ALEXANDRINA LOCAL HISTORY ARCHIVE

 

Interview with Jim Marsh, Barrage Superintendent at Goolwa on Monday 27th September 1999

Interviewer  Rose Geisler

Transcribed by ?

Punctuation by G.W. (Frodo) Krochmal

Corrections by Jim & Maria

 

Oral History is "A picture of the past in people's own words" (B. Robertson, 2000 Oral History Handbook). 

It is a spoken account, reflecting personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning.

 

Tape1

Side A

Jim how did you come to be at Goolwa as Barrage Superintendent?

I started life, I took over my Grandfather’s vineyard when I left school and wasn’t particularly happy at that

Where was that?

In Renmark West.  It was an old property, fairly run down and money was tight, and I suppose I didn’t properly have my heart in it, and father and I discussed it and we knew we had to borrow money to redevelop the place, to make a go of it, and - as I said - I didn’t have my heart it, so we didn’t think it was a good investment, so we decided to sell it and I took up the opportunity to go to Woomera doing a construction job

What period was that, Jim?

This was in 1971, I think it was.  We were doing work associated with the installation of the Narrungar tracking station.  Then I worked around Australia for several years on that sort of work

How old were you then Jim?

I was about twenty four when I left home

When were you born Jim?

Born in 1945, and ended up in meeting my wife Maria initially at the Berri Cannery, but she did come from southern Queensland, so I tracked her up there and one thing led to another, so with family responsibilities I thought I’d better look for something more permanent, and Mum used to send me up the Murray Pioneer regularly to where we were living in Brisbane, and I saw this advertisement for a supervisory position up at Lake Victoria (storage) with the then E&WS Department.  So I applied for it and after the usual protracted government red tape, I finally obtained, and was confirmed in, the position and started just after Easter in 1976.  I spent six years as Assistant Superintendent at Lake Victoria, which was probably at the height of its re-development - after it had been left in limbo for quite some years due to the vacillating over the proposed Chowilla dam, because had Chowilla gone ahead, all the Lake Victoria complex lock 7 and 8 & 9 would have been inundated, so consequently there was no work done - very little maintenance, no capital works.  When  Chowilla was finally put to rest, they had about ten years lack of maintenance and development to catch up on.  I arrived just in time to pick up with that.

We rebuilt the inlet and outlet regulators, put new gates in and refurbished all the head works, built miles and miles of levee banks, or refurbished them.  We topped them, widened them, straightened them up and carted thousands and thousands of tons of stone to face the insides, to stop the wash. I worked out there with a gang of about seven or eight blokes and in three years we laid by hand six and a half thousand cubic metres of stone.

Suppose it was local stone, was it?

It was local limestone yes.  Something that doesn’t happen very often these days, hand laying the stone, but it gave me a bit of empathy with the guys that built the place over at Goolwa here, and up there where they spent years laying stone, because all those structures were initially protected with hand-laid stone.  I’d been there for six years and George Ferguson, who was my boss, had the opportunity to move down here to Goolwa -  so I applied for his position and was successful, so I was superintendent at Lake Victoria for six years.  That involved the running of the Lake Victoria complex which was the lake with two, three regulators and well as lock 7, 8 & 9 that was operated as one unit. We used to balance one against the other, maintaining South Australia’s entitlement flow and impounding any surplus water for later in the summer when it was needed.  Basically, we set the flow into South Australia every morning, and continued with the development, we did make a lot of improvements over that time.

You had your family up there?

Yes, Daniel was six months old when we moved up there, Fran and Jo were both born there.  All my kids did their education through correspondence and School of the Air, which was lucky in my selection of mother for my children, because they really did well under her guidance.  We had a hut down the back yard, School of the Air radio in it.  In those days it was a little more flexible that it is now, in that we were South Australians on South Australian correspondence, but we could still avail ourselves of the facilities of School of the Air from Broken Hill - which was New South Wales, and the far west Darling - I forget what they called it - sort-of-zone had an itinerant New South Wales government-funded teacher.  An itinerant teacher who came out periodically and gave a bit of extra supervision and help with lessons, so we had it coming from three ways and it was very good for the kids.  They did well.  They translated into the formal school system very well when we came down here, and they’ve all gone on to be successful in their careers so....

They didn’t go to school until they came to Goolwa?

Daniel did, I think, seven weeks - the last seven weeks of Grade 7 at Goolwa - before he went to High School, and he just took to it like a duck to water.  We’re quite proud the way our kids have come on - a good background.  I think the life up there was a great place to rear kids, and it taught them to be self-reliant, self-sufficient, independent, think for themselves - some of those qualities you like to see in people.  But then, in May 1981, I had a phone call one morning to say that George Ferguson, whom I succeeded in the position, who was the Superintendent at Goolwa Barrages, had drowned - fallen out of a boat up at Boundary Bend  in Victoria while he was up there chasing Murray crays on a cold morning --------

Joy’s husband?

Joylene Ferguson's husband yes.  He was a local Goolwa bloke, it was always his ambition to get back here, and he managed to hold it for six years before he met with his accident.  So that position became available, and I had partially considered that as an option when George retired - that I would be interested in it; and we weren’t ready to go then, but I said to Maria  that whoever gets it is likely to hang on to it, and it won’t become available when we want it, so if we wanted to move to Goolwa we had to grasp the nettle while it was there - so we applied for it, along with twenty-seven other people and it took about six months.  Finally, after a couple of interviews, I succeeded to the position and moved down here and started on 10th November, 1987.

Jim, tell me about the history of the barrages, and how they came to be constructed.

