site in wider catchment terms were not evaluated. This reserve, ‘of very poor appearance’, was given a dollar value based on nearby land values, with the water itself unvalued.18 Not surprisingly, the adjoining owners declined to purchase, sure in the knowledge that it was unlikely to be wanted by other farmers. Now, in 2003, it exists by default only, as no purchaser came forward. No sign distinguishes it as a water reserve. In dramatic opposition to its earlier identity, only a small section of the local community now values the reserve positively. The Lands Department assessor

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5.6 Warrenheip Spring, looking south from road, with woolly tea-tree in centre

highlighted the weeds but was perhaps unqualified to note the remnant woolly tea-trees once so closely identified with such sites. Indeed, this spring is near Ti-tree Rd, which crosses Ti-tree Creek, now both without tea-tree. For members of the local Lal Lal Catchment Landcare Group, these remnants are considered significant in a landscape of predominantly cropped paddocks. Alarmed by the proposed sale of a number of spring reserves in the district, the group urged the Department ‘to ensure the protection of these areas as water sources and areas of remnant vegetation’.19 This prompted an inspection by a Flora and Fauna officer who supported the proposed sale on the basis that the tea-tree was ‘arguably locally significant but has no official status as such …’ Its vegetation remnants were valued as a taxonomic unit within a geographical range. They were not reimagined as the basis of a revegetated feature in a freshly claimed waterscape, one offering positive value to landholders. On being offered the role of unassisted managers, the already committed landcare group suggested the option of the reserve being managed as part of the Mt Warrenheip Reserve, with members prepared to assist in weed control and revegetation. One particularly environmentally conscious landholder even offered to take a conservation licence over the area at minimal rental.20

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None of these options eventuated and it remains an entirely unmanaged, almost unknown, water reserve. The spring’s water is no longer the coveted community resource that prompted initial reservation and continuing involvement. Although the spring is still accessed in dry conditions for stock watering, and its environmental potential has been identified by a small segment of the local community, the area has no positive values for the public land managers and few for the broader local community. As the communal water resource became less valued, site management deteriorated. This in turn devalued its natural attributes, so that the once distinctive woolly teatree and rushes became indistinct amongst weeds and rubbish. Warrenheip Spring has largely lost its resource and landscape value, as have the springs that once supported life at Navigators.

Spring Reserves at Navigators Navigators came to be distinguished from nearby Warrenheip when the Ballarat-to-Geelong railway was constructed. In 1862 Surveyor O’Brien described the 4 square miles, known as the Navigators district, as mostly occupied by small farmers, dairymen, a few splitters and mechanics, with ‘many of these striving men becoming possessed of freeholds ...’21 This was a community newly acquainted with land security, and eager to disassociate themselves from the railway workers’ camp that gave the settlement its name. The ‘many inhabitants of Navigators’ requested O’Brien to petition on their behalf for a new name for the town. It was explained, with some delicacy, that: the name ‘Navigators’ was there first used as the sign of a public house, put up and opened for the accommodation of the Railway-navvies. A few dwellings, near that public house, were afterwards known by the same name, which has since been generally applied to all of the adjacent property as it became occupied, carrying with it a certain amount of undeserved odium, in consequence of quarrels which in early times were somewhat frequent among the men at the quarries and works of the line near to the public-house.22 Although unsuccessful in this petition, the residents were successful in reserving a number of springs.

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O’Brien’s 1862 survey of the area was followed by a trail of complaints and requests to have subdivisional boundaries adjusted by applicants already established, some for many years, on a portion of the newly surveyed land they hoped to license. There were disputes concerning the most equitable design within allotment boundaries, often with regard to water access and sometimes concerning land potential. When 178 acres in Navigators was subdivided into six allotments, two occupants objected that their portions incorporated more swampland than others. One of the new licensees from this same section, Cornelius Patton, initiated the petition to have 17 acres around the nearby spring reserved so ‘that no parties shall camp on, or cultivate, or in any way occupy, till the inhabitants are more settled down, in a few years time’.23 They wanted ‘no division of the piece of ground in question, but that it may be kept totally as a reserve, for the benefit of all parties coming to the spring, and watering cattle etc’. They did

5.7

Springwater reserve at Navigators, originally petitioned for in 1863, granted 1873

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not want illegal occupants squatting near the spring, and were against the resource being monopolised. The thirty-eight petitioners were, temporarily, unsuccessful in obtaining the spring as a public resource, with the district surveyor deciding that a recently gazetted 5-acre water reserve ‘in the immediate locality’ would suffice.24 Ten years later, however, in 1873, another petition secured the excision of the spring, albeit reduced. In 1863, the same year that the 17-acre reserve was first petitioned, many of the same locals protested against the proposed sale of land around a spring which supplied ‘50 or 60 children during the summer season that attend school’.25 The Navigators’ teacher certified the petitioners’ claim that ‘If a Right of Purchase is granted … we will be compelled to keep our children at Home, as there is no water obtainable within half a mile of the school house’. The land applicant who threatened this community resource, John Crossley, had been living on about seven acres near the spring, originally under a Splitter’s Licence, since 1856. His improvements included two bark huts, fences, an acre garden and some cultivation. Crossley wanted to extend into the spring area by applying for a Rural Store Licence. Many of his neighbours were occupants under similar licences, and most were in arrears.26 Although opportunities to expand holdings were competitive, his neighbours believed that the spring should not be encroached upon, and the Lands Department agreed. Reservation, only temporary, was granted on the grounds that a ‘considerable number of inhabitants’ used the spring.27 Ten years after the first attempt to occupy the spring, Crossley tried again. He argued that the spring had not been used much since reservation, and that everyone had water on their own land. Once again nearby landholders protested, with some family names repeated from the original 1863 petition. This time they wanted the extra security of permanent reservation. Buninyong Shire supported the petition and although permanency was not granted, Crossley’s land application was refused. A third attempt, made by the same family in 1896, was almost successful. By this time the applicant was in illegal occupation, having enclosed the permanent spring, along with the adjoining road, into his freehold. The Lands Department agreed to revoke the reserve in favour of Crossley, until the Mines Department objected on grounds that the land was ‘auriferous’ and therefore

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unavailable for sale.28 On this occasion there had been no landholder petition. With both land consolidation and a turnover in land ownership, Crossley had been able to enclose the spring. The time of greatest need for a communal water resource in this area had passed. This pattern of repeated attempts to absorb spring reserves by one farming family was not restricted to Navigators. One of the springs that gave Springbank its name was under intermittent threat of revocation as one family, over a period of fifteen years, tried to purchase and then lease a reserve of less than one acre. Bungaree Council and Victoria’s State Rivers and Water Supply Commission rejected these moves on the strength of petitions from nearby landholders.29 In a ‘Back to Springbank’ celebration some fifty years later, the council support for this reserve was remembered and commended in speeches.

Pound Creek Spring Unlike most of the spring reserves at Navigators, Mt Buninyong’s Pound Creek Spring is still reserved. A surveyor’s 1855 plan of land around the timber and gold town of Buninyong shows clearly the spring adjacent to its ‘Public Pound’ and to the main Melbourne road.30 This spring marked the southern end of the Navigators district, bordered the Buninyong North Farmers Common, and was near the Buninyong Town and Goldfields Common. These commons provided residential and grazing rights for many involved in mining and timber industries. After the Ballarat–Geelong railway was built, in 1862, the spring was earmarked as the headworks of a water supply for the expanding railway town of Buninyong East (now Yendon). Travellers, drovers, local miners, woodcutters and subsistence farmers valued its water. It became known as Pound Creek Spring. The spring was not actually reserved until 1871 when it came under pressure from selectors.31 Twenty years later there was a petition to have it extended and permanently reserved as final protection from similar pressure. Although the reserve was extended to 20 acres, its temporary status was not altered. In 1910 it was under threat again with a request to drain and lease the area, on account of the loss of ‘ten head of cattle smothered in the swamp’. The application was rejected, ‘as it is required as a watering place for stock—being the only valuable site in

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the district during summer months’.32 Using hand tools, locals excavated a channel that carried water along a length of the road to Navigators. During drought periods this channel was cleared by the council on request from local residents. Unlike Warrenheip Spring, Pound Creek Spring did receive Land Conservation Council attention. The LCC revalued this reserve for its remnant vegetation and recommended it become a Bushland reserve. Although Pound Creek contributes to Lal Lal Reservoir, and the spring adjoins an established dairy farm, there was no reference to the water resource. It was the site’s ‘conservation potential with large old Manna Gum stand and isolated trees, some regeneration, kangaroo grass, sedges, cumbungi etc in creek line …’ that gave it new value. The Lands Department was prompted to inspect the reserve and consider

5.8

Spring north of Mt Buninyong, adjacent to saleyards and pound, 1855

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a change in ‘management’. A local officer well respected for his early interest in and promotion of wetlands, Gavin Cerini, envisaged the spring’s newly acquired Bushland identity as an opportunity to restore water habitat values, with intermittent burning to strengthen the native grassland section.33 Two adjoining landowners resisted the proposed make-over for the reserve. Their encroachment was well established. Five acres on one side of the reserve were cropped regularly, attracting no local government rates or licence fees. A further swathe of land was sliced off the western boundary to become an unsurveyed access road to the dairy farmer’s house. Another portion of the reserve was fenced out for grazing stock. On being asked to move their fences back to the survey line, one expressed fear ‘that people would pass his front door to go drinking and partying on the reserve’. They both claimed the swamp was dangerous, ‘in parts bottomless’, that ‘barbecues would be a fire hazard’, and that water was accessed in dry seasons. They wanted to lease the ground, arguing that ‘grazing keeps the area clean, tidy, less of a fire and vermin risk’.34 As much of the reserve had become farming land, this management truth was difficult for the Lands Department to discount. The revaluing of Pound Creek Spring reserve resulted in few changes. There was no restored wetland. Occupied areas were legalised under a grazing licence, and ‘exotic’ native trees planted in the area envisaged as open grassland. Tall manna gums and woolly tea-tree remained scarcely visible in amongst willows, blackberries, ivy and a carpet of periwinkle. The Shire Council practice of stockpiling road material on the reserve continued. Not surprisingly, the 1994 Lands Department review placed it in the surplus and saleable category, with no conservation values discerned despite Cerini’s report just eight years prior. The longtime illegal occupants, now licensees, were approached concerning a purchase, but, as with Warrenheip Spring, the cost of resurveying the area and the unlikely prospect of any competition for land so devalued by weeds resulted in no land transfer. In 1997 it was given a new bureaucratic identity as a Natural Interest reserve, which, like ‘Bushland’, signified little actual change. Despite name changes, occasional interest from the local landcare group, and even more occasional use in severe droughts, the spring reserve at Pound Creek remains almost unknown.

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Unrecognisable now as one of several nodes in a waterscape of competitive land settlement, this forlorn remnant struggles to be more than an abandoned parcel of Crown land that, like the spring at Warrenheip, persists because it has no sale value. Compared with Crown frontage, the springs were a more democratic water resource. The Warrenheip, Navigators and Pound Creek spring reserves were forged and managed by communities that valued them as a water supply. Once this purpose faded, the connection between the wider resident community and the resource likewise diminished. There is, however, one spring reserve in the West Moorabool catchment where this connection has held, with opportunities for reappraisal sustaining community links.

Continuity at Green Springs Green Springs, near Millbrook, is an unusual water reserve. It is signposted. Its water is highly valued, and the site is being managed jointly by the local fire brigade and landcare group to facilitate access to water, to encourage remnant woolly tea-tree, to revegetate, and to control weeds. Green Springs is one of several springs associated with Black Hill, and it constitutes the main source of Black Creek. Unlike Pound Creek Spring, it breaks through deep volcanic soil of high cropping quality. A view south of the spring incorporates a terraced

5.9

Farmers queuing at one of the district creameries

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sequence of deep-blue, spring-fed dams, with the creek now terminating in Lal Lal Reservoir. Green Springs was one of three surveyed within the town boundary of Moorabool Creek (Millbrook) in 1855.35 Not a lot could be discerned of the original pressure to have 18 acres reserved there, but by 1866, the need to retain the spring as public land for use by surrounding selectors would have intensified. Its name derives from the many years that the Green[e] family adjoined the spring. As dairy farmers, they were particularly well placed in the decade spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, because a creamery was built on the reserve. It was serviced by the Wallace, Millbrook and District Butter and Creamery Company which processed the cream separated at a number of district creameries situated on spring reserves.36 Farmers lined up on one side to have their milk separated and from the other carted away their share of skimmed milk to feed calves and pigs. The cream was then transported from the creamery to the factory in bulk. The Wallace, Millbrook and District Creamery Company eventually became the Wallace Dairy Company, which operated in various forms up until the 1980s. Its co-operative company structure linked many dairy families over several generations. From about 1907,

5.10 ‘Girls playing at Green Springs’

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farmers acquired their own separators and the factory collected the cream from farm dairies twice a week in summer, and once a week in winter. Original creameries at the district springs, although shortlived, hold heritage value for this farming community. In 1908, presumably when the Millbrook creamery closed at Green Springs, Green applied to lease a portion of the reserve to extend his dairy. He was refused because the spring was ‘Permanent and used by the public’.37 In a local family history there is a photo of two young girls, Molly McGuigan and a friend, playing at ‘The old creamery Green’s Spring’. It shows the spring partly excavated and contained by rocks. For some this spring was a playground as well as a fount of water ‘that never dries up’.38 In 1967 it was the West Moorabool River that ran dry. A number of Millbrook farmers and firefighters devised a plan to ‘harness the spring to guarantee the necessary supply’ of water for local use. The proposed scheme, approved by Buninyong Shire Council, involved a gravity-fed pipe linking a tank, near the spring, to a roadway standpipe. There was no paperwork required, just one phonecall. Pastoralist and Buninyong Councillor Clyde Fisken secured immediate funding by ringing his friend, the Lands Minister in charge of drought relief funds, Sir William McDonald. Within just two months of the initial project proposal, McDonald stood on the local fire truck and levered the standpipe into action. ‘Minister strikes a gusher …’ was the frontpage headline of Ballarat’s Courier.39 For McDonald, this must have been a welcome task performed amongst traditional rural voters in a year distinguished by his troubled scheme for land development in the Little Desert. Ironically, it was also the year that McDonald’s close political ally, Premier Henry Bolte, approved the construction of Lal Lal Reservoir.40 In just a few years, those farmers who celebrated the works at Green Springs were to be in fierce conflict with those managing the terminal reservoir waters of Black Creek. The value of Green Springs as a local water resource was strengthened with the drought-funded infrastructure, and, following the Land Conservation Council’s assessment in the early 1980s, its identity as a water reserve was endorsed.41 However, the local Committee of Management that emerged from the reappraisal has met with problems. Voluntary labour has maintained the two water tanks and associated pipes, and fenced and planted out a major

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5.11

Minister of Lands, Sir William McDonald, ‘opens’ Green Springs

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portion of the reserve, but the question of more basic repairs and infrastructure replacement has not been adequately resolved.42 Both local government and the Lands Department have avoided financial responsibility by pointing alternately to each other and to the Committee of Management. A second management issue to arise has concerned authorised usage. When the scheme was devised initially the local council planned to levy a $2 charge for each fill, but in opening the site McDonald applauded the free water, so the idea of charges was dismissed, with some embarrassment. In most years it has been locals that access the Green Springs standpipe, but, in dry conditions, ‘outside’ tankers have queued for water, usually at night. To discourage this the committee erected a sign based on bluff rather than legal opinion: Commercial water carriers prohibited This water supply is for limited local use only. Even though Green Springs has continued to be valued highly relative to other catchment spring reserves, the current management problems indicate its role has not been adequately articulated or supported by those outside the immediate community of users. Green Springs is a water reserve valued and managed primarily by local landholders. It has held, almost, its initial shape and function. Connections between the immediate community and the spring have been sustained to meet changing needs. As a water place, it has recorded high on the social flow meter. Always valued for its water, especially in a drought, it has been a meeting place for dairy farmers, for friends and for landcare enthusiasts, and the standpipe queue itself exemplifies its wider social value. Although the local landcare group acknowledges the potential of Warrenheip and Pound Creek springs, these sites remain relatively degraded. It is the continuing breadth of community valuing that has encouraged positive management of Green Springs as a local water resource and landscape feature. A few kilometres east of Green Springs is another spring associated with Black Hill. It is signposted with ‘KEEP OUT Trespassers Prosecuted’. This spring was transferred from the public domain in the late 1990s, ending 120 years of reservation.43 There was little opportunity for the community to revalue this 8-acre reserve, which

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at some point was transformed into two deep spring-fed dams, as a public water asset. Following the 1994 departmental assessment, which declared it ‘highly saleable’, the adjoining landholder agreed to purchase. Local government was consulted concerning cadastral changes, but in terms of the wider community, the transfer was a closed process. Only adjoining landholders were informed directly. A previous attempt to purchase the spring, in 1954, had met with objections from a more localised local government that considered the site ‘in the interest of ratepayers to retain’.44 It was some time after the 1954 application that two large dams were constructed on the site. They covered almost the entire reserve and made sizeable incursions onto two adjacent allotments. It is unclear whether the Lands

5.12

Green Springs Reserve, with tanks and newly planted trees in background

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5.13

Plan of spring reserve near Black Hill prior to sale

Department knew of this development, but the piecemeal record suggests that the reserve was under no lease at the time and was therefore not ‘known’. As with Crown water frontage, many water reserves became hidden from public view and knowledge once enclosed. In 1994 this reserve with its two dams of ‘exceptional capacity’ was assessed as having no conservation or public land values. There was no evaluation of this site in the context of the water resources of the stressed West Moorabool catchment, or of the water needs of the growing population in nearby Gordon or Millbrook. As the sale was not widely publicised and the reserve itself not widely known to exist, options for revaluing were not canvassed. Could the dams have been removed, with positive outcomes for streamflow? Could the dams have been developed to encourage swimming, fishing, biodiversity or

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a combination of these? Would the options for renewal have doubled as an opportunity for a wider awareness of the catchment issues that environmental agencies promote? For this reserve, as with others that were rediscovered and then sold by the Department in the 1980s, the questions cannot now be answered. Water Reserve file 21050 has been ‘put away’. Of the fifty-odd spring reserves surveyed in West Moorabool, only a handful have survived as a public resource. Repeated attempts to absorb reserves into freehold, by both illegal and legal means, became more successful as original landholders consolidated goldfield subdivisions and invested in dams and groundwater. Three water reserves near Black Hill were absorbed in this way, with others partially absorbed. Of the eight water reserves Bungaree Shire enquired about in 1951, three were placed under Ballarat Water Commission control from 1905, one more recently, and another was absorbed by a cemetery reserve.45 The devaluation of spring reserves in the public domain has been matched by a lucrative renaissance for productive springs now in private ownership. The family that farm Black Hill also tap its spring for the bottled water market, as do the owners of the former distillery site at Dunnstown. And although less lucrative, caretakers at a number of the Water Commission springs collect water fees from locals on a need-to-use basis. Some landholders have invested in their springfed dams to create trout fishing havens. Dams have been newly enlarged, revegetated, and bordered by cabin accommodation to meet a growing tourist trade. Many spring reserves have disappeared from public knowledge and imagination. It is difficult to reconcile this void with the past significance of springs in a goldfield and small farm geography that enabled communities to cluster, roads to connect, and struggling settlers to survive. And knowledge of the prevalence of springs in this catchment evinces a diverse landscape for original Australians more independent of rivers and streams. The springs are perhaps best characterised now by severance from the immediate community. Green Springs is an exception with its unbroken links to the past and promise of renewal into the future. Despite resource management agencies espousing principles of community engagement and insisting on them as investment principles, there is no recognition of

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existing spring reserves as a lost resource capable of resuscitation and linkage to wider water issues. If there were, perhaps reserves such as Pound Creek and Warrenheip could re-emerge as features understood and enjoyed in a revived geography of water.

Notes 1

2

3

4 5

6

7 8

9 10 11

12 13 14

PROV, VPRS 242/P0, Unit 4, File 10383, E. Bellairs, ‘Plan shewing the Subdivision of Land in and about Moorabool Creek’, 1855. Griffiths, Three Times Blest, pp. 91–7, 104–5; PROV, VPRS 44/P0, Units 15 & 75 for Trial Sawmill and Surveyor R. Harvey, ‘Country Lots in the Parish of Buninyong, County of Grant’, 1855. Although these six springs were just outside the West Moorabool catchment, they represented well the association of the scoria cones with springs; Cahir, ‘Spuds, Saints & Scholars’. Creameries were sited at Navigators, Dunnstown, Bolwarrah, Millbrook, and Wallace; Warrenheip Primary School, ‘History of Warrenheip’. For example, PROV, VPRS 242/P0, Unit 804, Survey plan for reservation of West Spring, 1868; Unit 17, File 73, Plan related to access dispute to spring reserve near Gordon, 1872. PROV, VPRS 242/P0, Unit 550, petition, 9.9.1903. Wright, The Bureaucrats’ Domain, ch. 6 ‘Interests and Inventories’, and for statistics on water reserves generally see pp. 56–7, 146–8, 217. Victoria Parliament, ‘Victorian Parliamentary Papers, Reserved Lands in Victoria’, 1884. Only a total of 14 water-related reserves (not confined to springs) registered for the largest catchment parishes of Bungaree and Warrenheip. PROV, VPRS 242/P0, Unit 927, Bungaree Shire to Lands Dept. 16.5.1951. Wright, The Bureaucrats’ Domain, pp. 146–8, ‘Cumulative acreage, Crown land reserves, 1857–74’, p. 113; quotation, p. 136. ibid., pp. 124–5, 135–6. DSE, Reserve File 3285, petition, 28.2.1863. PROV, VPRS 44/P0, Unit 44, Description of settlement appended to ‘Design for township of the Warrenheip Railway Station’, W. O’Brien 28.11.1862. DSE, Reserve File 3285, Black’s report, 9.3.1872. ibid., Reports, 7.11.1879, 12.4.1880, 4.7.1881. See PROV, VPRS 439/P0, Unit 48, for 1874 case involving orphaned children; and VPRS 5357, Unit 4464, for saga of Margaret Stewart and sons near Moorabool. PROV, VPRS 242/P0, Unit 304, is a large file on the Mt Warrenheip, Mt Bununyong and Lal Lal reserves, but the material on each is not segregated. For O’Toole references, see 2.12.1873, 22.8.1874, 28.8.1878 (petition), 10.10.1878, 27.11.1878, 2.10.1889 (ANA protest), 17.6.1889, 17.7.1889, 26.8.1889, 29.8.1889 (well reference), 19.5.1916 (encroachment report, Forests). Trustees Minute Book (Mts Buninyong & Warrenheip, Lal Lal Falls), Ballarat City Archive, has more detailed references on this case, beginning with 14.9.1878. Final reference, which details sale, DSE, Rs 9148, 7.12.1924.

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15

16

17 18

19 20

21 22 23

24 25

26

27 28

29

30

31

32 33

34 35 36

37 38

39

DSE, Reserve File 3285, Letter from Smith, Keneally, Quinn and Lonergan, 30.8.1872; Letter by Enright, Diamond, Murphy, 16.9.1879. ibid., Hartigan, 8.2.1926; Report, 22.2.1926, 16.8.1926; Murphy, 22.4.1926; Letter to E. Hogan, 16.8.1926; Department note appended to Hartigan complaint, 10.2.1928. ibid., P. Kinghorn, 14.9.2000; Inspection report, 10.3.2000. ibid., Assessment report, 1994. Same assessment criteria as described for Crown water frontage in previous chapter. Lal Lal Catchment Landcare Group, 8.9.1998. ibid., FFF Report, 4.10.1998; P. Kinghorn, Letters, 3.11.1998, 22.8.2000, 14.9.2000, 28.6.2001, 11.7.2002. PROV, VPRS 44/P0, Unit 44, O’Briens letter introducing petition, 24.9.1862. ibid. PROV, VPRS 44/P0, Unit 5, Letters related to J. Smale application, 23.7.1861, three other boundary disputes in this file; PROV, VPRS 242/P0, Unit 26, Petition, 28.2.1863. ibid., Adair’s report, 10.3.1863. PROV, VPRS 242/P0, Unit 431, Petition, 17.8.1863; certified by J. Coffey, 17.8.1863. PROV, VPRS 44/P0, Unit 70, Return of Store Licences for 1864, crossreferenced with petitioners; PROV, VPRS 242/P0, Unit 431, O’Brien’s report on Crossley’s application, 6.5.1863. ibid., decision, 23.12.1863. ibid., Crossley, 12.8.1879; Petition, 13.9.1879; Crossley, 12.12.1896; Mining objection, 26.2.1897. PROV, VPRS 441/P0, Unit 792 (Springbank), in discussion with former Bungaree councillor, Jack Toohey. PROV, VPRS 44/P0, Unit 775, ‘Agricultural Lands at Buninyong County of Grant’, W. Dawson, 1855. PROV, VPRS 242/P0, Unit 257, Large file on Buninyong and Goldfields Common, includes a number of district maps; PROV, VPRS 242/P0, Unit 540, Application by J. Barnard, 1871, Black’s report, 29.6.1871, Reserve history summarised in Lands report, 28.1.92. ibid., Petition, 4.1.1892; letter, 12.2.1910; Report (SRWSC) 9.8.1910. Land Conservation Council, ‘Final Recommendations, Ballarat Study Area’, pp. 42–4; Report, 1986; Cerini report, 30.8.1988. Cerini was earlier a Fisheries and Games officer with the Department; see Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth, for his involvement at Tower Hill, Victoria. DSE, Reserve File 12672; Letter, 22.12.1987; response to Cerini report, 1988. As for endnote 1. Downey, ‘The Wallace Millbrook and District Butter Factory and Creamery Company Limited’, esp. for interview with D. Downey. NRE, Reserve File 14142. Sullivan, ‘The Sullivans of Millbrook, 1857–1993’; Courier, ‘The Spring That Never Dries Up’, 27.1.1968, p. 5. ibid., p. 5; in discussion with Dave Downey, 18.3.2002; Courier, 28.3.1968, p. 1. Sir William McDonald, MLA Dundas 1947–1952, 1955–1970, Minister

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40 41

42

43 44 45

of Lands, of Soldier Settlement and of Conservation 1967–1970; Henry Bolte, Treasurer and Premier of Victoria 1955–1972. Robin, Defending the Little Desert. Land Conservation Council, ‘Final Recommendations, Ballarat Study Area’, p. 27. This remains an issue despite a recent (2006) water conservation grant to instal a third tank and replace piping. DSE, Reserve File 21050 (archived), Parish of Kerrit Bareet. PROV, VPRS 441/P0, Unit 804, Shire of Buninyong, 22.3.1956. DSE, File for P109189, P109190; PROV, VPRS 242/P0, Units 829, 17, 26; VPRS 44/P0 193, 575, 747, 226; VPRS 440/P0, Unit 379; VPRS 441/P0, Unit 792; PROV, VPRS 242/P0, Unit 927, Department response appended to letter, 16.5.1951.