Well, it really follows on from the construction of the locks on the river, which started in 1915 with Lock One.  The original impounding of the river was to aid navigation, and it was conceived at the height of the paddle boat trade, but by the time the project finally got underway, in 1915, the paddle boat trade had died. But the irrigation of Mildura and Renmark, under the instigation of the Chaffey brothers, was well underway, so there was a new need to impound water for irrigation, which was the river flows in the winter when nobody wants extra water, and the need to impound it so that they’ve got it to pump in the summer.  That scheme was, as I said, instigated in 1915.  It was approved in 1912 and they kicked off in 1915 with Lock One.  There were two gangs of blokes travelling up the river in the South Australian section - they built Locks 1 - 9 including 7, 8 & 9 which are in New South Wales waters, and, at that time, Lake Victoria in the far south western corner of New South Wales was not perceived to be of any value, so that they were quite happy to see this controlled by the South Australian government, and the three locks associated with it, which enabled it to be operated on the gravity-feed system.  The initial project to control the whole like basin involves some seventy structures, there was a whole series - I think nearly thirty structures on the Darling, and nearly thirty up the river too - it goes up to Lock Twenty-Six at Torrumbarry.  I don’t know whether there were any plans for further up than that, and several on the Edwards and Murrumbidgee.  Because of the change in the emphasis - with the decline of the paddle steamer trade, a lot of those were not gone ahead with - typified by the gaps in the numbering of the locks.  You’ve got one to eleven up to Mildura, and then there’s nothing between eleven and fifteen, and another gap up to Lock number twenty-six, so all those intervening structures didn’t get built, so there was a surplus of funds at the end of the scheme.  In the early thirties, I think it was about 1930, they realised this and they looked at some of the other projects , or other needs for the scheme for the whole basin,  so that it was decided to add to the already-being-constructed Hume Weir, (that was kicked off in 1928), and they decided to add another thirty feet to the height of the Hume Weir, to build the  Yarrawonga Weir and create that large mid-river regulatory storage which really acts as a bit of a safety valve, it’s a shock absorber for floods.  They can dump huge quantities of water out of it - they take some of the impact out it because a lot of those floods that come down the Goulburn and the Ovens into that impoundment come down very quickly and they can take some of the force out of it

As the South Australian Government in the meantime had long foreseen, or been made aware of the need, for some sort of a structure at the Murray Mouth.  They came up with a scheme, designed it and submitted a proposal and it was approved.  Goes back a long way - the early settlers - the country around Mundoo Island, Hindmarsh Island was settled in about 1840-1841. It was mainly cattle grazing because of the ephemeral nature of the Murray and the very flat terrain, it was a constant battle of forces between the sea and the river.  You’ve got fresh water coming down - it pushes the sea water out and everything’s hunky dory, but if you get a dry year and the river doesn’t flow, then the tides push the sea water in, and , as in 1915 it was a bad drought year, the sea water penetrated up to Mannum - they were catching Mullet at Mannum, and there was a sighting of a shark at Tailem Bend, and a dolphin at Murray Bridge!  I know the PS Decoy, and I think the Torella - commissioned by the SA Railways - who had large marshalling yards at Tailem Bend on the Adelaide to Melbourne line - these two steamers were commissioned to go up to Teal Flat, which is about twenty miles above Mannum, I think, - somewhere above Mannum - to flood these barges and bring back barge-loads of fresh water to be pumped up the cliff to the marshalling yards to provide fresh water for the locos.

Because the river was too salty?

The river was too salty to use

What year was that?

1915.         In the late nineteenth century Governor Jervois, about 1888 or something, when Governor Jervois first drained the swamp at East Wellington and created the first of those reclaimed swamp dairy areas.

On the eastern side of the river, not the Jervois side?

No, on the opposite side - that was the first one, and that sort of set the tone so subsequently most of those Cumbungi – the local bullrush - swamps with their adjacent levees, the levees were built up, and the swamps were drained and ploughed, and turned into pasture.  And then, below river level, they just cut sluice-ways through the levees and they were gravity-irrigated.  Now they had two problems in the summer - either the river level was that low that they couldn’t get the water into their irrigation bays, or it was too salty to be any good anyway.  So from that point of view there was a quite a strong agitation for quite a while.  It was added to after the First World War, because a lot of soldier re-settlement went into that area - a lot more development with returned soldiers, so they added their weight to the argument.  Also there was a lot of pressure from the people down the Goolwa end, especially the local landholders, the Rankines, who had a lot of land at that time. They actually tried to build a barrage, a weir across Mundoo Channel, which is the one with the most direct access between the lake and the sea, to try and stop the ingress of sea water into that reach, to hold a pocket of fresh water for their stock for the summer, because there is no source of fresh water on those islands and when they are surrounded by brackish water, that’s all the cattle had to drink.

The ruins of the construction are still there, aren’t they?

No, that’s the second one.  That first one was destroyed in a storm - the first Easter storm came along and washed it away - I think it was built in the late 1890’s the first one.  They finally persuaded the government to do something about it and it was built in 1918.  A wooden structure - the remains are still there just above the current Mundoo barrage, and that was just a wooden frame structure with big wooden flap valves on it - wooden sluices.  Didn’t stand the ravages of the weather.  There are two stories - one that it was blown up with dynamite by someone, and the other story is that it was destroyed in a storm, and I prefer to go for the storm story.  That’s more credible, I don’t see why anybody would want to blow it up.  And that’s where it stayed until the present structure was built in the late 1930’s.  They finished Lock 7 - as I said there were two gangs - building locks up river.  Lock 7 was the last one finished in 1934 by which time the design-work had been done, the planning, preparation, ordering of the materials.  They knew what they needed, they knew what they had to do, so basically the bulk of 1934 was spent in bringing all of that plant down to Goolwa, mainly with the Captain Sturt and The Industry.  The Industry was then the government’s snagging boat.  There were two steamers, and it was still the Engineering Chief’s Department at that time owned both those boats.  The Captain Sturt was built, commissioned especially for the lock and barrage constructions.  She was a Mississippi-style steel hull, stern wheeler, was put together at Cincinnatti, Ohio on the Mississippi, and then sent overland to San Francisco