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6


So far I have been writing about social repercussions for the forest community of water lost to Ballarat, and the lost connections between a broader catchment community and its waterways. But what I also want to emphasise is the lack of connection between that history and current debate concerning reallocation of an overcommitted water resource. There is no similar disconnection for science, with hydrology and ecology providing knowledge vital to making decisions about how much, what kind, and when, water is allocated between Ballarat and West Moorabool, between Melbourne and Gippsland, between Adelaide and the Murray River. Scientific representations of our waterways are central and defining, with political contests of reallocation commonly expressed in megalitres. Even gains in environmental flow are communicated as ‘extra’ megalitres, rather than more qualitative descriptors being used. Although water allocation is currently high on the policy agenda, we now know that the politics of who obtains security of access to water is not new even for this temperate part of Australia with its relatively reliable rainfall. This is often ignored by an economic development narrative of water management that implies resource demand was largely satisfied in the past because of water’s greater availability—with the exception of the environment as a more recent


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stakeholder. However, West Moorabool’s water settlement history reveals that water availability was considered firmly fixed and open to competition until a shift in the capacity of the resource created new allocation opportunities. Beales emerged as discordant voices from the goldfields responded to water resource limitations threatening to stall a vibrant gold economy. From the early 1860s Ballarat interests successfully dominated periodic development opportunities that resulted in four reservoirs in its neighbouring catchment. Water politics become more recognisable from the 1940s when the building of dams lower in the catchment, nearer Geelong than Ballarat, drew attention to the hydrological character and capacity of the entire Moorabool system. More recently a major catchment study designed to provide options for manipulating an already overcommitted resource has been the focus.1 For this study it was argued that until we knew more precisely what the total resource was and who had been allocated what volume, there was no real context for modification. And it would make no sense to argue against this. However, it is the exclusiveness of these investigations in knowledge and process that also becomes a denial of water history with its own contextual contribution. Moorabool Reservoir features prominently in contemporary reallocation investigations because of the number of farmers downstream of the dam and the high incidence of low flows for the river. The associated community consultation forums have resembled a tug of war, with consultants pulling to get science over the line and catchment farmers equally concerned to put some ‘history’ into the debate. Consulting hydrologists employ computer modelling to explain options for Moorabool’s overcommitted water. They are assisted by diagrammatic representations of a resource held rigid by the present and locked out of the past. Firm geometric lines divide a water wheel, more commonly referred to as a pie graph, into variously proportioned claims. For environmental professionals Moorabool Reservoir represents a volumetric segment of Ballarat’s tightly tensioned water wheel. But what is it that catchment farmers understand by ‘Moorabool Reservoir’? Could an allocation framework set new principles for water sharing from an agreed interpretation of historical, as well as scientific, processes?

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Moorabool Reservoir’s History For many farmers Moorabool is about the lives of their parents and grandparents. Its history is fresh and astringent. The turbulence of the gold years has cast a softer light on the story of how Beales Reservoir came to be, and although Moorabool Reservoir had its beginnings in the same period, its consolidation as a water supply reserve for Ballarat occurred in the harsher light of later decades. Following a gestation period of some fifty years, the reservoir was constructed near the headwaters of West Moorabool River after the 1914 drought. The essential story line for both the Beales and Moorabool reservation is similar. It explains how an established forest, and later farming community, was manoeuvred out of the reserve. But the process was more intense than at Beales. Some early forest occupants of the emergent Moorabool Reserve existed, for an entire lifetime, in a kind of administrative time warp. The ‘reserve’

6.1

Approximate boundary of the initial Moorabool reservation, as understood by C. Hodgkinson, 1866 Note: Timber Reserve was to the north of the ‘Gathering Grounds’



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was an exceedingly fluid entity that was variously abandoned and then resumed as the needs of Ballarat dictated. This grim pattern engendered an acute possessiveness over the water, and an ongoing suspicion for how the resource was managed. Land around the upper West Moorabool River was claimed as a potential water supply catchment for Ballarat in 1862, at the same time as Beales. Like Beales, the reservation was restricted to an exemption from mining and, supposedly, from land sales. The initial reserve penetrated much deeper into Bullarook Forest than Beales, and was therefore further from Ballarat. And there was much more of it. The land demarcated for Moorabool Reserve was approximately six thousand acres. It extended from just north of the current reservoir and followed the river south to the township of Wallace. Unlike for Beales, however, there was no follow-up survey, no formal reservation for water supply purposes, and no Water Commission works. Ballarat’s claim to this large tract of land was so tenuous that a portion of it, extending north from Beales towards the West Moorabool River, coexisted as the Warrenheip timber reserve. It was a proposed extension of this timber reserve to form a permanent forest reserve unavailable to selectors which lit the fuse in this volatile corner of Bullarook Forest.2 Unlike at Beales, the contest for resources went beyond local interests, with colonial advocates of forest conservancy and more equitable land selection policies influencing the eventual shape and inner boundaries of Bullarook Forest. Demarcation of the tree and land resource curbed the Water Commission’s frontier claim to a reserve around West Moorabool River and Devils Creek. Bullarook Forest constituted a particularly valuable timber resource because of the size and type of its trees, and its strategic proximity to a major goldfield. Knowledge of its value spread beyond the Ballarat District when its ‘wanton destruction’ was cited in forest protection debates centred in Melbourne.3 Pressure to conserve and manage the forest resource, especially around goldfields, escalated when three leading bureaucrats of the colony—Brough Smyth (Mines), Clement Hodgkinson (Lands), and Surveyor-General Charles Ligar—recommended new and extended forests in 1865. One of the forests suggested for permanent reservation was an eastern extension of the existing Warrenheip timber reserve.

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Simultaneous to the demand for a permanent forest reserve was the pressure for land settlement under Section 42 of the 1865 Land Act. Section 42 fulfilled the role that the former Residence and Cultivation Licence played in 1860–62. Originally an annual licence for 20 acres within ten miles of a goldfield, it was extended to include 80 and then 160 acres within thirty miles of a goldfield. Land selection by itinerant timber workers, miners and tradespeople was greatest in Victoria’s central goldfields, with Ballarat District leading the applications tally in 1866.4 Interest was from the same class of hybrid miner-farmers that settled at Beales, but there was now much greater political support for smallholder land settlement. By the mid-1860s converging interests for the water, timber and land of Bullarook Forest required colonial resolution. Delineation of the Warrenheip timber reserve as permanent forest was on the government agenda at the same time as Grant’s 1865 Land Act promised new opportunities for selection. The Ballarat Water Commission’s 6000 acres, which included a quarter-mile reservation on each side of the West Moorabool River, failed to withstand these pressures and contracted considerably. For the forest dwellers the ground was shifting under their feet and they shouted to be heard. In 1865 they petitioned against the move to permanently reserve a forest. These ‘resident millowners, farmers, woodcutters, splitters, and others …’ had been expecting the timber reserve ‘portion of Bullarook’ to be opened for selection under Section 42.5 James Henry Brown, in tiny script, drafted the petition. Brown was a forest veteran. At the time of the petition, he, along with Biddle, had operated the sawmill near the junction of Devils Creek and West Moorabool River for three years. When they applied for a 2-acre extension to their mill site in 1862, the surveyor approved as it ‘would not interfere with mining or public interests’.6 This site, now under the reservoir, became the settlement of Bolwarrah. Brown’s former milling site, about five kilometres further west towards Ballarat, had become the town of Bullarook. Most signatories to the 1865 petition were sawmill workers, including some ‘fallers’ and ‘splitters’ with twelve years of forest experience. Workers from nearby sawmill communities added their names below those working for Biddle and Brown. Some names were familiar from 1858 forest petitions, from incidents at Beales, from



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6.2

Sawmill application, Biddle and Brown, showing position near junction, 1862

compensation schedules more than thirty and forty years later, and from both old and current parish plans. Brown’s petition attested to the competitive demand for land selection under Section 42. Not only did he include his own subdivisional plan for the forest, he also outlined a system of arbitration whereby two mill owners and two of the oldest resident settlers applied principles of prior occupancy to competing land claims, under supervision of the Lands Department. Implicit in his proposal was the cohesive independence of sawmilling communities far removed from Lands staff in Melbourne or Ballarat.

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Clement Hodgkinson reported on Bullarook Forest after receipt of the petition. He was no armchair bureaucrat. Hodgkinson demonstrated an extensive and detailed knowledge of the public domain in his long public service career with the Lands Department.7 Not only protective of the forest resource, he was also clearly alive to the settlement needs of miners, many of whom experienced unemployment and economic hardship after the decline of alluvial mining. Indeed, he had drafted the innovative and democratic Section 42, considered the salvation of a Land Act otherwise condemned. Although ‘the rich soil and moist climate of the elevated wooded tracts of country’ at Bullarook had been identified earlier as a forest site for ‘useful deciduous trees’, Hodgkinson was moved by the earnest attempts at settlement he witnessed when inspecting the country.8 His initial comments related to the Warrenheip timber reserve north of Beales. He found that: Improvements had been made by several persons, some of whom held wood licences, and all of whom had been unsuccessful applicants for licences under the 42nd Section of the Amending Land Act at the sitting of the [Land] Commission in Ballarat. At the time of my visit some of these men, with their families, were reaping their crops of oats, grown among large forest trees—which these persons had not killed by ringing them—and which, consequently, rendered their crop of oats and potatoes very light. The parties are, generally, resident in small weatherboard cottages. From this reserve the best timber has already been taken by miners and woodcutters; consequently, as you have already decided on a reconsideration of the applications that were not favourably entertained by the Ballarat Commission, I think the rejected applications for sites on this reserve might, without material detriment to the interests of the mining population, be again favourably considered.9 On inspection of the proposed extension of this reserve across to West Moorabool River from Devils Creek, where Brown was situated,



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Hodgkinson encountered ‘numerous small patches of cultivation, and corresponding huts’, belonging to men anxious to secure their holdings under Section 42.10 And in Silurian forest country east of the river, he found a lesser number of holdings cleared of the most valuable timber. He recommended that all current applications in these areas be processed and proposed the boundary of what is now known as Wombat State Forest. He acknowledged the timber value of the land west of the river by suggesting that some tracts could be reserved for timber, but not proclaimed as state forest. His recommendations enabled Bullarook Forest to continue to both sustain sawmilling and support emerging farming communities. This part of Bullarook Forest was in dynamic transformation as had been its western portion, closer to Beales and Ballarat, some five years earlier. Interestingly, Hodgkinson did not refer to the Ballarat Water Commission’s ‘gathering grounds’ in his report, even though the reservation was demarcated on an associated plan. The omission was suggestive of the Commission’s insubstantial claim prior to Hodgkinson’s investigation. In an act that confirmed its insecurity with the first reservation of 6000 acres, the Commission successfully pressured the Lands Department for temporary reservation of approximately 1000 acres for dam sites on the West Moorabool River and Devils Creek.11 This constituted that part of the original reservation closest to the waterways, and home to Brown’s sawmill community. As MLA George Holden stated in parliament thirty-seven years later, ‘That was a reservation on top of a reservation’.12 This ‘new’ reservation comprised the part of the forest between Devils Creek and West Moorabool River known, both then and now, as the ‘Island’. Brown and his fellow petitioners had helped rescue the Island from permanent forest reservation, but did not save it all from a new Commission reservation. New licence applications for the riparian portion of the Island were in process before the re-reservation for water supply purposes was finalised. Sixty applicants under Section 42 were adversely affected by the reservation, with many losing valuable river frontage portions of their blocks.13 In these cases a number of licensees ended up paying for more land than they eventually got title to, but refunds were never received. All had paid survey and advertising fees. There is poignancy to the 1865 petition from the forest when it is appreciated

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that Brown died on his sawmill site almost forty years later, without receiving any compensation from the Water Commission for his mill plant, or for the value of his 30 acres of riparian land that he had acquired in 1866 under Section 42. No doubt Brown, as a millowner needing labour, had incentive to organise the petition but its wording and his later efforts over decades to secure fair compensation, for others as well as himself, revealed great compassion.14 He shared in the reality that forest workers needed secure tenure of more than the half-acre available under most forest licences to meet the ‘wants of their families during six months of impassable roads to the different timber markets’. He was committed to ‘securing for the poor man land to make his home free and easily obtainable’.15 Subsequent to Hodgkinson’s report, approximately five thousand acres of the Commission’s original ‘reserve’ that extended south to Wallace was selected under Section 42, and titles were granted without the reserve ever being revoked. The Commission did try to retrieve more of its lost gathering grounds along the West Moorabool River, and the Department agreed to increased river frontage. A new survey was negotiated for permanent reservation that would have presumably absorbed the 1000 acres temporarily reserved, but inability to settle with the residents or to invest in works halted proceedings. To add to the confusion, a further 1100 acres of land north of the reserve were withheld from sale in 1876.16 It is this amalgamation of reservations, the remnants of which eventually comprised about 1500 acres, which will be referred to as the Moorabool Reserve. Although there were legal distinctions that differentiated portions of the reserve, the occupants were either not aware of them or not in a position to be advised. This bureaucratic muddle created a complex context for later compensation claims, making highly questionable the later assumptions of ‘unauthorised occupation’ and ‘trespass’ by officialdom.17 And of course it was confusing at the time, with land applicants receiving contradictory advice, and with accelerated tree-felling between rival sawmilling outfits anticipating changes in land status.18 The Water Commission considered utilising Moorabool water during this early period, but the construction of two reservoirs (Pincotts, 1867; Gong, 1877) closer to Ballarat was a less expensive, albeit short-term, option. Before this decision had been finalised, the



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Commission served fifty-three notices on those on the Moorabool Reserve which warned that future improvements would not be recognised. In doing this, the Commission accepted the validity of claims prior to 1866. When the expected compensation process did not eventuate, the residents formed a deputation to request that the Commission commit to possession, or abandon its claim.19 They represented the majority of Moorabool residents who had lived near the river for six to nine years before temporary reservation in 1866, and who had been allocated land under Section 42 for which partial payment had been made. Reservation interrupted full payment and subsequent legal title.

Ballarat Retreats from Moorabool Reserve There were six more deputations and a petition to parliament before the Commission, having decided to build elsewhere, agreed to relinquish the land in 1873. Although, like Beales, the Moorabool residents’ issue held no appeal for the popular press, the influence of James Oddie, widely acclaimed as one of Ballarat’s founding fathers, on behalf of sawmillers Biddle and Brown, may have been a factor in effecting this new strategy. The commissioners wanted a temporary reprieve from persistent settler pressure. In signalling to the Moorabool residents that the reserve was no longer a Commission responsibility, they hoped to divert the settlers’ compensation claims to the government. And, if the land were to be required in the future, they reasoned, the government could be reimbursed. The commissioners attempted to strengthen their case with the opinion of George Gordon, Chief Engineer from Water Supply, that the ‘valuable watershed’ should be retained ‘for the country generally’.20 The Department of Lands had reason not to co-operate with the Commission’s new tack. In 1872, initial legislation to incorporate the Water Commission was passed following its settlement with Lal Lal Waterworks Association. Finally empowered to access loans, the Commission had mortgaged Moorabool to the Lands Department through the Mines Department, with which it had an outstanding debt. Although the Commission was reminded of this arrangement and compelled to retain the reserve, it continued to deny responsibility for the land or its occupants. Management responsibilities remained in abeyance. No rents were collected and no thistles

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eradicated. Residents were encouraged to direct protest at Melbourne, not Ballarat.21 They were condemned to an uncertain, albeit ‘free’ for some, occupation. The ongoing uncertainty experienced by the residents was heightened by land speculation during 1874. A sawmill proprietor and local landholder, Richard Richardson, was elected to parliament after a rough and heated campaign. He began his high-profile parliamentary career, first as Lands Minister, by revoking large areas from forested reserves across the colony. Particularly controversial was an excision of 535 acres from the Ballarat Water Commission’s 1866 portion of Moorabool Reserve. Most of this acreage fronted Devils Creek. This excision, and later land sale, not only realised his personal assets in the area but also secured continuing electoral support from proven friends.22 When a further 280 acres were granted to a holder occupying 1000 acres in the area, with no revocation, the Moorabool settlers feared further land speculation and renewed efforts for a financial settlement with the Commission. The residents moved from a position of intermittent hope for resolution during the 1870s to one of resigned quiet by the early 1880s. They had exhausted protest options and for a short time the newly constituted commissioners were preoccupied consolidating existing assets. It is unclear whether the settlers knew that, in 1885, the Commission turned its attention to the revenue potential of Moorabool following its success in renting a large portion of Beales Reserve. Its initial inquiry to the Lands Department began with: The Western Moorabool reserves are mostly in unauthorised occupation. It is fine land and worth perhaps 15/- or 20/- per acre rent per annum. The question is raised: should either the Government or the Ballarat Water Commission be obtaining a rent for this land. At present for all the years it has been occupied not a penny rent has been paid and most of the occupants have no claims of any kind. They settled after the lands were reserved and many of them were notified …23 To begin with, the Department quashed the question of rental. It had received legal advice that the lengthy adverse possession of the



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reserve would be an ‘effectual bar to the Commissioners ever exercising control over the land or occupiers’.24 A stand-off ensued whereby the Department, realising that the Commission did not require the land for a dam, wanted to resume control so that occupants could be dealt with and the reserve made available for other schemes. With the prospect of ‘other schemes’, such as a water supply for the mining community at Mt Egerton, the Commission became fearful of losing its claim to the reserve and agreed to ‘reassert its rights’ on certain conditions. It requested, in 1891, permanent reservation and a Crown grant ‘containing the right and giving power to let and receive rental for any portion of the said land that may not be required for immediate use in connection with the water supply’. Once the Commission declared its interest in using the Moorabool Reserve for water supply purposes, it was difficult for the Lands Department to insist on a transfer of responsibility back to the Crown. It was recommended that Ballarat resume its interest, ‘Provided any compensation that is absolutely necessary is paid by the Commission and the reserves are used solely for water supply’.25 These conditions suggest that the legality and enormity of the settlers’ claims was not appreciated in Melbourne, and that there was some criticism of the Commission practice of renting reserves. With the Commission denied rental land and with the Department obstructed from easily resuming control, the management vacuum persisted.

Commission Advances on Settlement of Bolwarrah In 1898 the Commission again negotiated for repossession when drought threatened Ballarat’s water supply. It was twenty-five years since the Commission had relinquished its responsibility. In this time, Ballarat’s Moorabool Reserve had become the settlement of Bolwarrah. In a meeting with the Minister for Lands and representatives from Bolwarrah, the Commission gave a reassurance that compensation would be paid for ‘claims that could be legally proved’.26 Chairman Wilson’s account of this meeting included a reported statement by the Lands Minister that the residents’ private interests ‘must be subordinated to the public good and that even if they had been freeholders they could not stand in the way of 40,000 to 50,000 people whose interests were paramount where a proper supply of water was concerned’.27 From the beginning, however, the settlers had asked

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for a fair recognition of their prior interests only, and had not questioned Ballarat’s need for the water. As with Beales, angst was rooted in the process of expropriation more than in its on-ground outcome. The compensation schedules compiled over previous decades were ignored for a new process conducted by Police Magistrate Anderson. One by one the settlers presented their claims at the Wallace Town Hall. Their trust was misplaced as it became clear that Anderson’s terms of reference were exclusive of land value or water rights. With brazen confidence, the Commission dated reservation from 1862, when 6000 acres had been ‘reserved’, and not 1866, when 1000 acres had been temporarily reserved for water supply purposes.28 This meant that compensation for the residents, referred to as ‘trespassers’, was for improvements only. A Commission plan of the reserve at this time accentuates how tightly the boundary shadowed the waterways, as well as the intimate confines of the settlement. Bolwarrah was in the south-eastern portion near Brown’s old mill, with the earliest forest occupants on

6.3

Occupancy of the Moorabool Reserve, Ballarat Water Commission, 1898



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land closest to the river. One such block belonged to the Calwells, grandparents of federal Labor leader Arthur Calwell. From 1860 the Calwell family, which was to include thirteen children, lived near the junction with Devils Creek. They acquired a further 70 acres of farming land nearby. Like the Calwells, almost half of the settlers held land adjoining or near the reserve. Under Anderson’s award in 1898, Elizabeth Calwell, widowed and in her late sixties, was offered £18 for the 25 acres of drained, cleared and fenced land within the reserve that she farmed with one of her sons. Her riparian right was ignored by Anderson. Fourteen years later, under a State Rivers and Water Supply Commission supervised award, she was offered £88 with a condition that the Commission make provision for stock water. By the time she was paid, in 1914, plans for the new reservoir incorporated her other farming land of 70 acres. Both were sold to the

6.4

Portion of ‘The Western Moorabool Reservation’, showing blocks held by Brown, Gabriel and Calwell

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Commission, ending fifty-four years of Calwell family life at Bolwarrah.29 Elizabeth was in her eighty-fifth year. Of the fifty-one residents of Bolwarrah that Anderson interviewed at Wallace Hall, fifteen were original occupants and the majority had lived on reserve land for twenty years.30 These figures do not include the landholders’ immediate families. In the years of Commission abandonment, the settlers had continued to build their lives on and around Bolwarrah. On most reserve blocks there was one house, sometimes two, outbuildings, a well, productive gardens and often a business. Lewis Gabriel settled on 9 acres in 1866, established 400 fruit trees, a butchery and a store, and was trustee of the Wesleyan Church, also on the reserve. In 1869 he was able to purchase adjoining land. Elsewhere there was a piggery, several dairies, a charcoalburning works, stores, woodyards, a school, and a blacksmith. There were thirteen residents who had not purchased existing rights but who were on abandoned blocks. For these residents legal tenure was difficult to establish. For example, Margaret Simpson lived on land originally taken out under Section 42 by Tasman Johnstone in the mid-1860s. After five years he decided not to wait for compensation and allowed his former employees, the Simpsons, to occupy the block. At the time of Anderson’s award Margaret was elderly, lived in a slab hut and was supported by two sons. Local MLA George Holden came to a timely rescue of the residents by convincing his Premier, Alexander Peacock, to withhold Anderson’s award. Elected in 1900 and resigning in 1913, Holden was committed to the Moorabool settler cause in its last stages. He owned a farm produce and processing business at Wallace, with his wider family associated with similar interests in Geelong. He was not part of Ballarat’s landed or commercial establishment to an extent that may have swerved his loyalty to the settlers. Indeed, he was aware of how ‘most of the large landholders got land in 1859 and 1860 without any trouble’ and was highly critical of the Water Commission’s rental practice at Beales that made them ‘the biggest landlords in his district’. He explained to parliament how the Commission insisted on getting a Crown grant for the drainage area at Beales, ‘then the land was divided up into nice little farms and they received rental’.31 He feared that the same process would occur at Moorabool. Over a period of three months Holden prepared a new award with the settlers. He was



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tenacious in producing Lands Department receipts belonging to residents for whom the Department claimed there were no files. These receipts supported applications under Section 42 that had been fully or partially paid, ensuring that compensation for land and water, as well as improvements, had a legal basis. Accusations of a departmental cover-up surrounded this investigation.32 The longer the compensation issue remained unresolved, the more complex it became, in part due to the political change of guard. Holden almost brokered a successful outcome in 1903, with both the Lands Department and the Commission committing more finance than in previous offers. He was assisted by Surveyor-General Reed’s finding that the settlers were entitled to Crown grants by adverse possession. But, when Thomas Bent became the new Lands Minister early in 1904, he reduced the offer of government assistance from £1000 to £500 and, incredibly, presented the Water Commission with the alternative of a £1500 donation to ‘go to law’.33 There was parliamentary dissension over the culpability of the Lands Department, with some questioning the validity of Commission rental practice.

State Rivers and Water Supply Commission Intervenes At about the same time that Holden demonstrated support for the Moorabool settlers, the Victorian Department of Water Supply, and from 1906 the State Rivers and Water Supply Commission (SRWSC), played an increasingly interventionist role in reserve affairs. This proved advantageous for downstream users as well as for the settlers. Following the rejection of a proposed large dam on the Moorabool on grounds of finance after dry conditions in 1898, the Water Commission responded to the severe drought conditions in the summer of 1902–3 with a proposal to lay a pipeline from the river to existing reservoirs. This solution to pipe water to Ballarat particularly concerned those landholders downstream of the reserve. They accepted the Commission’s former proposal of a reservoir to store winter streamflow if their existing rights were not infringed, but firmly believed there was no surplus summer water that could be diverted to Ballarat without affecting their interests.34 For these landholders, unlike those at Beales, the Department of Water Supply, as centralised water managers less imbued by Ballarat interests, represented the possibility of some redress. Whereas Commission reports on proposed works

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neglected reference to compensation water, those from the Water Supply Department referred to it with specified volumes attached.35 From at least 1905, there was a statewide scale from which the Department computed compensation water. The Water Supply Department challenged the Water Commission’s authority, so firmly established in isolation from wider scrutiny. The very able Alfred Kenyon and Chief Engineer Stuart Murray examined critically both the financial and technical aspects of a number of proposals for Moorabool. In 1905 Murray exposed the ineffectiveness of opting for the more affordable but smaller capacity reservoir that the Commission lobbied to construct.36 With a certain audacity, the commissioners responded to Murray’s 1905 assessment by questioning his professional judgment. Murray had been Chief Engineer of the independent Water Supply Department since 1886 and was codesigner of the large Goulburn and Laanecoorie weirs constructed in the late 1880s. In the same year that he criticised the Commission for its resistance to a sizeable dam at Moorabool, he helped the Minister of Water Supply (George Swinburne) to draft the 1905 Water Act which was to strengthen centralised control in the new SRWSC. Murray was soon to preside over this institution with its considerably heightened supervision of regional works.37 His experience with the Moorabool, and of course his longer experience in the northern irrigation districts, was no doubt confirming of this direction. Murray’s response to Commission plans not only exposed the superficiality of the engineer’s assessment of catchment and dam capacity, but was also highly critical of the Commission’s water management: There is excessive consumption during the summer season, chiefly, no doubt, for private gardens; and the quantity used is not to be wondered at, when it is considered that the Commissioners do not insist on the use of meters. Were they to do so, the result would be at once apparent … Should the Commissioners decide on carrying out a supplementary scheme, on anything like the scale here proposed, it will be very advisable to insist, concurrently therewith, on the use of meters wherever garden irrigation



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is practised. At the same time it will be necessary to impose an increased general rate …38 Minister Swinburne endorsed this view and, with the backing of a Parliamentary Committee, also defended Murray’s opinion on the dimensions of a new dam. This corralled the commissioners into further inaction because they experienced difficulty in securing loans for minor, let alone major, works proposed for Moorabool. In this period, when plans were moving between Melbourne and Ballarat, the Commission purchased land around the Moorabool Reserve for rental purposes. And, after some residents agreed to a financial settlement, the Commission offered one year’s rental for their vacated reserve blocks.39 Henry Brown’s sawmill block was rented from 1906. He had died in 1902, with an obituary as follows: The deceased gentleman was known far and wide as the senior partner of the old sawmilling firm of Biddle Brown and Co. He came to Bolwarrah in 1862 and resided here to the time of his death. He was a man much respected and esteemed by his many good qualities. He was hospitable to his friends and generous to needy, also a staunch and liberal supporter of the Wesleyan Church all his life. Indeed the church at Bolwarrah was mainly indebted to him for the building, by giving the whole of the timber for its erection. He filled the office of Chapel Steward and Sunday School superintendent for many years and was also a member of the Shire Council. Mr. Brown was at one time fairly well off but reverses came along and he died a poor man. Buried [at] Gordon.40 It is tempting to rewrite the last line by replacing ‘reverses’ with ‘reserves’. Before he died, he rejected Anderson’s award and the Commission believed Holden’s was excessive. His son, not living in the district, negotiated with the Commission to settle Henry’s estate. He was given one week to accept an offer of £100 above Anderson’s award, which remained a few hundred below Holden’s. The son accepted, Mrs Brown left her home of forty-four years, and the block was rented.41 Henry Brown died too early, by ten years, to benefit from a SRWSC award in 1912.

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With most of the reserve still occupied by residents or tenants, the Commission sought permission, at the end of 1907, to complete one portion of its expansionary scheme by laying pipes to the site of the proposed reservoir. Despite disagreements between the Commission and the Department concerning the best pipe track, materials for the pipe, and the alternative of a more affordable open channel, the pipeline was finally completed in August 1910. The Commission’s annual report for that year stated: ‘Considerable delay in getting possession of the reserve has occurred owing to the settlers being reluctant to move, although fair compensation has been offered to them’.42 In fact the commissioners refused to meet the settlers in conference and employed solicitors to settle. They acted from a position of strength after the Moorabool Reserve was granted to them in August 1908. Holden was critical of the strategy to use solicitors, arguing that few of the settlers had complete documents as to title, but were forced to accept amounts based on this evidence only.43 Compensation was required for those along the pipe track as well as for settlers remaining on the reserve. The commissioners wanted the reserve cleared of settlers swiftly once it was established that poor water quality prevented the use of Moorabool’s piped water. Apart from domestic sources of pollution, it was reported that slaughter yards sited upstream of one tributary required strategic diversion, and that Biddle and Brown’s ancient sawdust heap held stagnant water and had to be removed. The Commission urged the solicitors to hasten the compensation process, which in turn prompted Holden to intervene with stories of standover tactics being used against ‘unauthorised occupants’, a term that Chairman Brawn resumed for the settlers of Bolwarrah.44 To illustrate the unfairness of the Commission process, Holden used his detailed understanding of particular cases. There was the occasion, for example, when Simeon Brady, who had lived on the river opposite Brown’s sawmill since 1862, was visited on his deathbed: In Brady’s case, an amount of £170 [Anderson’s award was £40] had been agreed to, Brady to be allowed to remove buildings. The Commissioners abandoned this arrangement, and Brady was practically starved out. Then, 24 hours before Brady’s death representatives of the Ballarat



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Commissioners met him, obtained a release on payment of £100.45 Brawn maintained that Brady had asked to settle the matter before he died so that his wife could move, and that his son willingly signed the settlement statement that left the right to the buildings with the Commission. In a positive move Holden nominated Engineer Thomas Murray from the SRWSC to determine compensation for the settlers. During the years of pipe track negotiation and actual construction, SWRSC staff visited the reserve regularly. Thomas Murray in particular was involved with the Ballarat schemes from 1890, when he prepared preliminary reports for Stuart Murray. In early 1912 he finished his compensation report on the remaining seventeen residents, resisting a last attempt by Brawn to have the award restricted to improvements only. He acknowledged two cases of water rights that entailed the Commission making provision for stock water, and he allowed all occupiers to remove buildings. His overall compensation total was double that established by the Commission. He reprimanded the Commission for expecting the possession and removal of buildings before payment, and it in turn accused eight families of sowing crops to extend their occupation.46 Settlement problems for some occupants lingered for another few years, with the approval of plans for a large reservoir finally providing closure to the excessively protracted compensation debacle. It was not until rain was about to fill the new reservoir that cesspits were sealed, the sties and cowsheds destroyed, and manure debris burnt. I found only one image of Bolwarrah, just prior to its inundation, compared to the many of Moorabool Reservoir under construction. Moorabool became a symbol of Ballarat’s hope for a return to economic prosperity. But for the landholders and for Bungaree Shire it meant more lost land and water. The residue from the entire Moorabool reservation process was incremental settler distrust of the Commission, and Commission irritation with the locals. The resulting polarisation became self-perpetuating and still characterises the culture of water management in the West Moorabool catchment. Current allocation studies augment this polarisation by giving central emphasis to scientific data divorced from historical

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6.5

Bolwarrah before Moorabool Reservoir

context. The hegemony of scientific knowledge in water resource studies can be equated with the emphasis on legality in the compensation process. Both put local residents at a distinct disadvantage.

Moorabool’s Passing Flows This history of how the Moorabool Reservoir came to be partly explains the resentment between landholders and the Commission that continues to erupt in modern forums. And within that generalised discontent and sense of injustice it is the arrangements for compensation water or passing flows for downstream users that have continued to be a point source of aggravation. It is clear that without SRWSC involvement, the issue of passing flows may not even have been addressed, as was the case for Beales. And although the SRWSC offered expertise and support in relation to reservoir construction, its involvement with ongoing management was minimal.47 This is well illustrated by initial intervention to establish compensation flows, and then later lack of supervision of its management. From the time of Stuart Murray’s first Moorabool report in 1905, in which he calculated an approximate allocation for compensation flow, there was some consideration in Melbourne, albeit inconsistent, for farmers downstream of the dam. In 1908, when the Commission’s pipe track option was being negotiated, Minister Swinburne stated



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that ‘… the chief consideration of the Department was that persons residing lower down the stream should not suffer through it being diverted’.48 Elwood Mead, Chairman of the new SRWSC, reset a compensation volume threshold established by Swinburne for the now gauged river. The Commission protested and the volume was halved. Possibly encouraged by this easy reversal, the Commission repeatedly delayed presenting plans for a measuring weir, which would allow passing flows to be regulated, during dam construction in 1914. By early in the next year, downstream users complained that all water was being improperly diverted by a wood and canvas structure, and the SRWSC intervened successfully on their behalf. Mead’s compensation rate, uniform for the year, was replaced by a periodic rate subject to review that was determined by Thomas Murray. He stressed that compensation flows should be revised as information became available, and, if there was a shortage in the river, the Commission was to cease diversion until directed by the SRWSC. He calculated three seasonal compensation flow rates—for summer, winter and spring/autumn—and equated these with measurements in the compensation weir so that a caretaker could supervise the service provision.49 However, the periodical reviews never proceeded and there was no external monitoring of the releases. An incident at the reservoir’s baptism revealed the state of affairs between the Water Commission and those affected by compensation flows. Befitting what had been a tempestuous process, Moorabool Reservoir filled with raging stormwater in September 1915. The recently appointed caretaker, Middlin, and his assistants watched the embankment until late into the night, to ensure that it would hold under sudden pressure. Residents downstream had been warned that sudden evacuation might be necessary. In Middlin’s report of the night he included a reflection, no doubt to his later regret, that the reservoir had been of huge benefit to the downstream landholders that now had protection for their low-lying flood-prone land. With a sense of mischief, the Commission broadcast Middlin’s comment in a report to downstream landholders, to Bungaree Shire, and to the local politician.50 It was not until the late 1940s when pressure for irrigation works developed in the lower Moorabool River, south of Meredith, that the regime of upstream releases of water was questioned. The SRWSC

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both supervised the construction of these lower irrigation weirs and reassured the Geelong water authority that its interests would not be diminished. With these undertakings in mind, staff desperately searched for their Moorabool files to establish what compensation arrangements were in place for the reservoir. Unable to locate their own records they examined the leather-bound minute books of the Commission with more success. One adjustment to the summer flow release was made, but there was no action on Murray’s qualifying remarks concerning the need for ongoing review or for low-flow arrangements.51 Landholder suspicion concerning release arrangements and volumes has continued into contemporary allocation debate, with the widely held perception that Moorabool’s water is diverted into Ballarat before compensation volumes can be accurately determined. Not forgetting the vital role played by Jack Holden in rallying parliamentary pressure, it was the initial involvement of a central water bureaucracy—the SRWSC—that moderated the Commission’s expropriation of Moorabool water. This involvement was not restricted to hydrological determinations. Thomas Murray’s conscientious involvement with settlers, Stuart Murray’s concern for water use savings and compensation water, and Kenyon’s interest in the history and politics of Ballarat’s water confirm historian J. M. Powell’s caution in typecasting early water management as dominated by engineers without the capacity for broader, more social, agendas.52 The capacity of inheritor organisations to similarly integrate broader issues is more questionable. For the farming community that emerged from Bullarook Forest, Moorabool Reservoir is not an ‘asset’ with an agreed volumetric status that can be discussed dispassionately during water allocation forums. The lost water of Moorabool correlates with the catchment community’s perception of itself as wronged. The gritty historical kernel of Ballarat’s dominance of West Moorabool catchment water has been the unquestioned principle that an urban water supply could be sourced primarily from ‘outside’, rather than from within, its municipal and catchment boundaries. A supporting principle has been that the needs of the catchment community have been secondary, with the very persuasive notion of the ‘public interest’ equating with urban demand only. It is these principles which underlie the polarising



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process by which water was transferred from Beales, Wilsons and Moorabool. These principles have persisted as byproducts of an urban–rural power contest to perpetuate a significant hierarchy of regional interests. As contemporary investigations into Moorabool’s water reallocation continue, it is difficult to imagine co-operative resolution without an acknowledgement of past processes. If the principles of past water partitioning are declared and consensus reached as to the validity of them in a new context, subsequent valuing of resource sharing can extend beyond the relative measures of water. Questions concerning the broader economic and social viability of water supply communities have a chance of appearing on a water agenda historically set and dominated by the growth targets of cities being serviced. Although it is the Moorabool reservation process that provides a general historical background for the catchment community invited to participate in water debates, it is through the history of the Lal Lal Reservoir—or Bungal Dam—that the current generation of landholders most vividly interpret catchment policy. Farmers who are now fifty were beginning to shoulder economic responsibility as the idea of a new reservoir was being fulfilled. The next chapter explains this more recent experience that so firmly defines catchment boundaries in both physical and social terms. It explores further what a declaration of historically derived water-sharing principles might mean for the water donor community of West Moorabool.

Notes 1

2

3

4

Green, ‘Utilisation of the Waters of the Moorabool River’; Sinclair Knight Merz, ‘Moorabool River Water Resource Assessment’. PROV, VPRS 242/P, Unit 16, Report by C. Hodgkinson, Assistant Commissioner of Crown Lands and Survey, 13.2.1866. Wright, The Bureaucrats’ Domain: for specific reference to indiscriminate felling in Bullarook Forest see pp. 191–2, for general reference to Victorian forest conservancy debate see pp. 152–80; PROV, VPRS 44/P, Unit 771, ‘Statement respecting the Control of the Forest Reserves’ from Ballarat Mining Board; Victoria Parliament, ‘Victorian Parliamentary Papers, Report on the Advisableness of Establishing State Forests’, 1864–65, for discussion of Marsh see Powell, Environmental Management in Australia 1788–1914, pp. 54–64, see ch. 1 footnotes 52 & 54 for Smyth and Hodgkinson; C. Ligar (1811–1881), controversial career in both NZ and Victorian Lands Department, Surveyor-General 1858–1869. Powell, The Public Lands of Australia Felix, pp. 126–8.

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5 6 7

8

9 10 11 12

13

14

15 16

17

18

19

20

21

PROV, VPRS 242/P, Unit 16, Petition, 20.11.1865. PROV, VPRS 44/P, Unit 40, File 1345. Wright, The Bureaucrats’ Domain, in chs 4 & 5 he characterises Hodgkinson (Assistant Commissioner of Crown Lands 1857–1874) as strong in his definition of public domain (number and range of public reserves) owing to his personal vision and energy, rather than his effectiveness as an administrator. Victoria Parliament, ‘Victorian Parliamentary Papers, Report on the Advisableness of Establishing State Forests’, 1864–65, p. 5. PROV, VPRS 242/P, Unit 16, Hodgkinson Report, 13.2.1866, pp. 5–6. ibid., pp. 7–8. BWC, Minutes 20.8.1866, 17.9.1866. Victoria Parliament, ‘Parliamentary Debates’, 1903, Holden 3.3.1903, pp. 2668–9. BWC, Minutes 4.3.1867; requests for refunds in first few years, see BWC, Minutes 10.12.1866, 24.1.1867, 4.3.1867, 1.4.1867, 16.12.1870, 14.9.1871. ibid., 19.10.1906; for deputations to BWC or Lands Dept. that Brown helped to organise, see 17.5.1872, 23.8.1872, 5.11.1873, 14.11.1873, 14.1.1874, 6.2.1874, 22.1.1875, 21.1.1876, 4.2.1876, 26.5.1876. PROV, VPRS 242/P, Unit 16, Petition, 20.11.1865. BWC, Minutes 24.1.1868, 15.4.1868, 18.4.1868 (inc. Engineer Report No. 6), 25.11.1868 (plans), 7.7.1868, 13.10.1868; PROV, VPRS 3844/P, Unit 8, Report by engineer Thomas Murray to Chief Engineer Stuart Murray, 11.9.1890, details the chronology of reservation in a 24-page appendix; Victoria Parliament, ‘Parliamentary Debates’, 1903, Holden 3.3.1903, pp. 2668–9. These terms were routinely used in BWC meetings and in much of the departmental correspondence up until, and more occasionally after, Holden’s challenge. PROV, VPRS 44P/0, Unit 138: case of J. Grigg who tried to secure land at Devils Creek previously occupied under cutter’s licence, but boundary changes extended process over many years. VPRS 44/P0, Unit 226: case of sawmill (Ormond) proprietor Corcoran who held 40 acres along West Moorabool River (near Springbank) for accommodation of mill workers; when this was reduced to 14 acres because of a new Commission reservation there was much competition for the blocks. VPRS 44/P0, Units 138 and 140: sawmillers exploited the confusion during the land applications to strip areas of timber that infringed on others rights. BWC, Minutes 12.8.1870, 16.12.1870, 24.3.1871, 16.8.1871, 7.5.1872, 23.8.1872, 11.7.1873. ibid., land relinquished, 25.7.1873; Oddie, 1.2.1872, 23.8.1872, 25.7.1873; PROV, VPRS 3844/P, Unit 8, Commission case in T. Murray’s report to S. Murray, 11.9.1890, pp. 10–11. ibid., p. 3: ‘The lands are vested by Act of Parliament in the Commission and are mortgaged to the Board as security towards the repayment of the Commission loan’; BWC, Minutes: Deputations and petitions increased as it became clear that the Commission would not compensate, 14.11.1873, 14.1.1874, 6.2.1874, 22.1.1875, 24.2.1875, 21.1.1876, 4.2.1876, 18.2.1876,



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22

23 24 25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

26.5.1876; advice to lobby Melbourne, 20.2.1874. Richard Richardson (1852–1913), MLA Creswick 1874–1886, 1889–1894; Pres. Board of Land and Works, Commn Crown Lands and Survey 1880–1889, Commissioner into Closed Roads 1878; Houghton, Timber and Gold, p. 12; Victoria Parliament, ‘Parliamentary Debates’, 1903, pp. 2675–7; PROV, VPRS 242/P, Unit 525, File C. 41757; Wright, The Bureaucrats’ Domain, p. 247. PROV, VPRS 3844/P, Unit 8, Chairman to the Lands Dept., 9.10.1885, p. 13. ibid., Bannerman Report, 22.3.1888, p. 14. ibid., Commission letter to Water Supply Department, 6.3.1891; included in T. Murray’s summary report, ‘Western Moorabool and Devil’s Creek’, 5.12.1898. ibid., Commission letter to Dept. of Water Supply, 26.11.1898: ‘deemed absolutely necessary’ in view of drought to utilise Moorabool Reserve; BWC, Minutes 3.11.1898, 23.12.1898; Commission reassurance, 3.12.1898. ibid., 23.12.1898; VPRS 3844/P0, Unit 8, excerpt from Age, 8.12.1898: Minister reported as saying that ‘private interests must yield to those of the general public’ and that the Commission would settle with residents in occupation before reservation and ‘the claims, if any, of those who had occupied the ground subsequent to the reservation’. BWC, Historic Files, Box 2, ‘Anderson’s Award’; Victoria Parliament, ‘Parliamentary Debates’, 1903, p. 2682. BWC, Minutes 12.5.1899, Engineer Mahony’s report on plan; Kiernan, Calwell, p. 15; A. Calwell (1896–1973), Federal Labor Leader 1960–1967; referred to Elizabeth as the ‘matriarch of the tribe’; for information on Calwell’s holding, see BWC, Minutes 24.1.1912, 18.7.1912, 16.7.1914, 7.9.1914; Anderson’s Award; PROV, VPRS 3844/P0, Unit 8, T. Murray’s compensation report, 2.1.1912. BWC, Historic Files, Box 2, ‘Anderson’s Award’. Schedule gave considerable detail on each block. G. F. Holden (1869–1934) MLA Warrenheip 1900–1913; Sir A. Peacock (1861–1933) Premier 1901–1902, 1914–1917; Jarrett, Ballarat and District in 1901, pp. 200–1; quotation, Victoria Parliament, ‘Parliamentary Debates’, 1903, pp. 2678–9. BWC, Minutes 20.12.1901, 11.4.1902, 21.11.1902, 13.3.1903. It was arranged that Chairman Wilson and Holden would work together on the award. After reportedly agreeing on all cases Wilson then politicised Holden’s involvement, see 1902 BWC Annual Report; Victoria Parliament, ‘Parliamentary Debates’, 1903, Holden’s examples included Brown’s licence for the sawmill and Section 42, p. 2672. ibid., p. 2690: ‘It was like a chapter of ancient history to try to discover the number of Ministers of Lands who had dealt with the question at various times’; p. 2678. T. Bent [1838–1909, controversial land speculator, Premier 1904–1909] reference; BWC, Minutes 10.12.1903. BWC, Minutes: report to build large dam at Moorabool, 3.11.1898; special pipeline report by Engineer Mahony, 16.1.1903. PROV, VPRS 3844/P0, Unit 8, BWC report on two possible dam sites for Moorabool, 27.5.1903; Petition to Minister of Water Supply, 23.3.1903.

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35

36

37

38 39

40

41

42

43

44

45 46

47 48 49

50

ibid., Report by S. Murray on ‘Application of the Ballarat Water Commissioners for authority to obtain a supplementary water supply from the western branch of the Moorabool River, and to construct the necessary works’, 25.10.1905, pp. 8–9, ‘The allowance for compensation water to the Moorabool River, below the site of the reservoir, computed on a scale similar to that adopted elsewhere in the State, would be at the rate of 400,000 gallons per day …’; Report by Stuart Murray on BWC’s ‘curtailed and amended scheme’, 27.2.1908: ‘As conservator of the rights and interests of the general public, the government need offer no objection to the carrying out of the scheme; provided the offtake be so designed that no water shall be drawn from the river, unless 400,000 gallons per 24 hours …’ ibid., Mahony report, 27.5.1903; S. Murray, ‘Application of the Ballarat Water Commissioners for authority to obtain a supplementary water supply from the western branch of the Moorabool River, and to construct the necessary works’, 25.10.1905; Murray annotated a Commission report that asserted differences in actual dam capacity would not affect downstream interests with ‘A most absurd comment’; ‘Memorandum by Mr. Kenyon’, 21.2.1905; BWC, Minutes 23.9.1904, 13.3.1905, 23.10.1905. BWC, Minutes 9.11.1905, 17.11.1905; Powell, Watering the Garden State, p. 146. PROV, VPRS 3844/P0, Unit 8, Report by S. Murray, 25.10.1905, p. 5. BWC, Minutes 11.1.1907, 16.10.1908; examples of rental offered, 30.10.1905, 8.1.1909, 5.2.1909, 5.3.1909. Quoted from Gordon Advertiser, 6.6.1902, in Newsletter No. 46, Bungaree and District Historical Society, September 2003. BWC, Minutes 19.10.1906, 5.3.1907, 5.4.1907, 3.5.1907, 25.11.1907, 13.12.1907. BWC, Minutes 18.10.1907, 25.11.1907, 7.2.1908, 6.3.1908, 23.3.1908, 26.6.1908, 6.7.1908, 5.8.1908; Annual Report 1910, Chairman’s Summary. PROV, VPRS 3844/P, Unit 8, Meeting (Holden, for the settlers, Chairman Brawn, Minister for Lands, Graham) transcript ,4.2.1911; BWC, Minutes 14.7.1910, 15.10.1910. BWC, Minutes 11.11.1910, water quality report; PROV, VPRS 3844/P0, Unit 8, Meeting transcript, 4.2.1911, Brawn: ‘The people have settled on Crown Lands on a Water Reserve, and have no authority to be there. They may be called on to leave’. ibid., Meeting transcript, 4.2.1911, n.p. BWC, Minutes 10.12.1909, 15.12.1909; Holden’s personal claim for compensation, for a building at Wallace let to the Commission for pipemaking and destroyed by fire, was rejected; PROV, VPRS 3844/P0, Unit 8, T. Murray ‘Compensation to Settlers’, 2.1.1912. See also Murray’s interim report, 6.9.1911, and Commission’s response, 24.1.1912. ibid., Unit 8, Engineer’s File 1911–1919. BWC, Minutes, as reported by the Chairman, 23.3.1898. ibid., 16.10.1908, 13.8.1914, 5.11.1914, 2.12.1914; letter from SRWSC, 24.2.1915, 13.12.1915. ibid., Middlin’s storm (19.9) report, 7.10.1915.



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51

52

SRWSC 59/64661, held by Southern Rural Water, see precis of file; correspondence with Moorabool River Advisory Committee; Memo for Chairman re compensation flows on East and West, 1.3.1957: ‘Have lost SRWSC file 26/4845 dealing with this subject, has been missing for many years’; Green, ‘Utilisation of the Waters of the Moorabool River’. Powell, Watering the Garden State, pp. 8, 14, 261, 293.

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7


Lal Lal Reservoir was completed in 1972. Water from both West Moorabool River and Lal Lal Creek was gathered in the far south of the catchment, some 25 kilometres from Ballarat. In a promotional brochure, under the heading ‘The Bungal Dam Story’, the naming of the dam which impounded Ballarat and Geelong’s new water supply was explained: The site is about six kilometres south of Mt. Egerton between the homestead area of the original Bungal Run and the Lal Lal Forest Reserve. The name Bungal (pronounced Bun-gawl) is an aboriginal word thought to mean ‘each’ or ‘equal divisions of’. The Reservoir name is taken from the adjoining Parish of Lal Lal. Perhaps it was believed that ‘Bungal’, more likely to be a derivation of Bundjil the spirit of creation, encapsulated the principle of water sharing between Victoria’s two largest towns. For the catchment community, Bungal Dam came to represent its biggest loss of water, with the theme of inequity, not equity, central to its story. It was not only that this body of water was so much larger than Moorabool Reservoir, it was also its strategic position at the plughole


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end of the catchment that was significant. Then, as now, more than 90 per cent of Lal Lal Reservoir’s catchment lands were in private ownership and unforested. In the clean world of hydrology a reservoir ideally requires a large catchment of treed public land capable of delivering sweet water. With Beales and Moorabool we have seen that in the messy world that is our history, reservoirs cannot claim a pure birthright. It is not a bungled compensation process that gives Lal Lal Reservoir such historical grit, but the awkward attempts to control land use in the catchment. Agendas that Engineer Bagge, from the Beales era, would have approved were revived on a grander scale, impacting on farmers well beyond the perimeter of the reservoir. Once again, the conflict that emerged after the river water was dammed concerned much more than the landholders’ loss of water as a physical, quantifiable resource. The absence of prior community protest for this, the largest of Ballarat’s water supply reservoirs, was in itself a comment on the

7.1

Location of Bungal Dam

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seeming benignity of the new dam. No cautions were issued concerning soil nutrient levels or housing densities having to alter. The landholders’ collective experience was of a Water Commission that leased its reservoir land in the north of the catchment to farmers. And they were reassured by Victoria’s Premier—Henry Bolte—being well behind the project. He was considered a ‘local’ who farmed a property at nearby Meredith and provided drought relief funds to improve water supply at Green Springs. Bolte championed rural interests. In the debates of the 1960s around Melbourne’s water supply options, he backed the needs of northern irrigators over city consumers. He was a strong advocate of the State Rivers and Water Supply Commission (SRWSC), and in a productive partnership with its Chairman, Ronald East, built many new water storages designed to bolster productivity in country areas. The duo strengthened their influence with three new regional authorities, including West Moorabool Water Board which became Lal Lal Reservoir’s initial managing authority.1 Landholders might have been more wary of the new dam if they had witnessed the Ballarat and Geelong water authorities argue over how the proposed water resource would be shared. Both authorities displayed an unseemly possessiveness, with Geelong having the upper hand. It was Geelong that initiated site investigations for a new water supply almost two years before the 1967 drought, despite Ballarat’s Chairman suggesting otherwise. Geelong viewed a reservoir on West Moorabool as a supplementary supply that could forestall larger investment in more local sources, whereas Ballarat argued that Bungal represented its only remaining development site. Meetings were dominated by raw declarations of urban interests, unencumbered by consideration of wider catchment ones. It was towards the very end of a third meeting that the Ballarat engineer thought to ask: ‘Have the requirements of diverters been thought out?’2 Ballarat Water Commission was reluctant to share management of the resource with Geelong, preferring SRWSC control if itself denied the opportunity to become the controlling authority. To reduce an escalation of conflict between Ballarat and Geelong, the West Moorabool Water Board (WMWB) was set up as an independent authority, originally with one representative from both provincial cities, two from the SRWSC, and a government-appointed chairperson. The Board managed the parting of reservoir waters, with



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Ballarat apportioned two-thirds and Geelong one-third. In contrast to Moorabool, the Board initiated a compensation process that was efficient and fair. Bound by the Land Compensation Act, it released a ‘Land Acquisitions Statement of Policy and Procedure’. A corrected draft of this statement included an introductory acknowledgement that ‘inconvenience and hardship’ would be experienced by some.3 Affected landholders were informed of the process, and were invited to inspect reservoir works and to attend an opening celebration. This more transparent and co-operative compensation process was not completely without tensions, though, in part because the WMWB made a strategic decision to negotiate with individual landholders as