and shipped to Australia in sections, brought to Port Adelaide, carted over the mountains by bullock drays, and assembled at Nonoa Landing above Mannum, which is the same site which Captain Randall built the Mary Ann.  And she was re-assembled and put in the water in 1915.  They brought her to... -  where did she go to get fitted out? ...Murray Bridge or somewhere to put the superstructure on it.  They put the hull together and she was built beam-on to the water on skids, and slid sideways down into the river.  She had a steel hull which our local steamer operators knew was not the thing for the Murray water - it was too corrosive, which was why the Murray steamers have a composite hull which is a wooden bottom, wooden sides up to the water-line, then steel above that.  The Captain Sturt was only on the water for twenty, twenty-five years, and she had absolutely had it by the time she finished.  Really, her working life had finished by the time they started the barrages.  She had a beautiful, big steam plant and she had a steam-powered DC Dynamo which could supply electricity.  So she was moored above the Goolwa barrage works for the whole five years 1935 to 1940 as a floating power plant.  She supplied steam and electricity

A wonderful old work-horse

She was sold in - when they finished the project and they had the big auction in April, 1941.  She was sold off for two hundred and five quid to Captain George Ritchie, who wanted to use it as a boarding house.  Captain Bob Reed, (Tommy Reed's father), and a skeleton crew were on hand - the deal was that whoever bought it, she would be delivered to a point of their nomination within reason, I think it was within half a day’s steam from Goolwa she’d be delivered by the Department.  Captain Ritchie, Sir George Ritchie as he was, he was the local MP and town dignitary, wanted her just above the Goolwa ferry site, basically where she ended up anyway.  She was delivered on a Friday afternoon at about three o’clock, time was running out - she had a leaky hull - so they nosed her in on the bank and threw a line ashore, and Bob Reed said to his crew “We’ll slip up the old Australasian Hotel”, which was on the corner only about 200 yards from where the boat was, the top floor of which had been taken over by the Department as an administration and pay offices, so he sent his crew up, this is before the days of Eftpos and cheques and automatic pay into your bank account - they got their wages by cash and they had to get them before four o’clock - so they scooted up there, got their pay and signed for it, then the idea was that they’d go back to the boat, and lay her alongside and moor her properly.  Trouble was, there was two hotels between the pay office and the boat.  Next morning she was sitting on the bottom at the unusual angle which she still sits at!  That’s why she’s where she is.  She was supposed to be in closer to the bank, and laying parallel to it.

Jim, when they were bringing the equipment down from Lock 7 where did it land first?  Which was the first barrage built?

They did the same thing at Goolwa as they did up river, they had two separate gangs - one gang was specifically for Goolwa, because Goolwa was the deepest and most complex structure, the other gang kicked off at Mundoo - they built Mundoo barrage first - had a big camp there, and they both worked simultaneously and the gear was apportioned appropriately as needed.  I remember Berry Reid telling me - he was on, I think, the Captain Sturt - and they were towing some plant down, including several barges, one of which was a pile-driving barge, and the weather got pretty rough, and the pile-driving barge started to sink.  Freddy Pane, I think, was the skipper, and he told them to cut it loose, and as most people know the lake, Alexandrina, is like a great saucer, it’s very broad but very shallow, and this thing sank, and they headed around Point Sturt with their remaining barges looking for more sheltered water, and they went back next morning to find this thing, he said it was like an oil derrick out in the middle.  Sank in about twelve feet of water.  It had about a thirty-five or forty-foot derrick on it and there it was - no problem finding it - it was just sticking up in the middle of the lake!  They had a couple of other boats - they would have passed some ropes under it, and pushed some drums down into it or something.  They got it up and brought it in.  There was a lot of that sort of thing went on.  They took it in their stride.  These days every time it happened there would be an Inquiry.

Jim, those two gangs - they had their families with them?

There weren’t any families in the Mundoo gang.  Most of the admin. engineering, senior people, were at Goolwa - some of them had their families.  There were several little settlements in some of the flat areas tucked into the sides of the sand dunes.  It wasn’t a very congenial spot, because up to 1934, Sir Richard Peninsula was a grazing lease and a bloke ran cattle and horses on it, and they were fairly well eaten out.  But as soon as the decision was made to build these structures, the government resumed the lease and immediately de-stocked it, but it took some years to recover.

Is that why you can see fences along there?

Yes, it’s still the original fence.  That one that goes out into the reed bed. There were these little flat areas sort of tucked into the dunes and there was an official sort of camp

built at Goolwa where the houses are now - there’s a large flat area.  Most of what’s the front lawn was the stone dump, but there were some houses and accommodation behind it

They had a series of two and four room pre-fab houses.  They were bolted together in panels, you just unbolted them, stacked them up in piles and put them on barges and brought them down to the next job.  They came down here, some were built on site, I think one or two were built over on the Mundoo camp, and some were erected in the town at Goolwa.  You had to be fairly well preferred to qualify for one those houses, but a lot of the blokes just built shacks off their own bat down here in these little pockets.  Not very salubrious sort of places, and they each had a name with them - and they were as Hot-as- Hell, Sandy-as-Hell and Windy-as-Hell - that’s the sort of name they were given

Did they have little gardens Jim?

I think some of the women tried, because you can still see remnants of stuff in the dunes - there’s a bit of Red Hot Poker, and a few succulents, and the every present Freesias.

I picked the Freesias every year, and that’s over sixty years ago!