7.2

Lal Lal water supply catchment, as proclaimed in 1973

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the project progressed, rather than together as a group at the one time. With no union of claimant interests, it was more difficult for them to negotiate. It was not the terms of compensation that was to unite the catchment community, but the incremental land controls that followed the completion of the reservoir. Land acquisition was a costly process, and clearly the extent of freehold land initially transferred to the WMWB was inadequate to ensure catchment protection. As was the case with Beales and Moorabool, more perimeter land was purchased as availability and finances allowed, first by the WMWB and then by the current managers, Central Highlands Water. In the period more immediate to reservoir completion, the WMWB was restricted to exercising land use controls over a narrow margin of land delineated around the reservoir that was, from 1973, subject to a Land Use Notice. Within this margin, forest clearing and land cultivation were prohibited, earthworks for roads, dams or mining were disallowed, and no sewerage systems were to be installed. Also in 1973, the wider catchment area, excluding the northern reserves already controlled by Ballarat Water Commission, was proclaimed as the Lal Lal Reservoir Water Supply Catchment. This proclamation enabled the WMWB, some five years later, to initiate a Land Use Determination with Victoria’s Soil Conservation Authority.4 The application for a land use determination ignited a fireworks response throughout the catchment. Landholders, who only learned of the move through a letter to Bungaree Shire, feared that the WMWB would be authorised to set housing densities, specify farming practices, and demarcate special control areas for streamside protection. The application did not so much initiate antagonism as rekindle a litany of past wrongs that had begun with the expropriation of water at Beales Swamp in 1863. Once again, the supremacy of Ballarat interests over catchment ones was given ideological strength. In the later stages of the Moorabool Reservoir saga, the Water Commission portrayed resident landholders as intransigents that delayed Ballarat’s much needed surplus water supply. From the late 1970s, the catchment farmers were accused of compromising the quality of Ballarat’s newest and largest water supply. In a Courier article entitled ‘Threat to Bungal Water Quality’, Ballarat readers learned that:



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Delays in fixing the land use determination for the Bungal catchment area were endangering the safety of the water supply for 70,000 people, the engineer-in-chief Mr Alan Howard told the Ballarat Water Commission yesterday. He warned that phosphorous concentrations were reaching serious levels. Permanent damage could be caused to the water supply from the Lal Lal Reservoir unless adequate controls were enforced. These were being stopped by people acting on spurious information and a misbelief that good farming practise would not hurt the water supply, he said.5 It was from under the shadow of this land use determination that the Moorabool Landowners Action Group formed in October 1979, with Bungaree Public Hall stretched to capacity for the inaugural meeting. A local councillor suggested that Sir Henry Bolte, now retired from parliament, be approached to accept patronage of the group. He was, but he didn’t. At this meeting of farmers and landowners in the catchment shires of Buninyong, Bungaree and Ballan, it was agreed to: Protect the interests of the community against any unwarranted outside influences or control. Organise all forms of resistance to unwarranted or unreasonable Government intrusions into individual or collective basis rights, normally attaching to freehold rights.6 The language of the landholders’ first resolutions expressed insularity and anger that their livelihood was subject to controls imposed from outside the realm of their democratically elected local government. They then challenged state government agencies to provide a firm scientific basis for linking farmers’ use of fertilisers and pesticides to water quality readings at Lal Lal Reservoir. And, with well-informed sting, they wanted assurance that ‘herbicide/insecticide and afforestation practices of Water Authorities on land and water storages and reticulation under their control’ would not be attributed to farmer pollution.7

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The Moorabool Landowners Action Group (MLAG) was well organised. It elected an executive group to lobby for political support, engage with the media, draft a constitution, prepare for further public meetings and arrange speakers. It created a logo to represent its idea of a balanced approach to waterways, with a farmer, legs astride, and sheep on one river bank across from a fenced tree on the opposite bank.8 No membership records have been kept, but one newspaper report referred to 300 members. Unlike the Beales and Moorabool process, Ballarat water interests now confronted an established farming community that became unified by its West Moorabool catchment boundary after Bungal Dam was built. And its potential for representation by three local governments afforded greater political strength.

7.3

Logo of Moorabool Landowners Action Group

It was the highly organised response by MLAG that prompted a suite of land bureaucrats to meet and consider a nutrient investigation to quantitatively link farming operations with Lal Lal Reservoir water quality. Although there was agreement that such an investigation was both complex and necessary, funding was not guaranteed until 1980 when the Minister for Conservation gave an assurance that no land use determination would be issued until scientific research had been undertaken, and until local government town planning schemes had been reviewed.9 This political reprieve was an



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indication of the level of protest mustered by both MLAG and local government. A steering group composed of the Rural Water Corporation (SRWSC), the Department of Agriculture, the Soil Conservation Authority and the WMWB supervised the nutrient research program. Soil and water were sampled for a few years, but by the mid-1980s departmental support for the investigative project weakened and, to the surprise of the WMWB, equipment was dismantled. Before further funds were committed, it was insisted that a report of existing work be collated. This report, not presented until 1989, was sharply criticised by the WMWB for poorly researched findings that emphasised the high absorbency of the cropping soil and the limited movement of phosphorus. Landholders believed that the study was halted because the results were not to the WMWB’s liking.10 It was during this period, when the science of nutrient contamination was proving inconclusive, that the prime issue for debate shifted from agricultural land use to residential densities in the catchment. As the option of a state-imposed land use determination waned, the local government planning schemes soared in importance as a conduit for catchment management by the water authorities. For landholders, the idea of ‘outside’ interference with planning schemes approved by democratically elected representatives pierced the integrity of their local polity and their rights to self-determination. It accentuated the dichotomy between elected local councils and politically appointed Water Boards devoid of community representation. The WMWB had begun as a five-member Board but was reduced to three members once reservoir works were completed in 1975. The three members consisted of the two chairmen from the Geelong and Ballarat water authorities and a government appointee. The WMWB was considered particularly unaccountable to the catchment over which it sought increasing controls. Although it was recognised by catchment farmers as a separate organisation from Ballarat’s Water Commission, it was considered synonymous with Ballarat water supply interests. This was reinforced from 1976, when Ballarat Water Commission staff assumed responsibility for the running of the WMWB.11 The term ‘Water Board’ will be used to signify overlapping interests and joint actions. Robert Ford was the engineer-in-chief for Ballarat Water Commission in these turbulent times and, as such, embarked on a

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water quality campaign for the WMWB. He was at the regulatory interface of municipal planning decisions and over the next quartercentury was to employ the Board’s increasing powers rigorously to object to residential development within the catchment, including the unsewered towns. ‘Filth in our water’ was a Courier heading that summarised Ford’s inspection of a domestic sewerage disposal unit in Lal Lal catchment.12 Ford appreciated the subdivisional potential of the area with its many small acreage titles. Even though much amalgamation of these goldfield blocks had occurred, the potential for them to be disaggregated was there. He estimated that there were in excess of 3000 individual Crown allotments in the catchment, enabling a potential population of 10 000 without subdivision. With ‘increasing pressures for rural residential and hobby farm type allotments’, small allotments and subdivisions represented a threat to the region’s agricultural farmland and to Ballarat’s water supply.13 For the landholders, however, the threat was reduced opportunity to house family that farmed co-operatively, combined with fewer community facilities, such as aged care homes, in the catchment towns. They feared a slow strangulation of family farming life. In 1987 MLAG again roared into action when Buninyong Shire released its Interim Development Order, allegedly composed ‘under pressure from a number of state government agencies’.14 Of most concern were the Special Stream Protection Areas where no housing, animal grazing or agriculture, except by permit, was to be allowed. In less sensitive zones there were proposals to limit subdivision and introduce a tenement clause to curb housing on small allotments. MLAG pursued a consultative path with the Buninyong Shire in progressing the Interim Development Order to Planning Scheme. In what became a two-year process, some land use concessions were made to the landholders. Special Control Areas were replaced by 100metre buffer zones that excluded housing along designated streams, and density zoning replaced the tenement clause.15 As well as moderating particular land use controls, MLAG lobbied for a co-operative style of catchment management through provision in the Planning Scheme for a Catchment Monitoring Committee. It was resolved by agreement between the WMWB, MLAG and Buninyong Shire that a committee be formed of two representatives per group to monitor water quality and to initiate



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catchment works, such as tree planting and whole farm planning. Landholders wanted the issue of water quality to be approached using positive land initiatives to offset the more negative approach of land use controls. It was envisaged that the group would initiate research when required and generally advise council on planning matters.16 This model of a representative advisory group had been tried before, but, as with the proposed Monitoring Committee, it never acquired serious attention. Rather, the Water Board pursued other means to affect local planning policy. In 1989, only one year following the finalisation of the Buninyong Planning Scheme, the Water Board both contracted its own stream condition investigation and co-authored a new Ballarat regional strategy that undermined Shire of Buninyong planning controls. Clearly the Planning Schemes adopted by the three catchment councils had not resolved issues to the satisfaction of the Water Board. Consultants were employed by the Board to conduct a scientific assessment aimed, as expressed in a letter to landholders, to ‘examine the conditions of several streams in the region and provide details of the river management works considered necessary by the community to resolve any identified problems’.17 The Water Board was represented on a relatively new Ballarat Regional Board for Planning and Development which distributed its Strategy Plan for comment not long after the revised Buninyong Planning Scheme had been approved. There was some uncertainty as to whether the Ballarat Regional Board would move from its advisory role to being a planning authority, similar to the Upper Yarra and Dandenong Authority. Talk of council amalgamations augmented the uncertainty and there was suspicion that the Water Board was bypassing the authority of local government by acting through the Ballarat Regional Board. One Buninyong councillor accused the WMWB of manipulating the Regional Board to object to some permits, claiming that ‘The West Moorabool Water Board is getting the regional board to take over the powers they are denied’.18 MLAG responded to the Regional Board’s Strategy with a wellprepared submission, as did a number of individual farmers. Many of the planning issues seemingly resolved through local government negotiation were again open for debate. There was an increasing irritation with ‘overlapping and constant pressures to regulate

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the catchment’. The continual push to have the Water Boards as referral authorities was considered an undemocratic move by a single interest statutory authority that could ‘badly distort any planning development in the area’. Contributors objected to the catchment areas being viewed ‘in terms of harvesting water only’.19 It was in these community submissions to the Strategy that a succinct declaration of catchment interests was made. Mr Murphy from near Dunnstown wrote a seven-page submission.20 He was in a working partnership with two brothers and was assisted by six sons. Under the Buninyong Planning Scheme he was allowed to build on existing allotments within the farm boundary, with subdivision limited to provide for one working son. Murphy opposed the Ballarat Strategy because it resurrected the tenement clause aimed to restrict housing developments on existing allotments. Murphy explained how over time the partnership had deliberately purchased some of the more expensive 10- to 20-acre allotments so that the extended family could continue to give support to the intensive cropping operations, and to each other. He questioned the definition and application of tenement when parts of the farm were physically separated. He complained that the partnership would be forced to purchase township allotments at inflated prices at a time when farmland would be devalued by land use controls. He asked, ‘… where are our youth supposed to live?’ He contended that the catchment management principles of vegetation retention, setback requirements, stock exclusion from streams, and revegetation of riparian strips would in some areas be ‘verging on the absurd’. He calculated that the suggested 40-metre waterway verges would take out 30 per cent of his 700-acre farm. After noting that there was no reference to compensation, he asserted that ‘If these matters were to be part of concerns and debate prior to the Bungal Dam being built, it would be very doubtful if such a storage would ever have been sited there’. John Parkin of Bungaree, a farmer and longtime councillor, wrote in a similar vein.21 He was particularly concerned about the catchment towns: ‘The plan seems hell-bent on hamstringing township zones in the Bungal catchment such as Wallace, Bungaree and Dunnstown. These are long established townships operating for close to a century before the Bungal Dam was constructed’. He correctly



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predicted that infrastructure such as churches, schools, shops and recreational facilities would not survive if curtailed by tenement controls and larger allotments. As a councillor he had worked to establish well-serviced towns. In MLAG’s submission, it was contended that the Board’s plan would ‘kill off these townships’ and, not for the first time, the question of sewering catchment towns was raised. A Catchment Towns Preservation Committee was formed when Bungaree school closed, and it tried to keep sewerage schemes on the planning agenda. Landholders wanted to remain on family farms supported by local towns. Although the Water Board’s right to the water was not questioned, its ability to take water at further cost to those living in the catchment was challenged. There was increasing resentment that Lal Lal Reservoir had been constructed without adequate consultation. Although at the time the issue of compensation was addressed for those directly affected by the dam, the need for wider catchment compensation was never recognised in the successive moves to modify land use. There was a sense of delayed outage, as expressed in the following landholder’s letter to the local paper. Of the Bungal Dam he wrote that: this bungle was built at the foot of some of the best agricultural land in Victoria, also the streams have been brackish for the past fifty years to my knowledge. It is also notable that the majority of land that has been sold for development is not the best agricultural land in the area. What right has any board got to say, ‘stiff luck, you have bought land in our catchment area – now you can’t build on it as it may pollute our dam.’22 The proposed land use determination, Buninyong Shire’s interim development order and the Ballarat Regional Board’s strategy plan were clear targets for the landholders to collectively shoot down. By contrast, it was, and continues to be, much more difficult to defend their interests at the Planning Appeals Board (now the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal). From the late 1980s, local government, the Water Boards, and individual landholders contested permit applications for housing and subdivision, and later for farm dam

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construction, at this Tribunal. It was accessed regularly because local government and the Water Board could not agree on a process to accommodate each other’s interests in planning decisions. With the support of MLAG, the three catchment councils rejected moves, first made in 1988, to accept the Water Board as a referral authority.23 There was not sufficient trust for the Water Board to accept just an advisory role within council planning forums, or for councils to formalise a process to involve the Water Board. The Tribunal process has encouraged an adversarial approach to catchment management for all parties, with case-by-case conflict both highlighting the need for more generalised planning principles, and diverting attention away from more co-operative resolution. Between 1987 and 1993 there were forty-five housing permit cases from West Moorabool catchment brought to appeal before the Tribunal.24 Of these appeals, the Water Board was successful in about two-thirds of cases, which meant that planning permits were refused or, in lesser cases, modified with more stringent conditions appended. There were enough ‘wins’ on both sides to encourage both Water Board and local government. Indeed, this inconsistency in permit appraisal outcomes exacerbated the land use conflict. One of the first applications for a building permit that went to appeal concerned a Wallace township block. The Water Board was supported in its concerns for the waste disposal of the proposed dwelling adjacent to the West Moorabool River. As part of its finding, however, the Appeals Tribunal raised the wider issue of community growth: If, on the other hand, Wallace is to be encouraged to grow, as I believe it should to provide a community focus, the question of treatment must be addressed, either by diverting the drainage line referred to above, or treating its flow by ponding, etc., or by sewering the town—probably the best solution.25 This solution, flagged by an independent planning voice, was never openly discussed by the Water Boards or the various Ballarat regional authorities. In this same period the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works was faced with the unusual, for them, task of



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collecting water from the farmed, not forested, Upper Yarra catchment. To minimise the amount of reservoir treatment required, the Board sewered the valley.26 It was a landmark case concerning building permits for allotments at the base of Black Hill that prompted the 1991 Ministerial Amendment to the Planning and Environment Act.27 This amendment gave water supply authorities across Victoria the role of referral in proclaimed catchments. In 1988, the year before the Black Hill case was heard, the Water Board appeared across the table from local government and landholders at eight separate hearings. Ballan Council, which held responsibility for the portion of Black Hill in question, was under ministerial pressure to introduce a 40-hectare subdivision minimum. Both landholder and Council had been successfully appealed against for similar housing applications on four previous occasions. Antagonism festered and duplicity resulted. It emerged that the landholder lodged his application for housing permits very late on Friday afternoon, and they were approved at the Council meeting first thing on Monday. The Water Board was not aware of the permit for many months when its approval was requested, but not legally required, for sealing. Judge Jones’ determination for these housing permits near the headwaters of Woolen Creek covered seventy-odd pages, with the hearing extended over five days in late 1989. His finding was littered with references to former district cases brought before the Tribunal. His opening remarks reflected a weariness of an all-too-familiar conflict: These proceedings appear to be another round in the ongoing battle that has been waged for some time between the West Moorabool Water Board, Municipal Shires which have part of their Shires within the water catchment that is the responsibility of the Water Board and owners of land located within the catchment.28 Jones was highly critical of Ballan Council’s suggestion that the WMWB was going too far in its protection of the water supply by interfering unreasonably with the planning process and the rights of landowners. According to Jones, it failed to give notice to the WMWB

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when in full knowledge that housing might cause ‘material detriment’ to the interests of the Board. Jones noted WMWB evidence that housing had doubled within the catchment between 1975 and 1988, and that ‘the level of bacterial pollution appears to have increased’.29 The Water Board’s new status as referral authority has not dramatically changed relations with the catchment community and its local government, now Moorabool Shire Council. It is clearly the Board, now Central Highlands Water (CHW), that is seen to object to planning permits, even though they have been granted by authority of the Shire. In a recent case to enlarge the capacity of some dams to irrigate an olive tree plantation, the Shire representative declared that Council would have considered the application ‘favourably’ if the CHW had not objected.30 Indeed, it was the local councillor who represented the applicant at the hearing. The CHW’s case rested on expert scientific evidence of the degraded and stressed state of the wider catchment, to which an enlarged dam would contribute. Councils have lost more cases than they have won at the Tribunal because of a refusal to acknowledge the ‘cumulative’ picture. For housing permits, judgment was affected not so much by the merits of individual applications, but by the potential of such applications to have a cumulative effect on catchment values. One line of defence for the olive grower was that his nine megalitres represented only 0.015 per cent of the Lal Lal Reservoir and only 0.4 per cent of the water authorities’ allocation. When placed in the context of an overcommitted catchment, as represented by a professional hydrologist, the olive grower’s statistics are unlikely to convince an independent arbiter.31 Operating outside the wider network of catchment management has disadvantaged the resident community and its local government. Catchment interests, unlike reservoir health, have not been effectively presented in these planning appeal forums underscored by shifting scientific goalposts and excluding of historical perspective. The number of West Moorabool cases before the Tribunal has declined gradually. This has been attributed to the Water Board’s increased victories more than its change in status to referral authority. Even though the Tribunal process restrained MLAG opposition, the group continued to respond to various policy statements by local government and regional resource agencies. In part of a 1995 submission to Moorabool Shire’s Planning Scheme the prospect of the three



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main catchment towns being sewered was described as a ‘classical Catch-22: these towns cannot have development as there is no sewerage and, without sewerage, they cannot develop and are stagnating and dying’.32 There was a plea to consider ‘the fabric that makes up the catchment, the farmers, the townspeople, the sporting and service clubs, the church communities, the schools, the family ties, the relationship people have with the land, the people themselves’. By 1998 the language of protest developed almost spiritual overtones: Our area is blessed with good soil and reliable rainfall. The greatest misfortune to befall on us was the construction of the Lal Lal Reservoir, which was completed in the early 1970s. The West Moorabool Water Board, and its successor, the Central Highlands Water Board, have used planning controls as their only tool in catchment management. We believe they have acted irresponsibly and the West Moorabool Water Board, particularly, abused the planning processes. They have alienated the farmers and landholders in the catchment.33 Clearly many factors have converged in the thirty years since Bungal Dam was built that have challenged West Moorabool’s farming community. As with other farming sectors, international market changes have reduced more local control, and imposed different standards of economic viability. For West Moorabool agriculturists in particular, these challenges coincided with the unexpected fall-out from Bungal Dam. At the very time when farmers required more water for production, and strong family support for the farming operation, they were confronted by changeable land use restrictions, and an emerging politics of water allocation. It was during the 1980s that the farming community experienced a tightening of the water resource for irrigation. The extent of authorised irrigation land, which had not been reviewed since the Bungal Dam was built, was considered restrictive as cropping operations expanded. Under challenge, the SRWSC clarified that the water embargo did not extend to offstream dams or to groundwater.34 Consequently the number of registered bores increased more sharply from 1980, and again with the 1983 drought. Existing offstream dams

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were enlarged and new bore-fed dams constructed. Heated debates around the 1989 Water Act and the emergence of a new regional catchment authority with its ‘South-Western Region Management Strategy’ added to landholder belief that the catchment was under siege. It was at the end of this decade of immense insecurity for the catchment community that the Bulk Entitlement process was begun for Moorabool. This statewide process was designed to lock in water allocations ‘by creating rights at source’ for the large users, primarily water supply authorities.35 Farmers represented by MLAG wanted their existing water rights and occasional licences converted to the very secure entitlement that privileged Central Highlands Water. They wanted an entitlement that reflected their increased irrigation capacity from when most licences were first issued, some thirty and forty years previously. And they did not believe that the dimensions of the water wheel were suitably determined before the biggest cut was allocated to Ballarat. The farmers’ concern that the introduction of Bulk Entitlements ‘may see a situation where they will have to compete with urban water consumers for the water in the future’ has been realised in the dry conditions since 1998.36 After the CHW’s entitlement was locked into the new allocation system, it was proposed that a complementary process identify and manage licensed private diversions. A Streamflow Management Committee was established for what was envisaged as a six- to eightmonth process. Six months became five years. In that time, escalating pressure for environmental flows intensified negotiations. The Committee was disbanded while a Moorabool Basin investigation aimed to produce options to elasticise an overcommitted resource. More recently a state water plan for Victoria’s central region has proposed options for manipulating the water resource across a number of river basins.37 Its language is in megalitres, unmediated by past experience of water allocation. There has been no sharing of the real costs of Bungal Dam, only a sharing of catchment water primarily between Ballarat and Geelong. An understanding of West Moorabool experience, of how the community perceived its disadvantage as the Water Board’s influence extended out from the reservoirs to include the entire catchment, would introduce a softer social vocabulary that acknowledges and



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defines a critical role for the post–Bungal Dam catchment community as a provider of quality water. The social costs of this role, which for the moment concern the viability of family farming and the growth of catchment towns, could then be evaluated and addressed with solutions not necessarily tied to more water. Hydrology as the dominant scientific discipline informing and framing reallocation policy is not equipped to work from the more extended range of water-sharing principles which invite real politics to intrude. It is no wonder that consultants unfairly become entangled in crossfire between exasperated landowners and catchment authorities alike. To return to the water wheel image alluded to in the previous chapter, options for reallocation can emerge from both a scientific assessment of the wheel’s current dimensions and workings, and a historical understanding of how its current proportions came to be. And whereas water supply catchment communities do not question the need for hydrology, consultant and agency professionals do not accept the history of water partitioning as relevant. There is a further social dimension to the creation of Lal Lal Reservoir that has barely surfaced at all. It concerns the reservoir and its immediate surroundings as a place for people to know. Sharing the actual reservoir reserve with the local community was, after a brief and tentative trial, denied. There was no talk, and none was demanded, of compensating the community for loss of Crown water frontage and, perhaps more importantly, for loss to almost a third of the adjoining recreation reserve of Lal Lal Falls. The quiet that surrounds this facet of water management is symptomatic of the lost connections between this largely rural community and its waterscape. In previous chapters the extent of this loss has been illustrated by local springs now largely unrecognised, by Crown frontage not even guessed at, and by former reservoir reserves much diminished. But it is Lal Lal waters which carry this associated story best of all.

Notes 1

2

Dingle and Rasmussen, Vital Connections, pp. 258–85, 265–7; Powell, Watering the Garden State, see fig. 61, p. 252. Three regional authorities: LaTrobe Valley Water and Sewerage Board (1951, 1954), Dandenong Valley Authority (1963), West Moorabool Water Board (1968). Conroy, Thomas Mayo Papers, LaTrobe SLV MS 9595, meeting notes 21.2.1968 (quote), 14.3.1969, 29.5.1969.

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3

4

5 6

7 8

9

10

11

12 13

14

15 16

Conroy was first chairperson of WMWB, chemical engineer, formerly a manager of the Alkali Division of ICI, friendship with Bolte evident from family references in correspondence; Agreement reached largely in meeting of 21.2.1968, later endorsed in West Moorabool Water Board Bill, with a review period set at 1975; First draft of ‘Land Acquisitions Statement of Policy and Procedure’, 9.1.1969; Policy issued, 20.1.1969, p. 1 for collective strategy; example of consequent weaker claim in compensation case of water right with Baxter, report 4.6.1970, minutes 12.6.1970; celebration of opening, Courier, 4.7.1970, p. 3. NRE, File 2009030 Plan: ‘Lal Lal Reservoir and Marginal Lands’. Victoria Parliament, Government Gazette, No. 110 ‘Notice in respect of changes in land use in a specified part of the Lal Lal Reservoir water supply catchment’, 14.11.1973; No. 49 ‘Proclamation of Lal Lal Reservoir Water Supply Catchment’, 13.6.1973; King, ‘A Report on the Ballarat Water Supply Catchments’. For portion excluded see fig. 1, p. iv. SCA officer King recommended that the anomoly of Ballarat Water Commission retaining separate control of the northern reserves be reversed. Bungaree Shire lobbied for inclusion so that planning consistency was ensured. Courier, 17.10.1980, pp. 1–2. MLAG, Minutes of formation meeting, including motions, 3.10.1979. Comprehensive records (meeting minutes, flyers, correspondence, working notes, reports, newspaper clippings) of this group are held by Tom Sullivan, Millbrook. ibid., Motion 3, meeting 3.10.1979. Believed that the first President of this group, N. Ferguson, organised the logo. DSE file 89-0174, ‘Lal Lal (Reservoir) Investigations’. Meeting minutes, 11.3.1977, 14.12.1978, 9.12.1979; Correspondence, 31.7.1978, 15.11.1979; ministerial comment, 23.7.1980. ibid., WMWB to Dept., 1.12.1986; Land Protection Divison to WMWB, 30.12.1986; Dept to WMWB, 8.1.1987; Rees and Slater, ‘The Impact of Land Uses on Water Quality near Ballarat’; DSE file 89-0174, Lal Lal Landholder committee meeting, 20.11.1986. Summary of institutional arrangements, Ballarat Water Commissioners, ‘Final Report’, 1983, p. 42; attitude to structure, Courier, letter 22.11.1988, p. 8; MLAG, Cr. C. Harbour’s submission to Shire, February 1992; personal communication T. Sullivan, J. Parkin. Courier, 28.5.1987, p. 3. DSE file 89-0174, Ford to Ballarat Region Land Protection Committee, 1.4.1987, quotation from point 4. MLAG, flyer for public meeting, 15.5.1987; Courier, 17.10.1980, pp. 1–2. After threat of a land use determination MLAG meetings finished in 1982. A new Committee was formed at a public meeting 4.3.1987 to reactivate MLAG in response to the proposed Planning Schemes. MLAG, meeting minutes, 15.5.1987; press release, 18.5.1987. ibid., Memo of IDO resolution between MLAG, Buninyong Shire and WMWB, 30.6.1986; Shire to MLAG, 5.4.1989; First meeting, 18.4.1989;



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17

18

19 20 21 22

23

24

25 26 27

28 29 30 31

32 33 34

President’s Report, March 1982 (initial proposal for co-operative advisory group). Ballarat Regional Board for Planning and Development, ‘Ballarat Region Strategy Plan’; Craigie & Associates, ‘River Management Study’; quote, Biosis Research to MLAG, 1.8.1989. MLAG, letter, 7.7.1989, Ballarat Regional Board to three Shire Councils, gives assurance that its role is advisory only, not a planning authority like Dandenong. The Regional Board had more planning authority than the superseded Ballarat Area Planning Committee originally established to standardise planning in city portions of the ‘outer’ Shires, such as Bungaree, that controlled land in east Ballarat; Courier, report of Buninyong Shire meeting, quotes Cr. Harbour, 7.6.1991, p. 5. MLAG, MLAG’s submission to Board, 22.11.1989. ibid., Murphy’s submission to Board, 28.7.1989. ibid., Parkin’s submission to Board, n.d. Courier, letter, 28.7.1989 (Wiseman), p. 8, in response to letter (Knights), 8.7.1989, p. 8. MLAG, Water Board to Councils, 4.10.1988. Buninyong Shire response as expressed by Cr. Harbour, Feb. 1992: ‘My council is vehemently opposed to allowing non-elected, non-representative, single-interest bodies to control and direct the deliberations of the Council. The WMWB consists of a representative of the Ballarat Water Board, a representative of the Geelong Water Board, and a government appointee currently based in Melbourne, none of whom are accountable to landholders in the Lal Lal Catchment’. Bungaree and Ballan Councils were considered more hostile to the move, see VCAT [Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal] P89/1465, p. 26. Judge Jones gives a comprehensive account of an agreement between Councils and the Ballarat Area Planning Committee, and the provisions of the Local Government Act in this period. VCAT, 1993/28391, 36367 WMWB submission, p. 9, Appendix 11; Allan, ‘Towards Land Use Planning Conflict Resolution through Spatially Consistent Participatory Scenario Modelling’, p. 109. VCAT, P87/0087. Dingle and Rasmussen, Vital Connections, p. 284. VCAT, P89/1465. Considerable background information in this large report. Actually two landholders involved in previous application, but one involved multiple permits and received more attention. VCAT, P89/1465, Introduction. ibid., pp. 56, 37. VCAT, P51397/2001, Summary. Sinclair Knight Merz, ‘Assessment of the Hydrological and Ecological Impacts of Current Farm Dam Development’. ‘Cumulative’ the strongest theme in most CHW submissions to VCAT. MLAG, MLAG submission, Buninyong Planning Scheme, March 1995. ibid., 22.9.1998. PROV, VPRS 9484/SR1, 81/35215, ‘Moorabool (Lal Lal) Catchment River Advisory Committee’, report, 17.12.1981.

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35

36

37

MLAG, Water Act 1989 preceded by public meetings, lobbying of parliamentarians, letters. As farmers wanted to be distinguished from those supported more by government-subsidised irrigation systems. Public consultation for South-Western Region Management Strategy at same time as Ballarat Region Strategy Plan, considered over-regulation of the catchment from the ‘outside’; PROV, VPRS 9484/SR1, 92/12141, ‘Bulk Entitlements: Moorabool Basin Forum’, quote from notes for first meeting, 4.12.1992; 92/12345, ‘Moorabool River Bulk Water Entitlements’. PROV, VPRS 9484/SR1, 92/12345, MLAG to Forum (quote), 25.10.1993. Irrigation licences were first granted in the late 1950s. Although the number of irrigators did not alter significantly in the following twenty years, the extent of irrigated land roughly doubled (59/64661, Register of Authorised Diversions 1962; 81/35215, 1984 table of diversions). MLAG, Southern Rural Water to MLAG, 9.9.1994; In discussion with P. Toohey & G. Jamieson, two members of the Streamflow Committee. The water resources study was a National Action Plan project contracted to Sinclair Knight Merz; The State of Victoria, Department of Sustainability and Environment, ‘Securing Our Water Future Together, White Paper’; Draft, ‘Sustainable Water Strategy, Central Region’, 2006.



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8


By ‘Lal Lal’ I refer to more than the town that sits on the Ballarat to Geelong railway line. I include the forested country that encircles Lal Lal Reservoir and spreads out from West Moorabool River, Lal Lal Creek, Duggans Creek, Woolen Creek and Black Creek. This forest cuts across freehold and various Crown reserve boundaries but shares the same mix of eucalypts, scrubby undergrowth and yellow clay of Silurian origin. At the edge of this forest are intrusions of marginal farming land that were part of post-gold selections. More recently, treed allotments adjoining the township of Lal Lal have become home to those seeking a rural lifestyle. Lal Lal district contrasts with the very green and ordered cropping country at the top of the catchment and with the lightly treed undulations of the pastoral land to its immediate north. The gap between the Wathawurrung landscape and the European one feels closer here. There are waterfalls, steep ravines, rocky outcrops and sandy ridges circled around lake beds long gone. And there are teatrees, melaleucas, wattles, water ribbons and river mussels. But there are very few people walking or swimming or fossicking or fishing. The Lal Lal waterscape has retained environmental and landscape values that distinguish it from Ballarat, from Buninyong, and from the catchment towns with their hinterland of farmscapes. You would imagine


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that the forested waterways would be inundated, by Australian standards, with regional and local visitors. The absence of people is easiest to understand for that part of the Lal Lal waterscape around or on reservoir waters. In the West Moorabool Water Board’s (WMWB) promotional brochure for Bungal Dam it was explained that: Since water from the Lal Lal Reservoir is used for household supplies, it has been necessary to fence the boundaries of the Reservoir reserve to restrict public access. Bathing and boating in the Reservoir are not permitted. Fishing is allowed only for single-day outings organised by angling clubs in the vicinity of Ballarat and Geelong. This activity is permitted under strictly controlled conditions and requires prior approval of the Board on each occasion. More general fishing activities were permitted for one season just after the reservoir was completed, but these proved unsatisfactory.1 When the reservoir plans were first known, Ballarat anglers were excited by their potential. Shortly after completion of the dam a longtime fisherman of Moorabool waters wrote a submission to the WMWB, outlining proposed access and facilities for those wanting to fish the new waters. Stiles, designated parking, and rubbish bins were included. The Board agreed to a trial period, but with no infrastructure provided. With minimal encouragement to visitors, the reservoir was prone to forced entry and vandalism. In one incident the fence was cut and cars entered the reserve, leaving a trail of litter and disturbed ground. This was the ‘unsatisfactory’ fishing activity referred to in the brochure, and less than twelve months after opening, the reservoir became virtually closed to anglers. Restricted access was introduced, a number of trout releases were organised and, on occasions, Board members utilised the reservoir boat and joined angler club members for a fish. The Ballarat Anglers Club has now lost interest because such restricted access does not encourage releases or adequate catch rates.2 It is not just the reservoir that is off limits. Exclusion extends to those finger portions of reservoir reserve, before the river and creek gullies disappear under deep water, where the landscape is full of



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drama and natural interest. There is the granite-bouldered Lal Lal Creek as it tumbles into the reservoir, best seen from a weathered cart-track that runs along the gully. There is the wonderful Moorabool Falls, with its sixty-foot drop and basin pool, now choked with unseen weeds. And where Woolen and Black Creek enter you can still experience the remnant landscape of swampy river flats, once with names such as Cahir, Lofts and Diamonds. There are Tynes’ pines, which signpost Paddy Tyne’s abandoned farm on what is now a promontory of the reservoir. And there are farm buildings, some crafted from granite stone, and now stranded from a once strategic position along the river. There is the shaded Baker’s Track that connected Mt Egerton to Lal Lal, crossing at what was once a highly contested water reserve near Tynes.3 All this waterscape is hidden and quite lost to collective memory, ready to surprise the few that venture beyond the numerous ‘No Trespass’ signs.

8.1a

One of the few fishing expeditions in the reservoir’s first year

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8.1b Trout release near dam wall

8.1c WMWB signage prohibiting access to what was ‘Loft’s (or to some, Cahir’s) Flat’



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8.1d WMWB signage prohibiting access to what was ‘Diamond’s Flat’

8.1e

Lal Lal Creek meets Lal Lal Reservoir, just downstream of Lal Lal Falls

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8.1f

Known as ‘Loft’s, after the family which built and lived in the house, now unseen behind reservoir fence

Land absorbed by the new reservoir included a significant section of Crown water frontage through Lal Lal Forest, and also three generous streamside reserves. These reserves were not officially transferred at the time. The political confidence of the partners in the dam project was such that it was almost thirty years after dam construction before the status of two of these half-submerged water reserves became an issue, but not a public one. On one reserve the WMWB had built the caretaker’s residence, and on the other it was proposed to build a water filtration plant. It was only the legal requirements for a sub-lease arrangement between the reservoir managers and Thames Water, the contractor for a water treatment project, which alerted the Lands Department to the ‘lost’ reserves. The dry land remnants of



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these reserves, about eleven hectares, were purchased in 2000 by the new managers, Central Highlands Water (Ballarat Water Commission).4 As with other rediscovered Crown water frontage there was no meaningful evaluation regarding this lost streamside in a catchment severely deprived of the resource. Discussed only between the covers of bureaucratic files moving between Melbourne and Ballarat, there was no possibility of a community trade-off being contemplated and none was requested. In the bureaucratic shuffle it was revealed that other Victorian water authorities similarly occupied portions of land under no formal approval. The reservoir and its reserve have not been imagined as a local community resource, as a place, albeit hugely reconfigured, that people can again experience. Prohibition and estrangement have spread to the adjoining Lal Lal Falls Reserve, the only streamside in the entire catchment valued formally for its recreational and scenic qualities. It will be remembered from Chapter 4 that the Lal Lal waterfalls were rescued from a pastoral land sale in part because of their widely acclaimed natural beauty. The most prominent waterfall— Lal Lal Falls—is situated on Lal Lal Creek, with two nearby on the West Moorabool River. For 100 years following rescue and reservation, these special waters were for the most part nurtured by vigilant local and regional communities. And although the reservoir undermined these connections it does not entirely explain the current rift between people and place at Lal Lal. To appreciate and understand the diminution of the Lal Lal waterscape we need to capture moments when this craggy waterfall country expanded into the mindset of communities both far and close. Colonial observers were excited by the river spectacle which reinforced the revered niche for waterfalls in landscape appreciation and cultural memory. The beauty of the Lal Lal and the Moorabool Falls was written about in the journals of pastoralists and the reports of travelling colonial bureaucrats, and, unusually, elicited a ‘most picturesque’ from Webster in his 1856 survey. The Falls were painted, drawn and photographed by well-known colonial artists: Eugene von Guérard, S. T. Gill, Richard Daintree, Francois Cogne, Frederick Grosse, Archibald Smith, Fred Kruger, and William Bardwell, and by lesserknown Ballarat artists. Indeed, by 1904, a Melbourne Age reporter mocked the attention the Falls was receiving from district artists:

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So far the local painter—and he is to be met with in almost every street—has contented himself with painting the Lal Lal Falls, a scene which by this time must have used up some miles of canvas and some barrels of colour.5 The Falls reached Melbourne, with multiple appearances in published pictorial albums of Victoria designed primarily for urban and overseas markets. The two larger waterfalls were often paired in the one photograph, with Lal Lal Falls boasting a dramatic 50-foot advantage over the Moorabool Falls ‘drop’ of 60 feet. Lal Lal evoked the spectacular, Moorabool the secluded.

8.2

Lal Lal Falls, F. Kruger (most likely the floodwaters of 1870)

Settling the Falls into the Public Domain The Falls not only featured on the canvas of colonial artists, it also entered the public domain with a splash. Following outcry at the prospect of these waterfalls being hidden behind private fences, an extremely generous 1200 acres around the waterfalls on West Moorabool and Lal Lal Creek were reserved for ‘Public Purposes’ in 1860. This rather vague category of reservation was employed as a planning safety valve, especially around the goldfields, where the expectation of multiple land use heightened its value.6 Changes in



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the dimension and management of this reserve saw the waterfalls move in and out of focus. To begin with, the trustees resolved that the entire reserve would be available for recreation and introduced regulations for the sale of all dead wood and ‘unsightly live trees’, with proceeds to be used for plantings of ‘non-indigenous trees of good kinds’. However, the area of land to be managed was considerable and available funds, to eradicate thistles and maintain fences, were scant. It became a ‘sort of general common for everybody’s cows and horses’ but with no commonage fees attached.7 When Chairman Henry Bacchus, who owned Perrewerrh Estate, was ousted, the management direction altered to accommodate a more pragmatic ‘grazing’ push. The Lands Department had not authorised the new tenders for grazing and timber removal and felt provoked into proceeding with its plan to release much of the extensive reservation for settlement.8 With Lal Lal Falls on the brink of succumbing to settlement pressure only eight years after reservation, voices protesting the waterfalls’ landscape value were again heard. Lal Lal Falls future land status became entwined with nearby Mts Buninyong and Warrenheip, both reserved for timber. After the

8.3

Location of Lal Lal Falls Reserve in relation to Ballarat, Buninyong and Lal Lal

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1865 Land Act, Section 42 applicants wanted the Mounts ‘opened up’ for selection. Moves to retain the volcanic cones, along with the Falls, as ‘landmark features’ emanated largely from Ballarat.9 All three sites were applauded as worthy of public park reservation, a category more secure than the resource-vulnerable ‘public purposes’ or ‘timber’ reserves. The two Ballarat Councils of East and West, together with Buninyong Shire, which held Mt Buninyong and Lal Lal Falls within its boundaries, and a rather more reluctant Bungaree Roads Board, responsible for Mt Warrenheip, met with the Lands Minister to confirm the new reservations. These four councils formed one Committee of Management for the trio of ‘eastern reserves’, as they became known, with Ballarat the central reference point.10 The original Lal Lal Falls reservation of 1200 acres was drastically reduced with the release of land for farming in 1868. The remainder was reconstituted into three different but related reserve entities. They became islands of public land amidst almost one thousand acres of recently revoked and newly selected land. A miniaturised Public Park Reserve of 200 acres was retained around the Falls for ‘recreative purposes’. ‘Public Park’ denoted passive recreation, and was mainly assigned to large reserves in Melbourne. Lal Lal Falls, identified by Buninyong Shire as ‘the place where pleasure parties assemble’, was promoted over Moorabool Falls as the leading attraction.11 The West Moorabool River became the new eastern boundary of the reserve. This meant that Moorabool Falls was not entirely within the reserve, but could be viewed from the escarpment and accessed from an unused road to the north. The second reserve to emerge from this dissolution of the original 1200 acres was, although small, significant for the support it gave the many new land selectors who could not afford to invest in the provision of water on their blocks. The most accessible and reliable waterhole along Lal Lal Creek, less than one kilometre upstream of Lal Lal Falls, was re-reserved for water supply purposes. This waterhole was the Rockies, referred to previously as an example of a water reserve with an indistinct contemporary identity. This waterhole assisted a small farming community to develop adjacent to the much reduced Falls Reserve. The third reserve to emerge further tightened the social ties of this community in transition from goldmining to farming. In the



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debate concerning the new boundaries of the Falls Reserve, nearby residents saw an opportunity to request a reservation to satisfy more active recreational needs. In 1868 two hundred signatories from the local towns of Lal Lal, Buninyong East (Yendon), Egerton, Gordon, Moorabool Creek (Millbrook), and Warrenheip raced to get a petition to Melbourne before boundaries were finalised.12 Hotelkeepers, farmers and miners wanted part of the Falls Reserve to be formally retained as a racecourse. For at least five years a New Year’s Day race meeting had been held on scarcely prepared ground just above the Lal Lal waterfall. The petitioners were successful and a portion of the former Lal Lal Falls Reserve was re-reserved as Lal Lal Racecourse. The Racecourse and the Falls Reserves were adjacent and in effect perceived by locals to be the one land parcel, although they were managed quite separately. Whereas the Racecourse Management Committee, as opposed to the Lal Lal Turf Club, was composed of local landholders, the Falls Reserve retained its more Ballaratorientated, patrician influence. In large part, it was through the Racecourse Committee that local pressure to have the Falls Reserve valued and developed as a recreational asset was maintained. Lack of representation on the Falls Committee was resented. Theoretically locals could have been given a voice as a Buninyong Shire councillor nominated to the Committee of Management, but in reality they were of the wrong social colour. Like most country councils well into the twentieth century, Buninyong Shire was dominated by prominent townsmen and by those with squatter lineage. The Lal Lal Falls area was at the eastern boundary of the Shire, and socially was distinguished by struggling lessees, bush workers and miners. The management committee for the eastern reserves remained high-profile, with mayoral and landed establishment representation the norm.13 The first 100 years of reserve management could be characterised predominantly by disputes with lessees and, in a lesser way, by erratic, often inadequate, attempts to define the picnic area immediate to the main falls. Until the 1960s, the trustees’ meagre working funds came mainly from local, often adjoining, landholders who held grazing and timber licences over much of the 200 acres.14 Furthermore, funds for Lal Lal Falls were in competition with those allocated to Mts Buninyong and Warrenheip, both closer to Ballarat and to more established towns. It was not until the early 1880s that the trustees

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considered an agenda beyond the business of leasing. As was exemplified previously with the Commission water reserves, the 1880s decade was a period of civic beautification and broader cultural consolidation for Ballarat, and the Committee attempted to meet community expectations by introducing limited ‘improvements’. Those living local to the Falls regularly expected more than was delivered, and the constant tension to have the place suitably valued connected them to the place as much as its landscape qualities.

Keeping the Falls Picturesque, of Natural Interest, Reachable The new colonial agenda for a civilising, picturesque countryside certainly encompassed Lal Lal water. From the mid-1880s and into the next century, the Falls environs were given star-billing in those same Ballarat pamphlets and illustrated guidebooks produced by the local

8.4a

One of Niven’s many photographs of Moorabool Falls



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8.4b

Picnic party at Lal Lal

Niven publishing company that promoted the Water Commission reserves. The eastern recreational package included the two Falls, the two Mounts (Buninyong and Warrenheip) and the Water Commission water reserves (Beales and Wilsons). Lal Lal Falls was depicted as ‘one of the most picturesque spots in the district’, with Moorabool Falls and the Racecourse receiving a secondary, but still laudatory rating.15 The more weighty publication—Ballarat and District in 1901—included three photographs of Lal Lal Falls and four of Moorabool Falls out of a total of thirty-one.16 Postcards abounded in this period of burgeoning tourism. Tinted enhancements could make the surrounding vegetation seem quite lush, and, in others, the waterfall became a bridal veil image of sweeping whiteness. Beneath such headings as ‘Fishing and Shooting’ and ‘Picnic Rendezvous’, Ballarat residents and tourists were directed to the best recreational sites in and around the Falls Reserve: The Moorabool all down its course contains lusty trout and well-grown perch; the river can be reached by train to Millbrook, or by train to Lal Lal, or by a pleasant drive down

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8.5

Rose series of postcards, Lal Lal, Moorabool and Lower Moorabool (Granite) Falls

the Gordon Rd, and there is not a reach of it unfrequented by the speckled trout.17 Big piscatorial claims were also made for Fisken’s Dam, and were not entirely a matter of fanciful promotion. An Acclimatisation Society and associated Anglers Club, both based in Ballarat, recorded members’ catches and broadcast results in the local paper.18 In 1885 the Reserve trustees committed funds to improve a crossing and erect a footbridge just above Lal Lal Falls. It escorted people across to an escarpment with wonderful views of the river gorge and eventually to the other waterfalls—the Moorabool and



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Lower Moorabool, or Granite, Falls. This investment was followed by a move to create safer, closer access to the base pool of the Falls, often called the Basin, by cutting a pathway ‘from the head of the chasm to the foot of the falls, so that a good view of the waterfall from the greatest vantage-point can be obtained for the expenditure of very little exertion’.19 Both the footbridge and the path facilitated existing traffic rather than initiated new access. Many pamphlets and photographs, both published and in private family albums, espouse the enjoyment of the water, in the creek and over the three Falls. The two layers of columnar basalt that flanked the main Moorabool and Lal Lal Falls did not make access to the pools below the waterfalls at all easy. This is why the new path, which included a little bridge for a particularly narrow section, was so important to construct. To reach Moorabool Falls visitors could either take an unused road north of the reserve, follow a track from a boundary road along the gentle gully of Duggans Creek, or cross the new footbridge and follow the water from up high.

8.6

Aerial view of Lal Lal Falls Reserve and surrounds, showing link to racecourse and access to Falls

This third route across the creek near the head of the Falls was taken when seventy members of the Ballarat and Melbourne Field Naturalists organised a joint expedition in November 1885 to

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celebrate Prince of Wales birthday. It was hailed ‘as the first united gathering of amateur naturalists held in Victoria …’20 The Ballarat Field Club and Science Society was formed in 1882, and gravitated around the School of Mines. The School’s Professor of Geology, Mineralogy, and Mining, Frederick Krause, was secretary of the group, and Mica Smith, Professor of Chemistry, was an active member. James Oddie, who had lent his support to Henry Brown in his land claim at Moorabool, was the flamboyant president at the time of the excursion. To the accompaniment of a Highland piper, the group enjoyed refreshments at Moorabool Falls, having walked from Lal Lal Falls. After lunch: Little groups of collectors [now] started out in all directions. Green nets might be seen waving in pursuit of deftly flitting lepidoptera. Umbrellas spread to catch the coleoptera shaken from the bushes. A follower of Isaac Walton vainly trying if speckled trout lived in the pool beneath the waterfall. A painter in oils trying to catch the changing beauty of the landscape. A couple of photographers with their heads constantly under their black cloths. Botanical collectors breaking boughs, gathering flowers, digging roots, etc …21

8.7

Photographic Society members at Lal Lal Falls Reserve



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Amateur photographers from the Ballarat and Geelong photographic societies also included the Falls in their excursion program. Despite interest in Lal Lal Falls from the region, and further afield, it was believed to be the ‘poorest’ of the reserve trio with the least expended on ‘improvement’ works. The Racecourse Committee alerted the trustees when maintenance of fences, paths and crossings

8.8

Photographer, Lal Lal Falls Reserve, 1889

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became urgent, with works more likely to be completed just prior to the popular New Year’s Day races. The first official race meeting held by the Lal Lal Turf Club was in 1874, and its success prompted a special branch railway being built from the Ballarat–Geelong line to transport cattle trucks, literally, of race-goers to subsequent race meetings. The Racecourse Committee believed that the Ballarat trustees did not appreciate fully the tourist potential of the Falls so highlighted by the races. In a 1904 petition the locals of Lal Lal accused the trustees of gross neglect. They suggested that, in twenty-five years of management, reserve revenue would have totalled almost £1000, but that only £200 had been committed to works such as fencing: With the amount of funds at their disposal, if judiciously expended, they should have converted our park into one of the beauty spots of Victoria. The Lal Lal Falls have been the means of attracting large concourses of people to the district, but owing to lack of accommodation, they have gone elsewhere.22 Petitioners called for the removal of the current trustees, ‘on the grounds that they are non residents and quite out of touch with the district …’, and included a list of more suitable trustees for departmental consideration. Finally, on behalf of neighbouring farmers, they protested against the ‘infested state of the ground, which is literally alive with vermin’. Although difficult to verify, it is likely that the relatively lucrative lease money from Lal Lal Reserve was subsidising improvements at the two mountain reserves in closer proximity to Ballarat and Buninyong. Certainly this was the perception. The trustees were called to account by the Lands Department. They in turn blamed two families (both sharing a boundary with the reserve, and both with a history of controversial grazing leases) as the troublemakers. Furthermore, the trustees cited the planting of 130 advanced deciduous trees, 21 pines, and 50 willows near to Lal Lal Falls as testament to their commitment. And although this planting actually postdated the petition, the trustees professed to be ‘fully alive to the necessity of popularising the Park as a pleasure reserve’.23 It seems likely that the idea to form a weir just behind the head of the Falls, to ensure a summer flow for the waterfall, emerged from



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the disquiet expressed in the petition. The loss of Fisken’s Dam, after an apparent breach in the late 1880s, as a local recreational site of considerable dimensions would have placed a higher premium on the Falls as a public water resource. Engineer Mahony from the Ballarat Water Commission assessed the scheme initially and it was four years before a small test weir was established. In 1910 pressure resumed to construct the proposed weir, with Lal Lal Turf Club offering financial assistance for the project.24 Although the idea of the weir was shelved for another thirty years, the trustees did manage to furnish the reserve with timber conveniences. Local residents twice petitioned, and failed, to fill a vacancy on the Committee. And even with changes to the Committee after the withdrawal of Bungaree Council in 1912 (when the Forests Commission took charge of Mt Warrenheip) and after the amalgamation of the two Ballarat councils in 1921, there was no local elected. A reconstituted Committee became responsible for the management of Mt Buninyong and Lal Lal Falls, with two representatives from both Ballarat and Buninyong councils. For most of this period, up until 1964 when the Committee dissolved, Selwyn Scott, of Mt Buninyong Estate, was chairman. He came from an established pastoral family on the outskirts of Buninyong, far removed socially from Lal Lal. The continuing remoteness of the trustees, especially the Ballarat representatives, was evident when they hired a taxi to visit the reserves, for the benefit of Councillor Wilson (Ballarat) who, despite his position as trustee for five years, had never inspected them before.25 Although without a direct Committee voice, local residents continued to influence the kind of place the reserve became. It was probably Lal Lal Racecourse’s record attendance of 32 000 people on New Year’s Day 1937, and the availability of state government funds for tourist works on Crown land, that enabled renewed pressure for improvements. The Committee placed a wish list with the relatively new Tourist Resorts Committee in 1937. Second on this list, first going to Mt Buninyong, was that a well-serviced 60-foot swimming pool be constructed not far upstream from the waterfall.26 The grant was not approved, the swimming pool remained an idea only, and in just a few years after the record race day, the Turf Club, as opposed to the Racecourse Reserve Committee, ended operations owing to financial problems.