They don’t spread too much, but they’re always there. It was a hard life I believe because there wasn’t fresh water there either - they had to cart everything in.  The women did it tough.

Would the children have walked to school?

There was some arrangement - a bloke had - what did they call it? - a sort of char-a-banc -a sort of open long bus-thing on a truck body.  He used to ...  some of the guys lived as far away as Port Elliot, I forget the name of the guy, but Max Pearson will be able to tell you, he used to bring the blokes to work for a seven o’clock start, and then he’d back-load with the kids to school, and then reverse the procedure in the afternoon, he’d bring the kids back to camp in time to pick up the men when they knocked off at five o’clock, and then take them home again.  When my kids started here in 1987, there was a pre-fab weatherboard classroom against the fence, by the entrance to the school, that was put there in 1934 to accommodate the children of the barrages workers.  I reckon it should have been classified by the National Trust as the longest standing temporary school building in Australia,  (laughter) , because it was there until 1991-92, I think, before they shifted it, when they started building the new school

I wonder where it went?

It got shifted from there, around to the other side, and it was a music room for a while and then it eventually got sold off, and I don’t know quite where it went.  I think it got demolished - somebody bought it and demolished it for materials.  When you think of the population of South Australia, it was probably only about quarter of a million people, and this scheme was devised and designed, planned and built completely in-house by the then Engineer-In-Chief's Department. I reckon it’s an Australian achievement for South Australia as the Snowy Mountain scheme was for the country.  It was one hell of an engineering feat - it was built on time and within budget.  It was a big fillip for the economy of Goolwa, because these guys arrived at the end of the Great Depression, and it really put Goolwa on the map again economically, brought a lot of money into the town - five hundred and fifty thousand pounds was a lot of money in those days when wages were about five quid a week.  But it was hard work - everything was done, when you look at the old films and photos, there wasn’t much steel around, all the structural members were timber - there was a lot of Oregon, there were flitches of Oregon up to eighty feet long used here.  The longest derrick boat had a ninety-foot boom - that was Oregon.  About the only thing that had a steel boom was the old dipper dredge - the old Manno ....(can’t decipher words here)

So Goolwa barrage was being constructed at the same time?

Yes, they took five years to build Goolwa, and in the same time the gang over at Mundoo

built Mundoo,  Boundary Creek, Ewe Island and Tauwitchere.

Even the long Tauwitchere one?

Yes, but they’re shallow.  Half the time the Tauwitchere site would have been just about  - during the summer.  Tauwitchere holds back, at the best of time, about three foot six of water, whereas at Goolwa you’re looking at twelve to fourteen feet. So they had to be a lot more serious with their coffering off.  There was a lot of work in Goolwa in the   coffering off - they had to put down a double row of sheet piling about twelve feet apart  It’s only sand and silt, there’s no bottom to the water, it’s just silt as far as you care to go.  The design of the Goolwa barrage is completely different to Tauwitchere and Ewe Island - because of that they had to drive a double row of sheet piling, and then when they excavated the actual barrage foundation site, the silt they took out was dumped between the two rows of sheet piling to create the coffer-dam and because of the silt and sand, there was a constant influx of water so they had to have pumps going all the time to keep the site dry

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jim MARSH

Tape 1

SIDE B

 

Because of the uniqueness of Goolwa, because of its depth, they had to make special provision, because the barrages are the only structures that have to be designed to withstand pressure from both sides, as in a storm surge, we get reverse head.  Normal operation in the summer, we can get up to a metre and half head from the top side, the fresh side, but that can be reversed in a big storm.  I’ve seen better than that, closer to three metres in a big storm -

I’ve seen five feet of water being blown away from the top side of the Goolwa barrage, and the sea water built up so much it was spilling over the top.  Fully locked up and there was a foot of sea-water pouring over the top!

Was that 1994?

Yes, probably about then.  We had three days of fifty-five knot south westerlies, and it just blew all the water out into the lake, and blew the lake up to Mannum.  It pushed the water up - along the water front at Mannum, the river level rose by a metre, just as a result of that wind effect, and it took a metre and a half away from in front of the Goolwa barrage.

It got that low that it actually stopped the ferry for about an hour an a half - it couldn’t get into the landing, the river level was that low!

That’s when the boats were high and dry?

Yes, boats high and dry everywhere.  Because of this they had to angle-drive these piles, there are at least two rows of piles down either side that are driven at about a sixty degree angle in opposite directions, so that whichever side the force of water - what they call the overturning moment - whichever direction it comes, it’s counter-acted by these piles driven at an angle.  They left about three feet of the piles above the finished ground level, they got a team of axemen from the then-Harbours Board  down from Port Adelaide to dress the tops of the piles, they were like an inverted cone, tapered, into a shoulder about two feet below the top of the pile, and the idea of that was to lock them in.  When they poured the concrete foundation around them, it actually keyed them in.  There was no way that the foundation could be pulled off the top of the piles, it was keyed in by this reverse taper.

As well as that, they built what they call crow’s nest, which were huge, roughly circular, like a magpie’s nest that went around the piles to tie the whole thing into the reinforcing that was laid along both directions.  It’s one thing about Goolwa, there’s something like seven and a half thousand tons of reo in Goolwa barrage.  It’s amazing.  Every time you try and drill a hole you hit a piece of reo -  it will never fall apart - they did it well!

What’s ‘reo’?