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Enlarging or creating waterholes as swimming pools in rivers and streams was relatively common in the 1920s and 1930s. The State Rivers and Water Supply Commission (SRWSC) was the referral authority for works of this kind. Support from local government and agreement to protect a waterway’s ‘natural flow’ were the main requirements. Some of the applications outlined elaborate plans for paddling pools, springboards and dressing sheds, and tree plantings to beautify the immediate bank area. Requests to enhance the swimming and fishing capacity of waterways came from a range of local community groups: progress associations, Boy Scout clubs, school committees, the Australian Natives Association, anglers clubs, and swimming clubs. Most applicants appealed to high drowning statistics and the consequent need for a learning facility. A spokesman for the Namurkah Progress Association made a particularly spirited request to create baths in Broken Creek. After acknowledging the waterway’s poor water quality, he advised that ‘it does not matter up this way what state the water is in as long as it is damp and we can get a swim for our boys and girls. At present we are blessed with a real up to date school master and he is willing to teach the boys swimming …’27 Efforts to invigorate recreation values at Lal Lal Falls in the years following the abortive swimming pool project subsided with the approach of World War II. There were repairs to the path and bridge leading to the Basin, work on the road from Lal Lal to the reserve, and two fireplaces built, and the racecourse catering shed was jointly purchased to meet the needs of campers on both reserves. In this period there was the first hint that access to the water was being discouraged, but the explanation lies more in lack of funds and Committee laxity than in principle. When an adjoining landholder asked for a road to be made through the reserve to the junction of Lal Lal Creek and Moorabool River for the use of fishermen and sportsmen because his fences were being damaged, the trustees were ‘not agreeable’.28 And when a landholder applied to purchase the unused road that provided entry to the northern end of the reserve, the trustees offered no objection, seemingly without referral to local opinion. This road, albeit ‘unmade’, provided access to the Moorabool Falls. The application was withdrawn for unrelated reasons. After the war, tourism was encouraged in Victoria through the Tourist Development Authority in its various forms. Local politician



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Henry Bolte facilitated contact between it and the trustees, attending two committee meetings and taking part in an inspection tour. Ballarat’s Courier newspaper ran a number of tourist promotion articles concerning the Falls, extolling its popularity with both campers and day tourists. Apart from the scenic beauty of the Falls, visitor highlights listed were the good fishing in the Moorabool River and the hikes to nearby Moorabool and Granite, or Lower Moorabool, Falls. On a more critical note, the lack of swimming facilities, picnic furniture and road signage was noted. It was mainly with the impetus of Tourist Authority funds that the Falls financed its visitor improvements, ones inclusive of the waterfall. During the late 1950s and into the 1960s, reserve grants financed a lookout to the waterfall, a concrete stairway leading to the waterfall track, a picnic water supply, improved walking tracks, picnic furniture, and even a swing and slide. The Royal Automobile Club of Victoria assisted with road signage, affirming the greater mobility of Ballarat and Melbourne tourists.29 The Falls was not a destination for tourists only. Locals continued to use the reserve for family gatherings, sports days, and picnics, and children viewed it as an adventure playground. The picnic tables and viewing platform were designed more for visitors than locals, who had greater opportunity to explore more wild terrain. Lal Lal and Moorabool waterfalls were known as the ‘Big’ and ‘Little’ Falls. A photograph from this period, with notes added later, illustrates a family group’s familiarity, and physical intimacy, with the water-fall itself:30 It was not only the waterfall but also the waterways themselves that were well known to those who fished and scrambled across boulders to private places. It was a landscape of waterholes, gullies and river flats with names denoting past associations or special features. A map of childhood memories that represents Lal Lal in the 1940s recreates what is now lost geography for many. There were waterholes known as Platypus, Windmill, Plottzas, and Champion. There were Diamonds and Lofts’ Flat, and the Fort, which marked a feud between two families on opposite banks of the river. There were crossings at the swing bridge, where trees had fallen, and where railway sleepers and rocks were artfully wedged. Just up from the water there were old mining huts and mines to discover. There was ‘the Argyles’, a still intact chain of ponds promising afternoons of eeling, as did the holes

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8.9

Local family group eeling at Lal Lal Falls, c. 1960, with description by Pauline Holloway: ‘At New Year, almost to the day and only for two or three days the local anglers would head to the falls with wet bag and bucket to get a stock supply for their dams. If you happened to be there for the migration, piles could be scraped off rocks as they made their way up the face of the falls. They slowly worked their way up the crevices in the damp rocks but a touch on the tail would have them drop into the bucket. This was great fun when we were young.’



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along Duggans Creek en route to the Moorabool Falls. Negotiating a difficult descent from Granite Falls recently, my companion, who had lived near the Falls as a child, remembered the most helpful footholds in the rocks. For some, the reserve offered much more than a scenic picnic. In 1964 the Racecourse Committee, which had funnelled so much energy into the adjoining Lal Lal Falls, was dissolved when the racecourse was regazetted as parkland. It was the sudden availability of Committee funds that in part enabled a re-evaluation of the reserve. Revocation had been discussed for some years, and the racecourse trustees were adamant that they did not want the new park reserve to be managed by the existing Committee of Management for Mt Buninyong and Lal Lal Falls with its residual patrician flavour. Lal Lal residents lobbied for an all-local Committee without Ballarat City representation.31 They wanted the reserve to be added to Lal Lal Falls, with separate Committees of Management responsible for Mt Buninyong and the enlarged Lal Lal Falls Reserve. It was on this understanding that some of the old racecourse funds were entrusted to Buninyong Shire.32 And although, from 1964, Buninyong did take over sole management of the Falls reserve, and did commit to planning for the future development of the whole area, the two reserves were never legally stitched together. Simultaneous with the change in reserve management was regional pressure to promote Lal Lal Falls as a ‘top tourist attraction’.33 Buninyong Shire tendered for a landscape master plan and appointed an architect with local squatter credentials. Prior to working on this plan the architect was required to produce plans for a shelter, toilets and fireplace, so that a tourist subsidy could be quickly applied for, and perhaps so that former racecourse trustees could be reassured that funds would be utilised at Lal Lal. Actual works never extended beyond these three items, even though the master plan was completed and endorsed by the Shire. It was at this very point of heightened commitment to recreational development of the Falls when staff of both the Ballarat and Geelong water supply authorities met with the State Rivers and Water Supply Commission to debate proprietorial stakes in the proposed Lal Lal Reservoir. At the time, no clash of values was foreseen, at least by the architect. During his presentation to Council in 1968, he alluded to the adjacent West Moorabool water

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supply scheme as ‘affecting the Lal Lal Reserve most favourably’, suggesting that tourism would be enhanced.34 What was this stillbirth vision for the Falls Reserve, as expressed in the master plan? Multiple uses were envisaged, with no attempt to keep visitors away from the waterfalls or the river. For those interested in the arts, it was proposed as a festival site, with a ‘natural glade for accommodation of a sound shell for musical, dramatic and other entertainments’.35 For those who wished to appreciate the ‘natural beauty’, a hiking path connecting the two falls was suggested, with a caravan park planned for overnight visitors. The scenic qualities of the site were to be augmented with a 70-foot observation tower ‘to give a magnificent view of the near and distant countryside’. Picnic facilities were to be sited amongst the ‘fine’ plantations of pines. The four main developments of this vision—a soundshell, a caravan park, an observation tower, and a hiking track—continued, albeit boldly, prior uses of the reserve. On a Sunday afternoon in the late summer of 1967, the State Service Orchestra had performed at Lal Lal Falls under the direction of Herman Schildberger. Representations

8.10

Camping near the waterfall, 1889



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from Premier Henry Bolte facilitated the inclusion of Lal Lal in the orchestra’s country circuit. Boy Scouts and the RAAF made formal applications to camp at the reserve, but clearly more casual camping was supported.36 An observation tower would extend the function of the existing lookout platform and bring it into line with Mt Buninyong’s multiple investments in such structures. Walking excursions from the Falls to other landmark features or to fishing holes were evident in the early tourist literature. The master plan both confirmed and extended, colourfully, past visitor experience at this reserve, with developments intended to be sensitive to the beauty of the natural features. The only glaring departure from prior schemes was the swimming pool, and this omission, along with a moribund master plan, was most likely due to reservoir plans then in progress. In the forty-odd years following this documented vision, the Falls Reserve became an almost abandoned place with no access to the waterfall or the creek allowed. The completion of Lal Lal Reservoir in 1972 marks a significant turning point in this transition, with two repercussions for those who enjoyed Lal Lal Falls Reserve. Firstly, there was less reserved land and water to access because excisions were considerable. Secondly, it became increasingly difficult for people to reach the water. This second impact was never clearly delineated in one action, but quite minor actions have had a cumulative effect.

Post-reservoir Landscape The loss of public land, including water frontage, at Lal Lal Falls went almost unnoticed. Formalising the excision and control of Crown land in the vicinity of the new reservoir occurred after it was built, with Buninyong Shire and the Lands Department offering no objections to the proposed transfer of control to the West Moorabool Water Board (WMWB). It can be seen from the Department plan that West Moorabool River and Lal Lal Creek formed a large part of the eastern boundary of the Falls Reserve. It was a 37-acre bite into the mid-section of this boundary that was removed from the 200-acre reserve to provide for reservoir waters, and for land to buffer surrounding land use impacts. Officially this area was described as ‘well clear of the developed picnic area and the falls … located downstream in a very rough deep gorge containing the junction of the Lal Lal Creek and the

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8.11

Land excised from Lal Lal Falls Reserve for Lal Lal Reservoir



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West Moorabool River’.37 And, again, the land was ‘relatively small and remote in relation to the rest of the reserve …’ In acreage terms the excision was in fact a significant portion, comprising almost 20 per cent of the total reserve. In water terms, it was the most continuous section of Crown water frontage for the entire length of the two waterways and included the confluence waters. The Junction, as it was known, of river and creek was a favourite picnic area for some, with Platypus Hole nearby and expanses of nardoo, a fern with four-leaf clover foliage, so great that one resident remembers a game searching, unsuccessfully, for three-leaf clover.38 For many years the Junction was a favourite fishing spot for David Martin, who photographed the transition from river to reservoir. In the previous chapter we learned that local landholders did not loudly protest the creation of Lal Lal Reservoir prior to the event. Similarly, there was no broader environmental protest, even though Victoria’s landmark Little Desert dispute, one which galvanised environmental activists across the state, was in full flight as Bungal Dam construction began.39 Such protest was initially a relatively urban phenomenon, and amongst the coalition of conservation groups energised by the Little Desert dispute there was a predominant interest in land, not water, issues. National interest in water came

8.12

Fishing near the Junction, c. 1962

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8.13

Reservoir earthworks with Junction in view

with the damming of Lake Pedder, just after Lal Lal Reservoir was completed, but before Melbourne’s new Thomson Dam was finalised. This timing becomes a factor in explaining protest directed at Thomson Dam, as does its physical connection to Gippsland Lakes and its social connection with Melbourne as both future beneficiary of water and host to urban environmentalists. For Thomson Dam, secondary questions were raised about changes in public access to the river, but for Lal Lal questions of access and downstream ecology were not expressed publicly.40 Although Lal Lal attracted no formal protest from far or near, this does not of course preclude the sense of loss experienced by some. With the new reservoir, people’s experience of the nearby Falls did change. It went beyond road closures and lost frontage to involve a reconfiguration of people to place. Ironically the very creation of a vast body of deep water itself marked a new trend to distance people from water. This was supported by a politics of the environment which championed an objectified biodiversity set apart from humans. People-free wilderness areas replaced hiking-friendly national parks as the ultimate valuing of the natural world. The WMWB’s management of the reservoir was largely unchallenged in this wider culture of the environment, and it spilled over into the Falls Reserve.



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It was the extended role of the WWMB’s on-site reservoir caretaker that spearheaded the shift in visitor experience subversive of traditional connections between people and place. Supervision of Lal Lal Falls Reserve, just upstream of the dam wall, was added to reservoir duties in 1976. It was based on the precedent of a similar caretaking role for an adjoining reserve downstream of the dam wall, one which featured an iron ore blast furnace of historical significance. The WMWB agreed to Buninyong Shire’s request that the reservoir caretaker’s duties be extended to Lal Lal Falls Reserve, subject to several conditions. The first of these betrays a distinct change in management tone: That signs are erected prohibiting camping and advising that the area is to be locked each night. It is envisaged that the actual locking of the gates will only take place on Friday and Saturday nights and it is felt that the Notices should advise that it will be locked every night.41 This greater level of supervision was itself a change. In the earliest days of the eastern reserves, the local police constable was paid a small sum to keep an eye out for acts of vandalism or resource abuse. Caretaking was intermittent and usually resumed in response to complaints. Local landholders, and their children, fulfilled the role on occasions. The WMWB’s supervisory conditions prompted new regulations being gazetted for the reserve in 1979, when camping became, officially, subject to permission being granted. In the following year Buninyong Shire accepted the WMWB’s offer to erect barricades to confine vehicles to the Falls carpark. Previously cars could be parked at the picnic area closer to the escarpment. This action was not part of any articulated management plan for the reserve, but helped define, quietly, what the WMWB considered to be legitimate community use. And although caretaking responsibilities returned to a local landholder in 1986, following poor publicity about the condition of the reserve and disagreement about caretaker payment, a sense of supervised prohibition was retained.42

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Weakening Connections, Exclusion, Degradation The involvement of the WMWB in the management of Lal Lal Falls coincided with population changes in the immediate locality. A number of long-standing farming families affected by compulsory land accession moved away, while part of the Lal Lal forest was subdivided into ‘bush’ allotments. The local farming community was fragmenting for more reasons than lost land, so that an established connection between people and place weakened before others established. New residents, without strong associations with or expectations of the Falls, were attracted to Lal Lal. Referring to this post-reservoir period, a member of the Robinson farming family reflected that: several of the then occupied homes are no longer there. Dozens of new homes have been built over the entire area, some tracks are now roads, together with new tracks from wood cutting areas, motor bike and horse trails. To get from ‘A’ to ‘B’ without confusion, was, I decided, quite difficult.43 With these settlement fluctuations locally, the opportunity for the community to assign value to the Falls Reserve was relatively minimal at a critical moment. There was no effective local voice to moderate those more remote designators of public land values beginning to be heard. By the 1980s the environment domain had largely departed from the activist politics of amateur conservationists and science academics to become the preserve of an army of science professionals in both public and private sectors. Environmental impact studies, taxonomic inventories, and management strategies imprinted new value on public land and water. Victoria’s Land Conservation Council undertook a statewide assessment of Victorian public land which included the Ballarat area. Its final recommendations for Lal Lal Falls confirmed the reserve’s new valuing acquired by virtue of its location adjacent to the reservoir. In a cautionary tone the LCC suggested that: ‘To ensure maintenance of water quality, the managing authority may need to control access to this reserve, particularly to Lal Lal Creek and Falls, while ensuring that observation points and the picnic ground are retained’.44 It was suggested, but never implemented, that the WMWB



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be represented on the Committee of Management. The recommended change in status from ‘Public Park’ to ‘Scenic Reserve’ conveyed the preferred distance between people and the waterfall, with a boundary between picnic and outer reserve more clearly drawn. Both WMWB’s initiatives and their endorsement by the Land Conservation Council entailed an erosion of recreational values previously supported for the Falls Reserve by local government and a range of community users. Protection of water quality and promotion of recreational values were perceived as necessarily antagonistic. It is, of course, about more than the loss of Lal Lal waters as a recreational space. In this period following the construction of Lal Lal Reservoir the wider cultural value of the area narrowed with the ascendancy of more scientific values. For Lal Lal Falls this ‘scientising’ of place began with notions of water quality to then embrace ‘biodiversity’, the loss of species and habitats. It was a very sudden moment, in 1980, when Lal Lal Falls was catapulted to the forefront of species conservation. The Australian hairy anchor plant, Discaria pubescens, was discovered near the waterfall quite close to the test weir for the swimming pool. It was in fact a rediscovery, because both the 1885 party of field naturalists and a later Geelong excursion group had noted the unusual plant. Emerging from the 1980s politics of biodiversity, however, this celebrated plant donned a new identity as a rare and endangered plant.45 Other Victorian populations have since been discovered, but initially the population at Lal Lal Falls was considered particularly special. On direction from the Land Conservation Council the anchor plants were protected from grazing stock. When fencing provided by Buninyong Shire proved inadequate the local Field Naturalists acquired funding to protect the plants under a Bicentennial grant. The anchor plant find was soon augmented by the listing of thirteen plant species of ‘regional significance’ for the reserve. In 1989 environmental consultants, employed by the WMWB, described the Falls, on this basis of flora, as one of two ‘sites of significance’ for the West Moorabool catchment.46 With the botanical discoveries, ecologists came to know the reserve, and biodiversity along with water quality conferred scientific sanctity on this pleasure ground of past years. And although geologists already had a long association with the mining district of Lal Lal,

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it was strengthened and popularised with the 1988 publication of the Victorian Geology Excursion Guide.47 This interest from the wider scientific community put the reserve on maps other than local tourist guides. The environmental integrity of the Falls came to be valued beyond people’s enjoyment of a natural environment. It was perhaps this cultural ambiguity concerning the diminution of Lal Lal’s waterscape that explains the enduring impact of the following tragic event. As well as being on the itinerary of geologists, the Falls was listed by the Western Victorian Climbing Club as an accessible rock climbing site. In 1990 two girls on a school trip abseiled from the escarpment to the waterfall path and were killed by falling rocks. Understandably, Buninyong Shire almost immediately declared access to this well-trodden path to the Basin closed, and banned abseiling and rock climbing in the reserve. The path has, however, remained closed despite assurances that the Falls, as a tourist attraction, would not be lessened and that alternative viewing areas would be investigated. This downward journey along the creek and into the spray of the waterfall was a particular delight for visitors. The decision to permanently deny access to the waterfall, its pool and the downstream waters was not taken as a direct result of the coroner’s report. Although the coroner highlighted the need for more careful management with regard to protecting the path from rock fall, for signage to be erected indicating personal risk and for the lookout to be better sited, there was certainly legal scope for a more flexible access policy than was introduced. Likewise the Lands Department gave conditional agreement for partial access.48 Undoubtedly the Buninyong councillors felt cautious. There had been other accidents, and at least one earlier departmental warning concerning the broken escarpment fence. To provide some access would be costly, and clearly the gains were not sufficiently valued by the councillors. This was not the case in prior risk assessments. In 1950 the trustees were even prepared to consider dynamiting the overhanging basalt rock. The waterfall path remained open following a rock-fall fatality in 1895, a drowning in 1887, and serious accidents in 1953, 1962 and 1989.49 Some visitors, of course, have continued to experience the ten-minute descent to the Basin, but without official sanction and at greater risk with the lack of path maintenance.



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The reserve’s environmental credentials were not of sufficient merit to attract regular funding and without local pressure, such as the Racecourse Committee once exerted, it drifted into greater neglect and its very existence came under challenge. During the Victorian local government amalgamations of 1994, Buninyong Shire was largely absorbed into Ballarat and the new Moorabool Shire. Responsibility for Lal Lal Falls went to Moorabool Shire, although no reserve files, old or recent, were transferred. This Shire has a geographical and population bias closer to the city of Melbourne than to Ballarat, or Buninyong. A lack of management was highlighted when the new Shire repeatedly failed to control stock trespass on the reserve. It was during this period of reduced local government involvement that a management void posed the greatest threat to the identifiable past of the Falls Reserve. A Lands Department assessment recommended that most of the reserve beyond the immediate picnic area could be sold to the adjoining landholder. It was reasoned that: ‘The purpose of the reserve is essentially to view the Falls. This can still be done whether the land is owned by the Crown or sold’.50 Only the picnic ground and 20-metre frontages to the waterways were not considered ‘surplus’. Change in government was timely, but the idea of demarcating a reduced recreational area from a much larger environmental portion of the reserve survived. Before we follow this thread and reconnect Lal Lal Falls to the local community it is important to document its abandonment with a landscape portrait taken at the time (2003): The picnic area just above the Falls has a neglected ambience. Overshadowing the swing and slide, picnic tables, barbecue rotunda and toilets, all of 1950–60s vintage, are senescent pine trees. Just beyond the picnic ground are deciduous tree remnants of a more extensive, formal planting. A short walk to the original viewing platform takes you past seven ‘No Access’ signs and a small memorial plaque to the schoolgirls. In two places directly below the signage, it is clear that people have lowered the fence wire to reach the lower path and one section of safety fencing that surrounds the viewing area hangs loose.

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8.14a

Picnic area, Lal Lal Falls, 2003

Steps to the waterfall path have become unusable. The opportunity to be engulfed by the noise and spray of the waterfall, and to be immersed in the waters of the base pool, is no longer part of the official visitor experience. Unless the waterfall is in full flow, it is the verdant green of the willows lining the creek from the base of the Falls in contrast with the deep green of the blackberries climbing up the basalt columns that catches the visitor’s eye first. Only in winter when the willows have dropped their leaves can the pool be seen from the escarpment. Photographic views from the 1860s reveal a seemingly larger pool, with the more open vista accentuating the statuesque basalt flanking the waterfall. As for the weir upstream of the Falls, the concrete base has partly held but most of the wall of cemented rocks has fallen in angular blocks into the creek. Above where the swimming pool would have been are the fenced off Hairy Anchor plants. The fence is giving partial protection only and the weeds are gaining ground within the plot.



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8.14b

One of several ‘No Access’ signs, Lal Lal Falls Reserve, 2003

A longer walk over Lal Lal Creek, where the footbridge above the waterfall once was, and across to the Moorabool Falls takes you through the main reserve area that has been grazed and partially cultivated. Introduced pasture merges into soft mounds of silver tussock as the escarpment is approached. Here also you find those crooked manna gums that survived decades of official and unofficial timbergetting. Looking east across the gorge you see elongated

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8.14c

Steps to the waterfall, 2003

fingers of reservoir backwater. Although blackberries scramble along the waterways and the confluence of Lal Lal Ck and West Moorabool River—the Junction—is now submerged, the steepness of the main gorge holds its scenic value. Not so for Moorabool Falls which are heavily disguised by blackberries. It becomes difficult to orientate yourself in the fishing and pleasure party photographs of the 1860s. Nineteenth century descriptions of the wider reserve allude to untidiness, to areas littered with timber debris, ‘scrub’, outbreaks of thistles and serious infestations of rabbits. Under these conditions fires were regular. The large portion of ‘unruly’ reserve under grazing lease was a wild space that imposed itself on the picnic space demarcated around the waterfall. It is now the picnic area that imposes on the almost treeless landscape view presented by the rest of the reserve, with pine and poplar seedlings marching



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8.14d Willows and blackberries at Lal Lal Falls, 2003. Note bridge along unused basin pool path

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forward from the heavy shade of parent trees. The waterfall itself provides a link between these two parts of the reserve. Its scenic value has diminished without the ‘wild’, more densely treed backdrop that the wider reserve offered in the past. A photographic essay, perhaps beginning with Archibald Smith’s welcoming view of the Falls, would illustrate this shrinking of the waterfall’s scenic domain.51 This was the state of play when Central Highlands Water (WMWB) and the Lands Department commissioned a management plan for the reserve in 2001. It was the inability of Moorabool Shire to control stock trespass that seemed to trigger this action. In this plan environmental consultants proposed two management committees: one being the Moorabool Shire, to manage a reduced picnic area; and the other, CHW, to manage the remainder of the 160 acres as a conservation zone high in ‘ecological values’.52 CHW had already, in 1995, approached the Lands Department about managing the entire reserve. This was not long after it purchased the unused road which gave access to the northern end of the Falls Reserve near Moorabool Falls. Access to the proposed conservation zone was to be ‘subject to a risk minimisation process managed by the Committee of

8.14e

Upstream of Lal Lal Falls, 2003



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8.14f

Moorabool Falls choked with weeds, 2003

Management’. 53 Neither the Lands Department, CHW nor Moorabool Shire publicised the management plan process, and only by chance did it become known to the catchment community. With word of the proposed management plan, Lal Lal Falls found its local supporters once more. There was a core of people living near the Falls, most of whom replaced farmers, who now felt established at

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Lal Lal. These people were joined by those with particular environmental and historical interests from further afield. At two public meetings held in Lal Lal’s hall, many ideas for the reserve came from people with a similar geographical range to the 1904 petitioners, who likewise complained of a management structure that did not represent their interests. In the division between conservation and picnic ‘zones’, the possibility of integrating conservation with recreation interests seemed quashed. Fears were expressed that CHW, as the proposed sole trustees of the conservation zone, would exclude people. There was support for a walking track between the two Falls, for a viewing structure that offered a more intimate experience of the waterfall, and closure of the path to the Falls was questioned. After numerous delays a new community advisory group now liaises with Moorabool Shire concerning the management of the entire reserve. Many of the decrepit pines from the picnic area have been felled and, with new light both flooding in and opening out, it is possible to imagine revitalised connections. Lal Lal Falls Reserve has

8.15

Lal Lal Falls, A. Smith, 1866



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been variously sustained by primarily local but also regional communities. Without this energy and warmth our waterscapes are more liable to cultural shrinkage and environmental degradation. It explains the difference between Lal Lal Falls, which now boasts its basin pool unencumbered by willows, and Moorabool Falls, shrouded in blackberries and anonymity. The significance of this variable social flow, with its volatile composite of waterscapes, has been too easily ignored by a form of environmentalism which over-scientises and segregates. If a reservoir exists as a water quality abstraction only, and not a real place in our geography, and if a beautiful set of waterfalls is identified with just one plant species or a photogenic view, and not with an opportunity to more closely experience our rivers, then our creative potential to give contemporary value is stifled. Although Lal Lal Falls Reserve has struggled to successfully retain its place in the public domain, Lal Lal waters held by the reservoir, flowing in the waterfall country and running downstream of the dam wall through the forest remain largely unseen. By contrast, the water transferred by pipeline from Lal Lal Reservoir is clearly visible through allocation investigations, community water forums, planning permit outcomes, groundwater regulation, and, more recently, farm dam legislation. There exists an odd disconnection between Lal Lal waters and Lal Lal catchment issues that is not in itself identified as a ‘water issue’ by water managers, catchment communities, or environmentalists.

Notes 1

2

3

4

West Moorabool Water Board, brochure ‘Bungal Dam’, under heading ‘Tourist Facilities’. In discussion with C. Coltman, President of Ballarat Anglers Club, 16.4.2003; D. Martin, recreational fisher, 22.5.2003; for discussion of multipurpose reservoir planning see Pigram, Issues in the Management of Australia’s Water Resources, ch. 7 ‘Water for Outdoor Recreation’, pp. 210– 25; Pitts and Anderson, ‘Lake Wivenhoe’. In discussion with P. Holloway, U. Diamond-Keith, both with extended family histories in Lal Lal. DSE, File P2009030, Correspondence between WMWB and Dept re 0513669 (CA 1F S7 Bungal, marked incorrectly on current maps as CA 1S, used for caretaker’s house and shedding) and 0513669A (CA 1N S7 Bungal, proposed filtration site). According to CHW, the two allotments were placed under management of WMWB in 1970 by agreement with the Dept.,

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5

6 7 8

9

10 11

12 13

14

15 16 17 18 19

20 21

22

but there was no formal occupancy or tenancy arrangement established. Combined sale amount just under $10 000. Niven, The Garden City, quote: Introduction includes 1904 excerpt from Melbourne Age. Fisken, ‘Fisken Papers’, 30.10.1870, 6.1.1871; Griffith, ‘Journal’, 21.12.1840; Presland, ‘Journals of G. A. Robinson’, p. 85; D’Ewes, China, Australia and the Pacific Islands in the Years 1853–56, p. 56; PROV, VPRS 44/P0, Unit 594, Surveyor Webster’s report, 1.9.1856; E. Guérard, ‘Sketch of Falls’, Mitchell Library PXC308, 1855; S. Gill, Mitchell Library PXA1983, 1855; R. Daintree, untitled photograph, LaTrobe H2471, 1859–63; LTAEF 40, p. 55, 1861; F. Cogne, ‘The Lal Lal Falls Near Ballarat’, LaTrobe SLV 1117957, 1863; F. Grosse, ‘Lal Lal Falls’, LaTrobe SLV mp000781, 1864; A. Smith, ‘The Moorabool Falls’, LaTrobe SLV H1760, 1866, ‘Lal Lal Falls’, H1768, 1866; F. Kruger, LaTrobe SLV, 980315; 980309 c. 1870 (published 1882); Wm Bardwell, ‘Lal Lal Falls Ballarat’, LaTrobe SLV H161G, c. 1888. Wright, The Bureaucrats’ Domain, pp. 76, 114. PROV, VPRS 242/P0, Unit 304, Meeting resolutions, 15.31867, 9.4.1867. ibid., Letter from Wm Clarke to Dept., 2.11.1868; Letters from H. Clark, 11.11.1868, and Wm Clarke, 2.12.1868; Ballarat Star excerpts, 1.12.1868, 2.12.1868, in file. ibid., Letter from Ballarat councils to Dept. reference a Ballarat Star article applauding public space, in partic., ‘landmark features’ of Mts and Falls, 9.4.1866. ibid., Appointment of trustees, 29.9.1866, 13.10.1866, 17.10.1866. ibid., District Surveyor H. Morres, 1.12.1868; Buninyong Shire to Lands Dept., 18.12.1868. ibid., Petition, 14.12.1868. BCA (Ballarat City Archive), Minutes of Lal Lal Falls Racecourse Trustees exist for 1909–1966, but longer record of meeting minutes for Mt Buninyong, Mt Warrenheip and Lal Lal Falls reserves (almost complete 1873–1964) reveal politics of the committees. PROV, VPRS 242/P0, Unit 304, First formal grazing request, 3.7.1773, granted, 31.8.1877; BCA, Trustees (Mt Buninyong, Mt Warrenheip, Lal Lal Falls) Minute Book, examples of lease guidelines and problems: 11.7.1874, 15.8.1874, 19.9.1874, 24.7.1875, 25.10.1879, 10.4.1880, 9.10.1880, 11.6.1881, 15.12.1881. Niven, Ballarat Pictorial Guide, n.p. Jarrett, Ballarat and District in 1901. Niven, Ballarat Pictorial Guide, under heading ‘Fishing and Shooting’. Ridsdale, The Cast of the Century. BCA, Trustees Minute Book, 14.11.1885, 12.11.1886; quote from Niven, Ballarat Pictorial Guide, in text appended to Lal Lal Falls image. Field Naturalists Club of Victoria, ‘The Excursion to Lal Lal’, p. 98. ibid., p. 97; for Ballarat naturalists see Perry, The School of Mines and Industries Ballarat, p. 60. PROV, VPRS 242/P0, Unit 304, Petition from residents of Lal Lal, 24.6.1904. Griffiths, Three Times Blest, p. 56; BCA, Trustees Minute Book, 1.12.1900.



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23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

PROV, VPRS 242/P0, Unit 304, Trustees to Dept., 9.9.1904; BCA, Trustees Minute Book, 27.8.1904. ibid., Report by Mahony, 4.7.1906, Surveyor Boyd, 20.4.1907, 21.3.1908; test weir completed, 4.7.1908; Turf Club offer, 29.1.1910, 26.2.1910. PROV, VPRS 242/P0, Unit 304, Petition, 2.3.1906, Ball. East response 20.3.1906; BCA, Trustees Minute Book, for example T. Hedrick represented Buninyong for at least 25 years; H. Joseph represented Ballarat East for about thirty years (record exists from 1873 not 1866); D. Kerr (Ballarat) for 33 years. Unit 304 (PROV), the first departmental reserve file for Lal Lal, ends at about this time, and the record is resumed in DSE, RS 9148 (Part Two), and is held by Ballarat Region. Scott was a trustee from at least 1930; Griffiths, Three Times Blest, pp. 9, 121; BCA, Trustee Minute Book, 24.3.1945. BCA, Shire of Buninyong, Mt Buninyong & Lal Lal Falls file (unsorted material in box with Minute books for Mt. Buninyong and Lal Lal reserves), Letter from Shire of Buninyong to Tourist Resorts Committee, 24.5.1937; Letter from Shire of Buninyong to Trustees, 30.12.1937. PROV, VPRS 3844/P0, Units 224, 5, 6; Unit 224, Letter from B. Cohen to Min. of Water Supply, 3.11.1910; For correspondence re swimming hole along Two Mile Creek, Bungaree, see PROV, VPRS 6009/P3, Subject Index, Watercourses General: 1930–31 Letter Nos. 250, 835, 1139, 1179, 1443, 1623, 4377, 14436. For works at Falls Reserve, BCA, Reserve Minute Book, 1.3.1938, 17.3.1940, 17.8.1941, 24.8.1950; access issues, 21.4.1941; Shire of Buninyong, Mt Buninyong & Lal Lal Falls file, Letters from McTigue, 2.10.1940, 12.3.1941; similar issue with same landholder in 1934, NRE, Rs 9148 (Part 2); for road access from north, Minutes 17.3.1944; DSE file P104190 for application. BCA, Reserve Minute Book, 17.5.1950, 18.5.1950, 9.7.1951, 24.1.1952, 14.3.1952, 22.4.1954, 16.4.1956, 1.4.1957, 24.2.1960; Shire of Buninyong, Mt Buninyong & Lal Lal Falls file, letters from Bolte, 18.5.1950, 11.11.1953, 18.1.1954; Notification of subsidies from Tourist Development Authority 1956–57, 1961, 1963; Courier, ‘Lal Lal Falls Scenic Attraction’, 25.7.1951, p. 5; ‘Development of Beauty Spots’, 22.1.1954, p. 3. Pauline Holloway, private collection of family photographs and district records. This sentiment first expressed in writing in 1963, see letter from Robinson, DSE, Rs 9142 (Part 2). BCA, Lal Lal Falls Racecourse Trustees, Minutes 13.11.1909 to 8.6.1966. After race meetings finished a local sports committee supervised more general sporting activities, with revenue raised returned to local infrastructure. Upon dissolution (8.6.1966) the Committee resolved that ‘funds currently in their possession be used for Lal Lal Park and racecourse (beautification and improvement)’, and ‘that the racecourse be re-reserved as part of the public park’. Specific reference to ‘the gift of the old racecourse to the park’ made by architect in reference to the master plan, Shire of Buninyong, Lal Lal Falls file (Ballarat City Archive), 31.7.1967. Courier, 4.8.1967, p. 3.

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34 35

36

37 38 39 40

41 42

43

44

45 46

47 48

49

50 51 52 53

As reported in Courier, 8.3.1968, p. 3. Quotations from Courier , 8.3.1968, p. 3, report of architect’s presentation to Shire meeting. BCA, Shire of Buninyong, Lal Lal Falls file, correspondence re concert, 24.1.1966, 29.9.1967; Concert brochure in file; see also Courier, 20.2.1967, p. 5; for camping, Trustees Minute Book, 25.2.1955, 1.4.1957. DSE, Rs File 9142 (Part 3), WMWB (survey report) to Dept., 9.5.1973. In discussion with P. Holloway. Robin, Defending the Little Desert. Lake Pedder was a glacial lake in Tasmania, flooded in 1972 as part of a hydro-electric scheme; for Thomson Dam, see Dingle and Rasmussen, Vital Connections, p. 283; local response discussed with local Ballarat naturalist, Greg Binns. BCA, Shire of Buninyong, Lal Lal Falls file, Shire to WMWB, 18.11.1976. ibid., WMWB to Shire, 21.3.1980; Council resolution, 7.12.1986; Victoria Parliament, Government Gazette, No. 80 ‘Regulations for the Care, Protection and Management of the Lal Lal Falls Reserve’, 26.9.1979. Notes P. Holloway appended to map of Lal Lal in the 1940s, private collection. Land Conservation Council, ‘Final Recommendations, Ballarat Study Area’, p. 74. DSE, Rs File 9142 (Part 3), Land Conservation Council to Dept., 18.6.1980. Beauglehole, ‘The Distribution and Conservation of Vascular Plants in the Ballarat Area, Victoria’; Craigie & Associates, ‘River Management Study’. Clark et al., Victorian Geology Excursion Guide, ch. 12–2 ‘Ballarat’. DSE, Rs File 9142 (Part 3), Dept. to Western Victorian Climbing Club, 4.1.1991; Courier, ‘Council Bans Lal Lal Falls Access’, 16.11.1990, p. 3; BCA, Shire of Buninyong, Lal Lal Falls file, Coroner’s Report, Summary, 5.10.1990; NRE to Shire, 13.11.1990. DSE, Rs File 9142 (Part 3), Dept. to Shire, 12.12.1986; BCA, Trustees Minute Book, 15.11.1950, 17.9.1895, 2.1.1887; Courier, 17.2.1953, p. 1, 4.9.1962, p. 1, 4.7.1989, p. 1. DSE, Rs File 9142 (Part 3), Assessment and Evaluation Report, 23.2.1997. Nathan, ‘Lost Waters of West Moorabool’, pp. 294–7. Environmental Survey & Assessment, ‘Lal Lal Falls Reserve’, pp. 5–6. DSE, Rs File 9142 (Part 3), Lands Dept. to CHW, 10.7.1995; Environmental Survey & Assessment, ‘Lal Lal Falls Reserve’, p. 6.



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9


West Moorabool’s water history is different from Ballarat’s water supply story. Whereas reservoirs are the narrative finale for Ballarat, they begin the drama for West Moorabool. In history the reservoirs are not assumed. The reality of them ‘becoming’ is revealed in the experience of a rural community losing its water into reservoirs to supply a neighbouring urban catchment. Understanding how that community also lost significant physical and cultural connection with the waterways themselves explains the prominent identity of water as a physical resource divorced from river geography. These intertwined themes help to clarify why contemporary politics of water allocation create such polarised and heated debate in Australia. One reason for the continuing tension between major rural and urban interests is that our history of water settlement, of how unallocated waters transformed into overallocated catchments, currently provides no context for resolution. It is too easily assumed that the economic value of water, whether represented by housing and industry growth in cities, or by rural acreage under crops, is the sole object of the contest. An economic narrative attributes conflict to the diminishing availability of fresh water, presenting water as a natural resource that has now reached its development potential. In a recent journalistic


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essay it was observed that ‘a fundamental shift has occurred in Australia from water being plentiful and free to being scarce, threatened and valuable’.1 West Moorabool’s water history is not one of linear progression from a vast pool of untapped water, available to all, which over time reduced to a highly contested puddle. The ‘settlement’ of water was episodic, punctuated by a number of allocation opportunities as the capacity of the resource expanded. It involved a realignment of people with the landscape of water, which has itself been rearranged. If Beales Swamp and Bungal Dam represent two extreme points of landscape change, the shift has been from people clustered around dispersed but connected pools of reedy water to people quite removed from a distinctly defined body of deep water. And the narrative, extending across 150 years, which most strongly links these two points is the expropriation of West Moorabool’s water by a major urban centre, Ballarat, located in an adjacent catchment. First the water that drained into Beales and then Wilsons, followed by Moorabool and finally Bungal, was largely lost to the catchment community. From the initial loss at Beales, people living near the water were affected in ways largely unrecognised by local and colonial authorities. Surveyors close to the ground could foresee problems, but not so Brough Smyth’s Board of Science that lent such statistical legitimacy to the movement of water from one catchment community to another. It was the very process of expropriation, much more than the actual loss of water, which had such defining and lasting impact. Catchment communities experienced a loss of control over both land and water that incrementally expanded from a reservoir at Beales to a post-Bungal catchment boundary. Water came to represent an entrenched hierarchy of regional interests that was periodically reinforced. The reservoir waterscape which transformed the forest community at Beales and the farming community of Bolwarrah, and challenged the wider catchment community of Lal Lal, became integral to an embattled identity for West Moorabool. To view the reservoirs as Ballarat’s economic assets with hydrological properties only is to misrepresent the cultural complexity of a water settlement process permeated by the expanding intrusion of nearby urban interests.



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West Moorabool’s water history challenges the largely unquestioned principle of inter-catchment transfers by exemplifying the consequent social costs. Of course, some of these costs are a consequence of any water supply dam being constructed, but the case study points to a particular vulnerability of the needs of a catchment community being sidelined when the needs of another catchment community, usually more urbanised, are considered greater. If the essential principle of transferring water remains assumed rather than declared, there can be no comprehensive accounting of costs, and no serious responsibility accepted by all catchment communities for greater self-sufficiency of water supply. West Moorabool River’s problematic status as ‘stressed’, as one where more water has been committed than actually exists, can be characterised in the language of social history as well as hydrology. It would mean that the development requirements of West Moorabool as a distinct rural entity become a starting point for water-sharing arrangements alongside those of Ballarat. This broadening of the allocation framework is not to question the necessity of providing a clean water supply for an expanding regional city, but to give equal consideration to how this can be achieved without disadvantaging the donor community. A shared understanding of historical processes provides a context for this social dimension as fundamental as science provides for the hydrological profiling of Moorabool’s water resource. It is to acknowledge the transfer of water as a process with benefits and costs that depart from a volumetric accounting only. This acknowledgement of social parity as a foundation principle opens the way for a new range of co-operative water options to be negotiated. Not all will be expressed in megalitres. ‘Social’ now joins ‘economic’ and ‘environmental’ as the triple bottom line of policy design for natural resources, but it is the least understood. With scientific representations of environmental problems still so central, and with scientific disciplines in such close alliance with natural resource agencies, more expansive parameters for reviewing water allocations seem unlikely. For many living in the catchment reviews constitute another excluding process, one that is in keeping with their sense of water history. In the modern quest for quantifiable data about a water system shaped largely by products of

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expropriation, landholders continue to enter community forums with rigid investigative frameworks. As I write this there is a particular intensity to water debates. The capacity for our water resource to expand is perceived to have reached unprecedented limitations, there is new legislative provision for environmental reserves to secure a water entitlement, and ten years of low rainfall for much of southern Australia have all combined to unsettle established interests. Historically it has been at such moments that solutions, such as new dams, extended channels, and increased groundwater extractions, are approved in political haste. With water so high on the agenda of governments at all levels, opportunities for both political expediency and policy reform are created. For policy reform to escalate community understanding of water in both its reservoir and wider landscapes is required. Not seeing water, or not allowing it to be seen or touched, constitutes a significant difference between a Beales and a Bungal landscape. A complementary historical narrative to the graduated loss of catchment water as a physical resource tracks the loss of contact with remaining water in the rivers, streams, the unusually predominant springs, and the new reservoirs themselves. Multiple factors have contributed to this essential landscape reconfiguration whereby people once close to water have now such limited access. The two themes of water lost to a stronger urban neighbour and of water connections weakened intersect with water politics that emerged largely from Bungal Dam, which is the catchment’s greatest contemporary symbol of both an expropriation process gone wrong and a water exclusion zone. Rural estrangement from water does not feature in public policy debate and associated community forums, in part because the usual them-and-us divide is not clearly drawn. There is an element of landholder complicity in matters of access, and considerable divisiveness, with only some landholders well situated to embrace water in all its dimensions. There has been little positive valuing of waterways by environmental agencies to offset the negative culture of water resource management that pervades the catchment. How do we strengthen and conserve the social flow of our inland water? What conditions will encourage the return of people to their



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river, spring and reservoir? What experience will foster a new commitment and custodial ethic? Will televised advertisements promoting healthy catchments with a team of riparian planters succeed? Or perhaps a glossy magazine from our Water Minister, wherein he hammers the essential importance of the resource to our everyday lives, will persuade? Both these strategies suffer if people do not know their local geography of water, or if they cannot access rivers except visually from afar. And being disconnected from an accessible history of particular waterways in itself inhibits a capacity to visualise past landscapes, to evaluate elements of change, and to imagine more intimate water space. The now mandatory agency task of appraising social, as well as environmental and economic, assets when diagnosing the ‘health’ of waterways is perhaps a move towards recognising the significance of people having contact with the waterways they are being asked to ameliorate. Lal Lal Falls, along with Moorabool Reservoir, have both been listed in a recent background report on Moorabool River’s water resource as a ‘social asset’. However, a list of swimming and fishing spots along a river does not adequately convey the social meaning and value of a particular site or river reach. There is no appreciation of changing values in a record locked into contemporary usage only. It could mean that Lal Lal Falls rates poorly as a social asset because there is no water recreation. Lal Lal Falls has been imagined as sacred touchstone for the Bundjil spirit of creation, as pleasure-ground for picnickers, swimmers and race-goers, as a setting for private adventures, and as a conservation entity protective of natural values. It comprises a place where nature and culture have created changing landscapes of continuing social value, ones difficult to imagine without its water. The social value of Lal Lal Falls lies in its strong linkage to local and regional communities. It is an evaluation of changes in the extent and character of community linkage that gives a measure of a waterway’s social value. West Moorabool’s history of springs, reservoirs, and special river reserves such as Lal Lal, reveals that a waterscape strong in community connections—or ‘social flow’—is more likely to retain greater natural integrity. There is no one reference point from the past that establishes an ideal degree of linkage in how we value and interact with an environment itself changing. There is no suite of

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policies that supports the social, as opposed to the environmental, flow concept. Measures to manipulate reservoir releases, improve instream vegetation, or install fish ladders would have unquestioned support from natural resource managers. Reinstatement of a pathway to the basin pools of the waterfalls at Lal Lal or management of the adjoining reservoir for people as well as water is less assured. So too is a public revaluation of Crown water frontage, closed roads and spring reserves. Our environmental culture, one at variance with its partial United Kingdom ancestry, is in pursuit of an ecosystem ideal which denies the reality and potential of landscape change driven by a community ideal. In the United Kingdom, there is much greater cultural acceptance of landscape as an expression of migratory waves of people in dynamic play with each other and place. Use of the term ‘countryside’, inseparable from its people, features in a shared language of debate about landscape change across professional and lay communities. In Australia, ‘the environment’, quite detachable from people, is the more common subject for discussion, with ‘the bush’—almost a literary term—more aligned to countryside. There is no Australian version of Richard Mabey, a nature writer with a national audience, compatible with our greater culture of scientising nature. Eric Rolls was an unusual Australian voice that was appraised by environmental professionals, pushed onto their ground, and became a lesser voice. Tim Flannery, with his scientific credentials, is a voice more in tune with our environmental culture but perhaps less challenging. Many of our talented environmental historians remain in academia, largely unheard. Inserting a real social agenda into the heart of water policy is perhaps more difficult in the new settler societies of America and Australia where settlement history is so clearly superimposed on a static picture of an indigenous population in harmony with nature. For many it sets a benchmark from which any move is necessarily viewed as a lessening of intact ecosystems. Unfortunately the cultural legacy of this picture is more the environmental product than the essence of people in nature. In a recent major policy statement presented in the Victorian River Health Strategy, the notion of linkages is used as a measure of integrated landscape health: ‘Maintaining linkages is essentially about making sure that a river is part of the total landscape, that it is not just regarded as a channel running through



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the land’.2 The three dimensions of this linkage are described as longitudinal, lateral, and vertical. They connect upstream with downstream, streamflow with floodplain, and surface waters with groundwater. With biophysical connections targeted for diagnosis, social connections have been ignored, almost. The River Health Strategy does commit to the social values of waterways, but they are restricted to recreation and tourism. A deeper understanding of the linkages between rivers and communities is absent from the scientific framework. There is currently much angst being expressed in Ballarat for its greatest water feature, Lake Wendouree. With low reservoir levels and a new commitment to withhold its replenishment with potable water, this ornamental and recreational lake is returning to its swampy past. Those lobbying for its renewal promote its lake identity as a pleasure water-space of post-gold Ballarat society. An increasing appreciation of the limited nature of the town’s existing water supply is being superimposed on this layer of historical experience and solutions are being canvassed. This cultural connection to water has been virtually severed in rural West Moorabool. Its transition in European times from a landscape inscribed so generously with springs, swamps and rivers to one depleted of visible water features, including the new reservoirs, has not intruded into contemporary water debates, as with Ballarat and its Lake Wendouree. Its waterscape history has evaporated, even though the history of its water allocation is constantly refreshed. This silent slide towards segregation of rural people and local water places is an unacknowledged dimension of West Moorabool’s lost waters. Stories that implant rural water into our cultural world have not successfully countered the disconnection between people and the natural world in our wider environmental culture. Water has been distilled from its past to produce a resource removed from history, landscapes disconnected from community. If water places are locked away, stories are not repeated, grafted, renewed and replaced. They become insulated from different stories of water as a resource that is transferred, spread too thinly, of variable quality. It is a fusion of stories that reunites a landscape of reservoirs with a local geography of water in our cultural imagination. Both have given shape to the other. Conserving a river’s social flow is to strengthen a community’s capacity to value its water as a resource to be shared and as a landscape to be inside.

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Notes 1 2

Fullerton, Watershed, p. 328. The State of Victoria, Department of Natural Resources and Environment, ‘Healthy Rivers, Healthy Communities & Regional Growth’, p. 17.



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—— The Whys and Ways of the Bush and Guide to Bush Plants, or, in Nature’s School, Spectator Publishing Co., Melbourne, 1911. Munro, C. H., Australian Water Resources and Their Development, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1974. Musgrave, W., ‘The Political Economy of Resource Use: Water’, in J. Sinden (ed.), The Natural Resources of Australia, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1972, pp. 165–81. Nathanielsz, R., ‘She’s Right Mate, It’s Only Crown Land’, Victoria’s Resources, vol. 17, no. 2, 1975, pp. 18–21. Natural Resources and Environment Committee, ‘Access to Victoria’s Parks’, Victorian Government Printing Office, Melbourne, 1987. —— ‘Water Resources Management in Victoria South-Western Region Water Management Strategy’, Parliament of Victoria, 1989. New South Wales Health Commission, ‘Guidelines for the Recreational Use of Water Storage Areas’, Sydney, 1978. Newell, Patrice, The River, Penguin Books, Melbourne, 2003. Newnham, W. H. (ed.), Victoria Illustrated 1857 and 1862, Landsdowne Press, Melbourne, 1971. Niven, F. W., Niven’s Guide Book and Souvenir of Ballarat, F. W. Niven & Co., Ballarat, 1885. —— Guide to Ballarat: The Garden City of Victoria, F. W. Niven & Co., Ballarat, 1890. —— Cities and Towns of Victoria: Golden Ballarat, Illustrated by the ‘CrispPhoto’ Process, F. W. Niven & Co., 1892. —— Ballarat Pictorial Guide, F. W. Niven & Co., Ballarat, 1898. —— The Garden City: Being a Series of 31 Magnificent Panoramic Views of Ballarat and District, with Special Descriptive Article, Ballarat Revisited, Atlas Press, Melbourne, n.d. —— The Garden City: Being a Series of 40 Magnificent Panoramic Views of Ballarat and District, with Special Descriptive Article, Ballarat Revisited, Atlas Press, Melbourne, 1910. O’Brien, W., A. McGregor and B. Crawshaw, ‘In-Stream Uses of Water in Australia, Part 1 of In-Stream and Environmental Issues, Consultants Report no. 9’, Water 2000, Department of Resources and Energy. Office of the Commissioner for the Environment, ‘State of the Environment Report 1988: Victoria’s Inland Waters’, Victorian Government Printing Office, Melbourne, 1989. Osborn, B., The Bacchus Story, a History of Captain W. H. Bacchus of Bacchus Marsh, and His Son, Bacchus Marsh and District Historical Society, Bacchus Marsh, Vic., 1973. O’Shaughnessy, Patrick, ‘Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works Catchment Management Policies: A History and Analysis of Their Development’, Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, 1986. Parks Victoria, Aboriginal Affairs Victoria, Ballarat and District Aboriginal Co-operative Ltd., ‘Ballarat Koorie Heritage Trail’, 2003.

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Perry, Warren, The School of Mines and Industries Ballarat: A History of Its First One Hundred and Twelve Years, 1870–1982, School of Mines and Industries, Ballarat, 1984. Pigram, J., Issues in the Management of Australia’s Water Resources, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1986. Pitts, D. and D. Anderson, ‘Lake Wivenhoe: An Example of Comprehensive Water Storage Planning’, paper presented at Australian Water Resources Workshop, 1984. Plumwood, Val, Environmental Culture, Routledge, London, 2002. —— ‘Human Vulnerability and the Experience of Being Prey’, Quadrant, 1995, pp. 29–34. Powell, J. M., The Public Lands of Australia Felix: Settlement and Land Appraisal in Victoria 1834–91 with Special Reference to the Western Plains, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1970. —— ‘Perspectives on Water Management’, in I. Coghill (ed.), Readings in Geography, Sorrett, Melbourne, 1975, pp. 78–109. —— Environmental Management in Australia 1788–1914, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1976. —— Watering the Garden State: Water, Land and Community in Victoria 1834–1988, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1989. —— ‘Enterprise and Dependency: Water Management in Australia’, in Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (eds), Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies, Melbourne University Press, 1997, pp. 102–21. —— ‘Snakes and Cannons: Water Management and the Geographical Imagination in Australia’, in Dovers, Environmental History and Policy, pp. 47–73. Presland, Gary (ed.), ‘Journals of G. A. Robinson’, Records of the Victorian Archaeological Survey, no. 5, 1977. Read, Peter, Returning to Nothing: The Meaning of Lost Places, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1996. Rees, D. B. and S. J. E. Slater, ‘The Impact of Land Uses on Water Quality near Ballarat’, Land Protection Division, Research Report no. 2, Department of Conservation, Forests and Lands, Frankston, 1989. Reisner, Marc, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Viking, New York, 1986. Ridsdale, Keith, The Cast of the Century: A Centenary History of the Ballarat Fish Protection Society and Anglers’ Club, 1899–1999, Ballarat Fish Protection Society and Anglers Club, Ballarat, 1999. Robin, Libby, Defending the Little Desert: The Rise of Ecological Consciousness in Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1998. Rolls, Eric, ‘The End, or New Beginning?’ in Dovers, Environmental History and Policy, pp. 24–46. Sainty, Geoff and Jane Roberts, ‘Oral History, Ecological Knowledge, and River Management’, in Dovers, Environmental History and Policy, pp. 118–45. Scurfield, G., The Hoddle Years: Surveying in Victoria, 1836–1853, The Institution of Surveyors, Australia Inc., Canberra, 1995.