Reinforcing rod and it’s heavy reo, too.  It’s three-quarter of an inch diameter.  They poured a three-foot thick slab, forty-foot wide - that’s the foundation slab under the Goolwa barrage.  It extends ten feet upstream and twenty feet downstream.  Then on top of that they built the hundred and twenty eight piers that comprised the whole thing.  The river bed is fairly broad and shallow.  The actual channel is out where the lock chamber starts.  The Goolwa lock chamber, which is forty eight bays out from the abutment  - two hundred and fifty metres is on the southern bank of the channel of the river as it goes past that site.  They had to go out there to get water deep enough for the lock chamber, and the navigable pass which holds about fourteen feet of water - that’s the deepest part of the water, which is adjacent to the lock chamber.  When you go out to bay ninety, then they start to step up again.  The floor is in a series of steps.

When you talk about the channel, it’s the natural channel?

Yes, the natural channel of the river.  It tends to go from where the lock chamber is, heads right across and tends to hug Hindmarsh Island

So it wasn’t      (...?) then

It was, yes, because when Captain Sturt came down in 1830, it was a low flow period

in January 1830, in a whale boat that probably drew two foot six, three foot of water, he couldn’t get down to the Mouth.  He got as far as where the Dominant Marina now is, and had to walk down.  When they were developing the steam trade, - the original concept for the Murray steamer trade was that Goolwa was going to be a bit like New Orleans, and they were looking for a sea trade as well.  It was standard in the late 1850’s, when this trade was building up and they were still looking at running from the river, out through the Mouth and around to Port Adelaide without having to trans-ship the cargo, which was mainly wool, some wheat, and coming into the Mouth, instead of heading towards Goolwa - coming up the channel, you went down the Coorong, toward Tauwitchere, and then into the lake, about two thirds of the way across the present Tauwitchere barrage, there was some sort of a channel there, out around Rat Island, the Mud

Island, and back to Goolwa. From the Mouth to Goolwa was a day’s steaming. On a steamer you came in on the morning tide, then spent all day before you got back to the wharf.  In the 1860’s this seemed to be a bit of a hassle, and apparently some of them ran into a bit of grief, because there’s not a lot of deep water up there, so then there was some dredging done on the Goolwa channel in the first two miles above where the barrage now is, and possibly some below it,  - to deepen it.  That became a regular channel then, from Goolwa straight down through the Mouth or down the Coorong, past the Mouth.

There were blokes doing a regular run, right down to Salt Creek and places like that. They were bringing wheat and cattle and stuff back to Goolwa.  Mail and grocery runs, hawking boats.

Where did the timber come from, for those piles?

All over.  Some were trucked down around Delamere, some was cut up in the Mt Lofty area because there was Stringy Bark, and I think seven different types of timber in the piles.  A lot of it came from Victoria, because they were forty-five and sixty feet long, and that’s a fair tree to get a long straight trunk.  So you’re looking at stuff like Mountain Ash and Flooded Gum and things like that, in those good conditions, and there’s not a lot of that country in South Australia.

How did they get it here?

By boat

Would it have come through the Mouth?

Came by train.  Port Adelaide, and then put it on the train -came by rail. 1880, I think the railway line got to Goolwa.  It picked up the trade.  They’d bring it to Goolwa - put it on the train, then off to Port Adelaide.  That took over from trans shipping at Port Adelaide - the original railway line was built from Goolwa to Port Elliot in 1853, then a few years later, (10, in fact),  extended to Port Victor, because they lost too many ships in Horseshoe Bay.  But that was a lot of hassle - they thought it was easier by rail.

I know some of the timber came from around Currency Creek

Not the pile timber.  Timber for the boilers.  A lot of guys earnt good money cutting

(timber).  The power was steam - everything was based on steam boilers.  There was a lot of timber cut for that.

I know other stuff came from Cary Gully. Dr Laurie who was the senior... (can’t decipher words here)... Chris Laurie  .... (can’t decipher words here)

I wonder how the timber came down from up there - from the hills and so on?

Train - they had a line from Mt. Barker through to Strathalbyn to here.  Everything arrived by train - there was a twice a day train service to Goolwa, Victor Harbor.  Victor Harbor was the big pleasure resort.

Jim, it amazes me when there was no actual official station here, that they had established the wind velocity and all these tricky things in their design.  How did that happen?

Any information like that you have, most likely been hearsay.  There wasn’t any official recording of it.

They listened to the locals?

Yes, just asked the locals.  Ecological considerations weren’t taken into account.  If they wanted to do this now, there is no way they would get it up, it would not be approved because of the impact it had on the ecology.  They reduced the size of the estuary by nearly ninety per cent, (87%, actually), and that reduction of the estuary was the start or the cause of a lot of the problems they are having now.  Since they built the barrages we’ve had a series of fairly wet years with good flows out through the Mouth.  In the last twenty years we’ve had enough dry years and a very, very significant increase in the rate of diversion upstream, which has had quite considerable effect on the amount of water that we’ve got to pass out through the Mouth, and when you get back to the size of the estuary reducing by eighty-seven per cent, they reduce what we call the tidal prism.  This is the force, the column of water that surges in and out of the Mouth daily by just the effect of the tide.  That was enough to keep the Mouth clear.  When they reduce the size of the estuary, they reduce the size of the tidal prism and greatly reduce the velocity and volume of that water that was passing in and out.  Ever since 1945, we’ve had yearly a net gain of sand, and that was first shown up fairly soon after, with the formation of Bird Island.  That wasn’t there before they built the barrage.  That’s really the nucleus of all the sand shoals there now.  In the past, we’ve had big flows in the 50’s and 70’s that have shifted a lot of that sand back out through the Mouth off shore.  We haven’t had a big flood for quite a while, and we’ve had some very low flow periods.  Every time you get a tide, every flood tide brings in some sand, and you don’t get enough force in the ebb tide to carry it out again.

So daily you get a net gain that’s building up now to a critical level and this is causing all the problems.  The possible incidence of a Mouth closure has been reduced from something like one in twenty to about - they were quoting one in six several years ago, but I venture to say it’s about one in four now.  It’s getting worse and worse by the year.

This has also had an effect on the native fish, - the Mulloway, Mullet, Flounder, Bream - all need the estuarine conditions to complete their breeding cycle.  Especially the Mulloway, they use the Coorong now - which is all that’s left of the estuary - they used to use the whole lower lakes as a nursery area.  The adult Mulloway would come in and feed because the brackish water had its own particular ecology - it was a very rich nutrient area where a lot of the smaller vertebrates and predators are, that started the food chain - a very rich feeding area for the Mulloway.  They would come in, fatten up, get in good condition for breeding and go out to sea and spawn and when the spawn hatched, the fry would come back in through the Mouth and live in it for about the next twelve months, as they grew.  They’d feed up and grow on until they were big enough to withstand the rigours of the open sea.  It was a similar story for the small Flounder and Mullet and the Bream.   By reducing that estuary, you reduce the size of the local fishery by a proportional amount.  This is why there is now a strong move to modify the operations and the structure of the barrages to facilitate the movement of fish through them again, to try and restore some of those conditions, increase the numbers of fish that can take advantage of it.  Hopefully that won’t get bogged down with red tape and we might see some result of it in a year or two.  I can remember Bert Lundstrum, who’s one of the old retired fishermen around the town, telling me that the year that they closed the barrages  for the first time, the Mulloway came in the Spring, usually about November - normally they go straight up the river into the lakes - they got to the Goolwa barrage, or the barrages, because they all closed at much the same time - 1940, and there was this physical barrier there, and there were hundreds of tons of Mulloway in the Goolwa channel below the barrages and people used to come down and net them just like you can do it with Carp now.  There’s a famous photo of the Goolwa wharf with, I think someone said there was, a hundred and sixty ton of Mulloway on the wharf.  The Goolwa wharf was covered in Mulloway from one end to the other and it was about four times as long as it is now.

What did they do with it?

Tried to ship it away, but a lot of it went rotten, got dumped.  It was a real racket in those days with fish.  They used to go away in the train, they would be packing boxes with crushed ice - go to Adelaide - mostly Melbourne - that was the big fish market.  They used to have what they called a Blue Ticket.  If your fish was off when it got there,. they’d send you back a blue ticket - you got no money.  Quite often you got the Blue Ticket whether your fish was good or not.  It was a real racket. You never see a poor fish merchant. Goolwa was a complex thing. A deeper barrage – Mundoo has twenty-six bays - a similar design to Goolwa but not as deep, only holds back about eight feet of water.  Boundary Creek is only six bays and even shallower, much the same.  The two long ones, Tauwitchere and Ewe Island - all the barrages on the other side, Mundoo complex are built, unlike Goolwa, on an area of sandstone ridge.  There are no piles.   They had to coffer dam it off, especially in the winter.  They had to sweep and wash the mud off the rock, and then trim it and actually cut the foundations into the reef, and they poured the concrete structures on top of that.  I heard a few stories from Pat Reid and some of the others.  Pat particularly used to tell me graphic stories because he was on the night shift on the pumps.  Same old stories - leaking coffer dams -you had to be constantly pumping water out, and the banks weren’t built much higher than they had to be, and when you got a big storm, several times they got washed away and they had to rebuild them.  They got quite innovative when they were building these coffer dams - they’re just a sand bag and earth bank.  They started off by filling sand bags and stacking them out into the water and putting the train line on top of them, then running these dobbins – small light rail tipping trucks - out and they would tip the soil either side of the sand bag core.  You’d end up with a dirt levee bank with a core of sand bags in the middle.  That was seen as a bit labour-intensive and too hard, so somebody came up with the bright idea of using a barge and a couple of flitches of timber about 60ft long, and they would run these two flitches out from the end of the already built bank to the moored barge, put the train track on top of it and push.  The loco would come in from behind, and they would actually push the rake of dobbins out over the water on these two big flitches of timber, and tip the soil straight into the water - it saved a lot of gut busting.  It was typical of the sort of innovation and ingenuity that was going on all the time.   I experienced the same sort of thing when I was at Lake Victoria. The blokes who had been in the job a long time, been around a bit, had to do their own thing, and it’s surprising how many good ideas came from the workshop floor.

It was a boon in the depression times, the fellows sub-contracted if they had a horse and scoop, and so on ?

Yes, there were a lot of horses hired.  There were some big contracting companies who supplied teams, and a lot of local farmers too.

I know they came down from Jervois some times

I remember a bloke from Strathalbyn, George Foster.  Just to side track a little - this is the only project I know by this department - major construction project - that had any sort of comprehensive film record, and some years ago we dug out the old film reels  - in pretty poor condition - so we had it re-mastered and a couple of copies made in association with the local Historical Society.  It’s a regular thing for the January meeting that we show the film down at the barrage, and Rose Geisler here some years ago - I think it was at about the first or second showing of it - contacted a bloke named George Foster, who was living in Strathalbyn, but came originally from Jervois, we showed the film of the Tauwitchere  and Ewe Island construction works, and this rake of horses came onto the screen and they were George’s team.  George named them one by one, four horses in a row, and he could still remember their names.  Apparently there were a quite a few stories concerning the horses over there.  Pat Reid was telling me that there was one horse that got injured, and the supervisor at the time wanted to have him destroyed, they argued for the horse and saved his life, kept him in the stable, patched him up, doctored him up, - he had to go back in the team - they couldn’t carry any passengers,  but the guy who was operating - driving that team  - always used to put this horse first in front of the dobbins.  He had three good horses in front of him, and basically it was a three horse team  (laughter) - the injured horse used to go along for the ride, he put enough weight on to keep the trace chains up but he wasn’t contributing much.  They kept him going, he apparently survived and found a better life at the end of the contract.