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Seddon, George, Searching for the Snowy: An Environmental History, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1994. Serle, G., The Golden Age: A History of the Colony of Victoria 1851–1861, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1968. Sewell, W. R., J. W. Handmer and D. I. Smith (eds), Water Planning in Australia: From Myths to Reality, Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Australian National University, Canberra, 1985. Sewell, W. R., ‘Comprehensive Water Planning: An Agenda for Change’, in Sewell et al., Water Planning in Australia, pp. 1–26. Shaw, A. G. L., A History of the Port Phillip District: Victoria before Separation, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1996. Sheil, Christopher, Water’s Fall: Running the Risks with Economic Rationalism, Pluto Press, Sydney, 2000. Shoard, M., A Right to Roam, Oxford University Press, London, 1999. Sinclair Knight Merz, ‘Assessment and Review of Crown Water Frontages in the Corangamite Region’, SKM, Melbourne, 1999. ——— ‘Assessment of the Hydrological and Ecological Impacts of Current Farm Dam Development’, SKM, Melbourne, 2002. ——— ‘Moorabool River Water Resource Assessment, Stage A Report’, Corangamite Catchment Management Authority, Melbourne, 2003. Sinclair, Paul, The Murray, a River and Its People, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2001. Smith, David Ingle, Water in Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1998. Smyth, R. B., The Gold Fields and Mineral Districts of Victoria, Government Printer, Melbourne, 1869 (1980 fascimile published by Queensberry Hill Press, Melbourne). —— ‘On the Influence of the Physical Character of a Country on the Climate: Being a Letter to the President’, Transactions of the Philosophical Society of Victoria, vol. 1, 1854. Spreadborough, Robert and Hugh Anderson, Victorian Squatters, Red Rooster Press, Melbourne, 1983. Standing Consultative Committee on River Improvement, ‘The State of the Rivers’, Ministry for Conservation, Melbourne, 1983. Staughton, P. and R. Ashley, ‘Lal Lal Blast Furnace Report’, Committee of Management, Lal Lal Blast Furnace Reserve, 1976. Stewart, Fisher, Ian Drummond, and Associates, ‘Proposal for the Development of a Waterway Management Strategy’, Ballarat Water Board, 1989. Sullivan, Dulcie, ‘The Sullivans of Millbrook, 1857–1993’, D. Sullivan, Millbrook, Vic., 1999. Syme, G. and B. Nancarrow, ‘Fairness and Its Implementation in the Allocation of Water’, Xth World Water Congress, 12–17 March 2000, Melbourne, CSIRO Land and Water, Australian Research Centre for Water in Society, 2000. Taylor, Angela, A Forester’s Log: The Story of John La Gerche and the BallaratCreswick State Forest 1882–1897, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1998.

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Terrill, D., ‘Riparian Zone Management. Review of Literature. Draft Report for the Goulburn Broken CMA’, Centre for Environmental Applied Hydrology, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 1998. The State of Victoria, ‘Better Rivers and Catchments’, Report of the State of the Rivers Task Force, Melbourne, 1987. —— ‘South-Western Region Water Management Strategy’, Natural Resources and Environment Committee, Melbourne, 1988. —— Department of Natural Resources and Environment, ‘Healthy Rivers Healthy Communities & Regional Growth, Victorian River Health Strategy’, Melbourne, 2002. —— Department of Sustainability and Environment, ‘Irrigation Farm Dams: Water—a Finite and Precious Resource’, Melbourne, 2003. —— Department of Sustainability and Environment, ‘Securing Our Future’, Melbourne, 2003. —— Department of Sustainability and Environment, ‘Securing Our Water Future Together, White Paper’, Melbourne, 2004. —— Department of Sustainability and Environment, ‘Sustainable Water Strategy Central Region’, Melbourne, 2006. Thomson, K. and G. Serle, A Biographical Register of the Victorian Parliament 1859–1900, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1972. Turner, J. L. (ed.), The Walsh Papers, Ballan Historical Society, Newlyn, Vic., 1985. Victorian Office of the Commissioner for the Environment, ‘Victoria’s Inland Waters: State of the Environment Report’, Victorian Office of the Commissioner for the Environment, Melbourne, 1988. VRFish, Victorian Recreational Fishing Peak Body, newsletter ‘Fishing Lines’, July 2003; letter from Hall & Wilcox Lawyers, 13.5.2003. Wentworth Group, ‘Blueprint for a Living Continent: A Way Forward from the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists’, World Wide Fund for Nature, Australia, 2003. West Moorabool Water Board, ‘Bungal Dam’, Ballarat, n.d. White, Richard, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River, Hill and Wang, New York, 1995. Wickham, D., C. Gervasoni and W. Phillipson, Eureka Research Directory, Ballarat Heritage Services, Ballarat, 1999. Wilcox Hall & Associates, ‘Access Advice’, paper presented at VRFish Access Forum, 2003. Willis, J. H., ‘The First Century of the Field Naturalists Club of Victoria’, The Victorian Naturalist, vol. 97, 1980, pp. 93–106. Withers, W. B., A History of Ballarat, F. W. Niven & Co., Ballarat, 1870. Wright, R., The Bureaucrats’ Domain: Space and the Public Interest in Victoria, 1836–84, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989.

Theses Allan, Ian, Towards Land Use Planning Conflict Resolution through Spatially Consistent Participatory Scenario Modelling, Master of Arts, Monash University, 1996.

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Fletcher, Tim D., The Cumulative Effects of Recent Land and Water Use on the West Moorabool River, Victoria, Australia, PhD, University of Melbourne, 1998. Gill, William, Social and Scientific Factors in the Development of Melbourne’s Early Water Supply, Master of Science, University of Melbourne, 1981. Murphy, John, The Savages of Bungaree: Irish Settlement in the Bungaree District, BA Honours, Australian Catholic University, 1995. Nathan, Erica, Lost Waters of West Moorabool: A History of a Community and Its Catchment, PhD, University of Melbourne, 2004. Terrill, Daniel I., My Land, Our River: Private Property Rights, Public Goods and Land Use Decision Making in the Riparian Zone, PhD, University of Melbourne, 2002. Winfield, J., Landscape and Community: A Local Environmental History, Masters (not submitted), University of Melbourne, 1995.

Manuscripts Buninyong Historical Society, ‘Aboriginal archaeology of the Yendon-Lal Lal area’, notes based on excursion led by Ray Willis. Chisholm, J. A., ‘The Early Days of the Ballarat Water Supply’, Ballarat Water Commissioners, Ballarat, 1980, copy held by Ballarat Public Library, Australiana Collection. Conroy, Thomas Mayo, ‘Conroy Papers’, MS 9595, Manuscripts Collection, La Trobe SLV (State Library of Victoria). Downey, Leanne, ‘Interview, Mr. David Downey’, Bungaree & District Historical Society, 1998. —— ‘The Wallace Millbrook and District Butter Factory and Creamery Company Limited’, Bungaree & District Historical Society, 1998. Fisken, A., ‘Fisken Papers’, MS 9124, Manuscripts Collection, La Trobe SLV. Griffith, Charles, ‘Journal’, MS 9393, Manuscripts Collection, La Trobe SLV. Holloway, Pauline, Private family collection of life in Lal Lal. Keeble, Eddie, ‘Bungaree 1910–1920: Reflections on Farming Pursuits and Family Life’, Bungaree & District Historical Society, 1994. —— ‘The Evolution of Bungaree and District: Aboriginal Habitation to Productive Titled Units’, Bungaree & District Historical Society, 1995. —— ‘The Keebles of Bungaree, 1863–1991’, Bungaree and District Historical Society, 1991. Linane, Father, Diamond Jubilee, St. Michael’s Bungaree, 1978. Linane, Father (ed.), Verses of Ould Bungaree ... In Key of D Sharp, Upper Moorabool Historical Society, 1969. Linane, Fr. T., ‘Bungaree Jottings’, Ballarat Catholic Diocese Centre, n.d. Odlum, T. R., ‘History of the Ballarat Water Supply from 1852 to 1947’, Ballarat Water Commissioners, 1947, copy held by CHW, Ballarat. Robinson, John and Graeme Bound, ‘Story of Lal Lal State School’, in School Project, Lal Lal, 1951. Smyth, R. Brough, ‘Papers’, MS 1176, Manuscripts Collection, La Trobe SLV. Warrenheip Primary School, ‘History of Warrenheip’, Bungaree & District Historical Society, 1951.

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Bibliography

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Primary sources and government records BCA (Ballarat City Archives) Records relating to Buninyong Shire were transferred to Ballarat City after local government amalgamations in 1994. Trustees Minute Book (for Mt Buninyong, Mt Warrenheip, Lal Lal Falls), 1873– 1964. Minutes of Lal Lal Falls Racecourse Trustees, 1909–1966. Shire of Buninyong, Mt Buninyong and Lal Lal Falls file. BWC (Ballarat Water Commission) Comprehensive records have been retained by Central Highlands Water, Ballarat, and are currently being processed for the Victorian Public Record Office. Minute Books. Continual record from first meeting of the Municipal Councils of Ballarat and Ballarat East Joint Water Committee, 27.1.1862. Early correspondence recorded in the Minutes. Engineers Report Books. Annual Reports, including Final Report with Historic Information, 1983–84. Miscellaneous Papers, Historical Files, Box 1 & 2. Plans, including work by F. Krause and R. Surplice. Index available. Newspaper cuttings. Photograph albums, featuring staff, reservoir construction and reserves. Bungaree & District Historical Society, Bungaree Newsletter no. 33, 1999. Newsletter no. 46, 2003. Repository for the family histories listed under manuscripts. DSE (Department of Sustainability and Environment, Victoria) This ‘Lands’ Department has undergone several name changes in recent times. Most records consulted were active files held by the Ballarat regional office of the Department, with some archived within the region. They constitute the more contemporary records of the Lands Department otherwise held by the PROV. UR & WF File: Unused Road and Water Frontage File. Rs File: Crown Land Reserve File. MLAG (Moorabool Landowners Action Group) Records held by Tom Sullivan, Millbrook. NSW (New South Wales) Archives Roll 2748: Colonial Secretary: Special Bundle—Itineraries and Returns of Commissioners of Crown Lands 1837–1849; Roll 2756: Commissioner of Crown Lands, Portland Bay, List of Runs Assessed. PROV (Public Record Office of Victoria) VPRS 44/P0 Inward Registered and Unregistered Correspondence.

Bibliography


251

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VPRS 242/P0 Crown Reserves Correspondence. VPRS 244/P0 Pastoral Run Plans. VPRS 439/P0 Land Selection Files, Section 49. VPRS 440/P0 Land Selection and Occupation Files. VPRS 441/P0 Crown Land Occupation Files. VPRS 3844/P0 Water Supply Correspondence Files. VPRS 5357/P0 Land Selection and Correspondence Files. VPRS 5920/P0 Pastoral Run Files. VPRS 6420/P0 Township, Parish & County Allotment Registers. VPRS 6605/P0 Chief Commissioner of Crown Lands, Inward Correspondence. VPRS 6008/P0 General Correspondence Files. VPRS 6009/P0 General Correspondence Files, SRWSC. VPRS 9484/SR1 Project Database, Rural Water Corporation. This series was created from SRWSC and RWC records. Some files were retained by inheritor organisations, others were sent to the PROV. The transfer was incomplete, new file systems replaced the previous record system without adequate linkage, and the status of many files as part of the ‘public record’ seems questionable. Most records pertinent to West Moorabool are in storage with Southern Rural Water. VPRS 12011/P1 General Correspondence Subject Files, Fisheries and Wildlife. Royal Mining Commission, Victoria ‘Gold Fields Royal Commission of Enquiry. Report of the Royal Mining Commission Appointed to Enquire into the Condition and Prospects of the Goldfields of Victoria’, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, Melbourne, 1862–63. Victoria Parliament ‘Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Council, Reserves of Land’, vol. 2, Government Printer, 1852–53. ‘Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Council, Return: Respecting Waste Lands’, vol. 2, Government Printer, 1852–53. ‘Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Assembly: Report on Artesian Wells’, Government Printer, 1856. ‘Victorian Parliamentary Papers, Board of Science, First Annual Report’, vol. 2, no. 45, Government Printer, 1858. ‘Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Council, Victoria Progress Report: Select Committee of the Legislative Council on the Management of the Board of Land and Works’, vol. 1, pp. 12–13, Government Printer, 1858–59. ‘Victorian Parliamentary Papers, Board of Science, Second Annual Report’, vol. 2, no. 48, Government Printer, 1859–60. ‘Victorian Parliamentary Papers, Report on the Advisableness of Establishing State Forests’, vol. 4, no. 77, Government Printer, 1864–65. ‘Victorian Parliamentary Papers, Papers Relating to Forest Conservancy’, vol. 3, no. 86, Government Printer, 1874. ‘Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Assembly, Report from the Select Committee on the Water Reserve, Plenty Ranges’, vol. 1, D11, Government Printer, 1876.

252


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‘Victorian Parliamentary Papers, Closed Roads: Progress Report of the Royal Commission’, vol. 3, no. 72, Government Printer, 1878. ‘Victorian Parliamentary Papers, Closed Roads: Final Report of the Royal Commission’, vol. 3, no. 82, Government Printer, 1879–80. ‘Parliamentary Debates, Bullarook Forest’, vol. 36, pp. 2575–82, 85, Government Printer, 1880–81. ‘Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Assembly, Reserves’, vol. 1, C1, Government Printer, 1881. ‘Victorian Parliamentary Papers, Reserves’, vol. 2, no. 20, Government Printer, 1883. ‘Victorian Parliamentary Papers, Reserved Lands in Victoria’, vol. 3, no. 45, Government Printer, 1884. ‘Parliamentary Debates, Ballarat Water Commission—Moorabool and Devils Creek Water Reserves’, vol. 103, pp. 2668–9, Government Printer, 1902–3. ‘Parliamentary Debates, Unused Roads Bill’, vol. 106, esp. pp. 1669–82, 2093– 2100, 2218–30, Government Printer, 1903. ‘Victorian Parliamentary Papers, Royal Commission into the Management of State Forests and Timber Reserves, Report on Wombat State Forest’, vol. 3, Government Printer, 1899–1900. ‘Government Gazette’, Government Printer, Victoria.

Newspapers Ballarat Star, partial index available at La Trobe SLV. Ballarat Punch, 1867–1869. Ballarat Miner and Weekly Star. The Courier.

Maps The following are plans not identified with files from PROV or DSE, or from published sources. Land Victoria, Historic Plan Series GF 75 (Brough Smyth, 1859). Loddon 76A, 76B (H. W. H. Smythe, 1839). Roll Plan 50 (R. Hoddle, 1840). Tourist Map of Ballarat and Creswick Districts (J. M. Reed, 1917). Parish plans: Borhoneyghurk B406; Bungal B548; Bungaree B507; Buninyong B489; Dean D34; Kerrit Bareet K126; Lal Lal L122; Moorabool West M137; Warrenheip W8. Features: FTR307 Bungaree, Beales (R. Surplice, 1860). CHW Archives The Lal Lal Mining Race Co., 1858. Preliminary Survey Water Supply Geelong and Ballarat (R. Surplice, 1859). Ballarat and Ballarat East Water Supply, Geological Survey Sheets 1, 3, 4, & 5 (F. Krause, 1869).

Bibliography


253

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Plan of Portion of the Ballarat Water Reserves, Beales, 1886. Plan of the Western Moorabool Reservation, 1898. Gold Museum, Ballarat Country Lands in the Parishes of Lal Lal and Peerewerrh, County of Grant (C. Webster, 1856).

254


Bibliography

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Index

Australian Natives Association 103, 118, 207 Bacchus family 11, 22, 41, 81, 83–4 Bagge, Christian Hermann, appointment 37; management of Beales 38–41, 43, 47–50, 52–4, 57, 59, 168; departure 49 Baldock, Joseph and Sarah 34–5 Ballarat Acclimatisation Society 49, 201 Ballarat & Geelong Photographic Societies 203–4 Ballarat Anglers Club 189, 228 Ballarat Field Club & Science Society 202 Ballarat Punch 39, 40 Ballarat Water Commission, incorporation 26, 38, 49; litigation 31, 52; reserve management 37–8, 48–50, 59; farm tenants 52–5, 157 Ballarat Water Committee 26; compensation 27, 30, 34–6, 38, 40–3, 57 Bamber, Charles 32 Beales Reservoir 22, 25, 27–9, 33, 38, 40–1, 43, 46, 49, 59, 140–3, 145–6,


148, 151, 153–4, 159, 162, 168, 233, 235 Beales Swamp 12, 15, 21–2, 26, 50, 61, 171, 233 Bent, Sir Thomas 154, 164 Biddle and Brown sawmill 143–4, 148, 156–7 Board of Science 19, 20, 233 Bolte, Sir Henry 169, 172, 208, 212 Bolwarrah settlement 143, 150–3, 156–9, 233 Borders sawmill, location 12, 29, 45; community described 12, 32–3 Brawn, Frederick 55–6, 157, 158 Brown, James Henry 143–8, 151, 156, 203 Bulk Water Entitlements 183, 235 Bullarook Forest, boundary 8, 9, 11, 79, 81, 95, 142; occupancy 11, 12, 21, 22, 27; resource conflict 10, 13, 23, 29, 30, 46, 50, 88, 142–6, 161 Bullarook Tramway Co 36 Bungaree District/Roads Board/ Shire 21–2, 30–1, 36, 39, 40, 46, 50, 52–3, 55–7, 60, 87–8, 113, 125, 135 Buninyong 87–8, 98, 110, 120, 124–5,

4/4/07 8:06:24 AM

130, 172, 176–8, 188, 197–8, 205–6, 210, 212, 216, 218–20 Butcher, Dunbar 102 Calwell family 152, 153 Carey family 97–8 Catchment Towns Preservation Committee 178 Central Highlands Water 57, 61, 63–4, 112, 171, 181–3, 194, 225 Chirnside family 87 Clark, Henry 12, 22, 32, 35, 36 Closed Catchment debate 48, 50 Closed Roads, definition 85–6; Lal Lal parish 81, 89, 90; landscape types 79, 80; Royal Commission findings 87–90 Clow, J.M. 22 Committee of Management, Lal Lal Falls, Mts Buninyong and Warrenheip 196–8, 201, 204–8, 210, 218–19 Conroy family 96–8 Creameries 110, 128–30 Crown Water Frontage, resource description 74–5; legislation 78–9, 81 Deakin, Roger 84 Department of Lands, crown water frontage 71, 75–6, 78, 86, 93–4, 97, 99, 102–4, 193; Lal Lal Falls 196, 205, 212, 219–20, 225–6; Moorabool reserve 144–6, 148–50, 154; occupancy at Beales 29, 30, 35, 36; spring reserves 113, 117–20, 124, 126–7, 132 Department of Mines 19, 20 Department of Water Supply 60, 154 Devils Creek 142–3, 145–6, 149, 152 Diamond, Charles 99–100 Diamond’s Flat 190, 192, 208 Environmental flow 4–5, 139, 183, 237 Fishing 49, 71, 93, 102–3, 134–5, 188–90, 200, 207–8, 212, 214, 236 Fisken family 11, 22, 27, 41, 77–8, 81–4, 88, 130 Fisken’s Dam 201, 206

256


Friends of Moorabool Reservoir 64 Gabriel, Lewis 152–3 Geelong 7, 52, 122, 125, 140, 153, 161, 167, 169–70, 174, 183, 188, 189, 204–5, 210, 218 Goldfields, licences 11, 14–15, 21–2, 27, 29–30, 36, 40, 124; illegal occupancy 12–13, 21–2, 34, 40; water shortage 11–22 Green Springs 128–35, 169 Grigg, William 43 Groundwater 42, 110, 135, 182, 228, 235, 238 Higgins family 96–8 Hodgkinson, Clement 114, 141–2, 145–7 Hogan, Edward (Ted) M.L.A 119 Holden, Jack M.L.A 146, 153–4, 156–8, 161 Illegal occupancy, crown frontage 94, 98, 104, 193; forest 12, 13, 21–2, 34, 40; reserves 117, 119, 124, 127, 135; claims of 147–51, 153–4 Kirk’s Reservoir 14, 49, 58–9 Kirton, J. 55 Kittelty, J. 33 Krause, F. 27, 42, 53, 203 Lake Colac 86 Lake Wendouree 238 Lal Lal Catchment Landcare Group 64, 121, 127–8, 132 Lal Lal Falls Reserve, access 202, 207, 212, 215, 217, 219–20, 225; artists 194–5; excisions 212–14; master plan 210–12; petitions 198, 205–6, 227; public land assessments 217–18; vegetation 205, 211, 218, 221–2, 227 Lal Lal Forest 167, 193, 217 Lal Lal Racecourse Committee 198, 204–5, 210, 220 Lal Lal Turf Club 198, 205–6 Lal Lal Waterworks Association 27, 29, 38, 41, 77, 83, 148 Land ‘jobbing’ 82–3 Land Conservation Council 103, 120, 126, 130, 217–18

Index

4/4/07 8:06:24 AM

Landscape debates 3, 5, 72–4, 102, 135, 235–8 Ligar, Charles 78–9, 142 Local Government Planning Schemes 173–6, 178 Lower Moorabool Falls 208 MacDonald, Sir William 130–2 Mahony, J. 54 Marsh, George Perkins 37, 48 Melbourne Field Naturalist Club 202, 218 Millbrook 70, 98, 110, 128–30, 134, 198, 200 Mining water companies 14, 21, 27, 32, 35, 41 Mollonghip 111–12 Monbiot, George 73 Monett, Oliver 38 Moorabool Enterprise Sluicing Co. 15–16 Moorabool Falls 190, 194–5, 197, 199–200, 202–3, 207, 210, 222–3, 225, 228 Moorabool Landowners’ Action Group (MLAG) 172–6, 178–9, 181, 183 Moorabool Lodge 62–3 Moorabool pipeline 111, 154, 157 Moorabool reservoir reserve 144, 147–8, 150–1, 153–5, 157–9 Moorabool Shire 181, 220, 225–7 Mt. Buninyong 110, 125–6, 196–7, 206, 210, 212 Mt. Warrenheip 12, 23, 42, 110, 114, 117–18, 120–1, 197, 206 Mudd, Christopher 53, 59 Municipal rates 26, 52, 57, 127 Murphy family 177 Murray, Stuart 155–6, 158–9, 161 Murray, Thomas 158, 160–1 Navigators 122–6, 128 Niven, F.W. Publishing Co. 58, 199 O’Brien, Surveyor 122–3 O’Malley, M. 29, 34 O’Toole family 118 Oddie, James 148, 203 Parkin, John 177

Passing flows 41, 159–60 Patton, Cornelius 123 Peerewerrh 41, 84 Peet, James 29 Petitions 4, 13–14, 54, 99, 111–12, 115, 117–18, 124–5, 143, 146, 205–6 Piscatorial Council 102 Plenty Ranges 48 Pound Creek Spring 125–8, 132, 136 Public Reserves Protection League 103 Reisner, Marc 84 Reserve rangers 36–7, 39, 40, 49, 50 Reserves, arson 36–8, 50; beautification 57–60, 199, 200; rabbits 46, 223; sabotage 36–7, 40, 50; thistles 46, 148, 196, 223 Residence and Cultivation Licence 21, 22, 40, 114, 143 Richardson, Richard 149 River picnics 4, 63, 87, 208 Robson, John 49 Rockies Water Reserve 76–7, 82, 197 Royal Commission into Closed Roads 85–9, 92–3 Sawmills 11–13, 21–2, 29, 32–4, 36–9, 41, 46, 110, 116, 143–4, 146–9, 156–7 Schroeder, Hermann 41 Section 42, 1865 Land Act 22, 111, 143–8, 153–4 Shoard, Marion 73 Sluicing 14, 16 Smyth, Brough 14, 19, 20, 233 Social flow 4–5, 69, 105, 132, 228, 232, 235–6, 238 Soil Conservation Authority 171, 174 Springbank 64, 125 State Rivers and Water Supply Commission (SRWSC) 56, 103, 125, 152, 154–6, 158–61, 169, 174, 182, 207, 210 Swimming holes 71, 134, 106–8, 212, 218, 221, 236 Taylor J.H. 12–14, 17, 19, 20 Thomson Dam 215

Index


257

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Timber reserves 13, 99, 113, 117–18, 142–3, 145, 197 Tooloora Baluk 7, 10, 11 Two Mile Creek 15, 32, 42 Unused Roads and Water Frontages Bill 91, 93 Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (Planning Appeals Board) 178–81 von Mueller, Ferdinand 48 VRFish 103 Wallace, Millbrook and District Butter and Creamery Company 98, 129 Warrenheip 110, 111, 116, 122, 198 Water permits 15 Water reserves (springs)

258


encroachment 118–20, 127; reservation process 109, 111, 113–14; sale of 120–1, 124–5, 127–8, 133–4; vegetation 110, 121–2, 127–8 Waterscape change 2, 5, 69, 79, 85–9, 95, 98, 101, 109, 132, 135, 188, 190, 208, 212, 220, 233, 235–8 Wathawarrung 7, 8, 110, 188 Webster, C. 69, 81–2, 89, 194 Wells 42–3, 112 West Moorabool Water Board 169, 170–1, 174–6, 180–1, 182, 189, 190–3, 212, 215–18, 225 Wilson, Noble 49, 52–6, 59, 150 Wilsons Reservoir 32, 46, 61 Yendon 125

Index

4/4/07 8:06:25 AM

Lost Waters: A History of a Troubled Catchment

Troubled Waters

Troubled Waters

Troubled Waters

Troubled Waters

Troubled Waters

Troubled Waters

A Ravel of Waters

A Ravel of Waters

A Ravel of Waters

Russian Path Dependence: A People with a Troubled History

A Partial History of Lost Causes

A Partial History of Lost Causes

Cambodia's Curse- The Modern History of a Troubled Land

Cambodia's Curse- The Modern History of a Troubled Land

Troubled Bones: A Medieval Noir

Troubled Waters: The Geopolitics of the Caspian Region

The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History

The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History

Handbook of Catchment Management

A Lost Touch of Magic

A Lost Touch of Bliss

Dragons of a Lost Star

Dragons of a Lost Star

A Lost Touch of Innocence

Dragons of a Lost Star

Dragons of a Lost Star

Dragons of a Lost Star

Dragons of a Lost Star

Dragons of a Lost Star

Dragons of a lost star

Lost Waters: A History of a Troubled Catchment

Troubled Waters

Troubled Waters

Troubled Waters

Troubled Waters

Troubled Waters

Troubled Waters

A Ravel of Waters

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