Jim, those that worked on Tauwhitchere as we call it had pronounced it a different way, didn’t they?

Some of the locals - if you come from Meningie-side you called it Tawadgery.

I don’t know if it’s a bit of Aboriginal influence or not, but this side they call it Tauwitchere.  Most people call it Tauwitchere - a few of the oldies over the other side still call it Tawadgery. . It’s a bit like some of the old people here - Dora Tuckwell will never call it the Barrage - it’s always the Barridges .

Jim, there’s a story about them coming back to work on Monday morning on the Meningie side, from the Milang side, and the vehicle coming from Murray Bridge ran off the embankment and a whole lot of them were drowned, and the doctor couldn’t get here?

Yes, I don’t know if they were coming back to work on the Monday - I think they were coming back from the pub.  I think there might have been a bit of booze involved in that, but they ran off one of the causeways. As far as I know they were the only deaths, but they weren’t really on the job - they were coming to the job.  They were associated with the job, but it didn’t happen during working hours.  I think the official record shows that there were no deaths. During that five years, there were about five hundred blokes involved in the construction.  And with a big turn over, too - if you didn’t pull your weight, there were always two blokes waiting at the gate to take your place when you got the chop.  But those guys did go over the causeway down near where the fisherman’s camp is at Pelican Point somewhere.  It’s not the current road, they built a new road since, but there are a couple of creeks draining out of the lake into the Coorong, and there were causeways across these river reed beds and apparently they were marshy or something, and they slipped off it.

I think the doctor had to come from Tailem Bend, or right around from Victor Harbor?

More than likely yes, because there wasn’t much of that sort of thing down there in those days. Transport was pretty light on, too. Generally, they like to think that the whole job was done without any deaths, there certainly were no deaths on site, there were a few injuries, but you don’t hear too much about that, health and safety wasn’t a big thing those days.

From Goolwa, as far as I can find out, there has only been two deaths since 1952.  An eight year old girl fell in – see, back in those days they used to let the public, I mean there wasn’t anywhere near the numbers of public wandering into the place as there are now, but in those days they just had the original wooden logs with wooden decks with rails on them for the crane, and no hand-rails, nothing.  The public used to wander out on to it, this little girl tripped and fell in, into an open bay, and was carried down; there was a guy who wasn’t with her, but he whipped off his shirt and jacket and jumped in after her and he drowned as well.  They both went under and didn’t come up.  As best I can tell, they were the only two deaths off the barrages and that was a long time ago - back in 1952.

When was that safe walk-way on the side of the barrage constructed?

In 1986 the aluminium walk-way was put in.  It cost $167,000.  I expressed some surprise at that, when I was told that figure, but my regional manager told me it was considered a good insurance that was cheaper than the cost of one civil claim if somebody fell in, and it was put up in response to the ever-increasing numbers of public coming on to the place.  Up to that time, the public was just allowed to walk across the barrages.  They used to keep them off - they had a chain with a sign on it they used to put across if the river was rough.  It can be very hairy - there are plenty of stories you hear of people getting out under the structure with a squall coming in. They have had to go out with a trolley to bring them in - they just couldn’t stand up - and that was just the done thing when the weather was bad.  Before Barry Bonner got the job, there was an old guy who had some sort of disability.  He used to sit out in the lockhouse all day and if the weather was really bad at five o’clock, they had to send a couple of men out with a flat-top trolley to bring him in, because it was too windy for him to walk in.  No hand-rails, no walk-way, nothing.  So they made that decision in 1986 to build that aluminium walk-way with hand rails and all the doings, and the public then was not allowed any further than that.  They’re fully contained, because they used to be able to walk across the gates on the lock and all.  They used to be able to walk all the way across to Hindmarsh Island.  Our Occupational Health & Safety people would have kittens if they could see them do that now!  That’s just the sign of the times, we’ve got security gates now.  The possibility of liability and litigation is that great now, that they’ve put gates on each end of Mundoo and Tauwitchere to stop anyone walking, riding, whatever, across the structure.  Nobody at all not associated with the job is allowed onto the site without special dispensation - they really cut down on it.  Not like it was ten years ago when we used to take bus-loads of visitors across, those days have gone.  We had to get special permission 3 years ago for the barrage reunion, we had seven bus loads of people went across that day to Tauwitchere.

It would have been a great shame if all the fellows who had worked on it hadn’t been able to visit it again.

Oh yes! There were a lot of people...-...All those guys now are all in their eighties, now they come back, they are so chuffed with what they’ve done.  What they did then is still there - still operating.  It’s taking ever-increasing importance in the operation of the State.

The pool that the barrages create supplies about 80% of Adelaide’s water, South Australia’s water.

By pool you mean the back-up?

Yes, the back-up, it’s only 0.75 of a metre above sea level and it backs all the way, 175 km, up to Blanchetown.  With the exception of the Morgan pump, all the major pump stations for the town, domestic or industrial, come out of this pool into Mannum, Adelaide, Murray Bridge, Onkaparinga, Tailem Bend, Keith.  In drier years, like 1982, we supplied up to 90% of Adelaide’s water.  Without the Murray and the pipelines, that wouldn’t happen. And without the barrages, that water there would not be able to be pumped. 

Has there ever been any talk of using the water out of the lake for big projects, it’s a huge expanse of water?

It’s a very inefficient storage, (yet) inefficient as it is, it’s still a critical part of the storage capacity for the lower reaches of the river.  Getting back to the ecological point of view that we were talking about five minutes ago, one of the fall-back positions being considered is to abandon the barrages and let the lakes return to their natural estuarine condition and build a structure----------------------        

 

 END OF TAPE

 

 

 

 TAPE 2

Side A 

Interview with Jim Marsh, Barrage Superintendent at Goolwa Barrage,  Monday 27th September, 1999 at Goolwa

Interviewer:  Rose Geisler

We were talking about the possibility of abandoning the barrages and rebuilding the structure at Wellington. It would entail quite significant capital expenditure, because they would have to build distribution works down each side.  All the people who now pump out of the lake would have to be supplied from a large pipe line       (can’t decipher rest of sentence here}.... inefficient and expensive

You mean down to Narrung?

Yes, all those people would have to be supplied.  Anybody that’s diverting water out of the lakes, so the capital cost would be significant.  The ecological benefit would be quite profound - it would never return to what it was before control because of the reduced amount of fresh water that’s allowed to come down the river now.  But politically it would never get legs for that reason - there’s too many important people, people with influence that have got their quarter-of-a-million-dollar weekenders on the north side of Hindmarsh Island and up at Clayton and places like that.  Where they now have nice flooded river flat outside their place with a channel dug through it, and a cabin cruiser tied up at the wharf, they would have three hundred acres of mud-flat when they come down for their holidays and salty water would be on that side - I don’t think they would be very happy.  But I think it’s time that they  ---- I would say that the barrages in their current condition have probably got another thirty or forty years  - thirty years anyway of economic maintenance left in them.  I think now’s the time that the powers that be should really start seriously considering their options.  This is nineteenth century technology, and it’s now the end of the twentieth century -- there are much better ways of doing what we do.  The ideal, in my opinion, would be something like the Thames flood gates - large radial gates that can either rest on the bottom of the river in flood time, or can be swung with the skin above the water so you can actually walk around on it.  Ideal for maintenance, and also during flood time you could do your maintenance when you’re out of the water.  Very expensive, but I think any option is going to be expensive.  There are other options with the use of inflatable bags - very tough bags that you inflate to a certain level and control your water that way.  Fully inflated, they would be a complete barrier, and partially deflated, they allow a certain amount of water to pass over the top.  That idea has been put into practice I believe in Holland and places overseas.

Jim, do you mean on the same site as the barrages are on now?

Well I really can’t see it being put anywhere else - as I said before, the political ramifications of shifting the barrages would be too hot for any government to try and weather, and I think the damage has been done.  But there could be a lot more allowance made for ecological considerations.  There’s an on-going programme of modification of operating rules to facilitate ecological improvement.  That’s very much part of the operating philosophy now and the old technology of the structures makes it very difficult to implement, and I think when the structures are replaced that these sort of considerations will be very much taken into account.  They weren’t taken into account at all when the present structures were designed.

Jim, who has control of the barrages now?

Basically SA Water, the bulk water section of SA Water operates - fairly autonomous, but the whole river is actually supervised by the Murray Darling Basin Commission in Canberra - we work in conjunction with them.  They tend to supply most of the information we need as regards flow.  They’re very strong in the head waters - Hume Dam is under their control and Hume, Dartmouth and Yarrawonga.

By the time it gets down here, it’s fairly controlled, we know what’s happening.  It takes about two months for the water to get from that end to this end, so they don’t spring any surprises on us.  Our main expertise comes in the day-to-day operation of it.  We know the parameters by which we have to operate and what the aims are - the ultimate outcomes.  The weather is the greatest influence on our operation, and the unfortunate part is that when we have water to spare and we need to regulate or to discharge water, it coincides with the storm season, so we have to keep on our toes.  Anything over about twenty-five knots from the south-west or south, we have to close down.  It brings the sea in and with the reduced amount of water coming down the river, and the increased use of water in this pool, water quality is now a prime consideration.  It wasn’t much of a bother even fifteen years ago.  If you got some saline backflow, who cared? – nobody! These days it affects a lot of people and, even in the last five years, it’s become so much more important with the sudden influx of wine-grape growing in the Currency Creek area - even on Hindmarsh Island, I’d love to have some better technology, to be able to operate in response to the weather to such a fine degree of tolerance.

Do you mean that when the wind brings the salt water up over the barrages, the amount that comes over affects the degree of salinity?

It doesn’t even have to come over.  We can be fully locked up at Goolwa - you have to appreciate the last two miles of the river run parallel to the coast  - they are separated by three to five hundred metres of sand dunes - that’s fairly coarse sand the water can percolate through, at the rate of five feet a minute.  You get a big blow, south-westerly over about twenty five knots, it gets rough and pushes all the water out into the lake, pushes the lake up the river   (can’t decipher a few words here)   It can drop the level of the lake by about a metre, at the same time it’s bringing the sea level up, and you get up to two - and in extreme conditions, three - metres of reverse head.  Three metres will bring it over the top of the barrage, but even if you’ve got a metre of reverse head, we can pick up a thousand  EC’s – Electrical Conductivity Units, the standard salinity reading method along the river and in the M.D.B.C. -  just by circulation of the sea water in through the dunes - under the dunes into this reach.  It affects the reach the first two miles up to about the Dominant Marina.  But then, when the storm goes down, that water will mix, and the saline zone will move back up river a bit, and if you get a real big storm, it actually pours over the top.  It’ll fill this whole reach up.

Is that why Goolwa can’t depend on the river for it’s reticulated water system?

Goolwa hasn’t pumped from the river since the summer of 1988.

Is that the reason why?

No, Goolwa’s water supply is basically from Myponga from the big tanks on the hills above Port Elliot, and, as the water flows, it creates a pattern.  No matter how clean the water is, there is always a certain amount of sediment.  That sediment will fall and lay

with the direction of the current, so that the current will pass over it without moving it.

If you pump from the river you reverse that flow, and it stirs a lot of sediment up from the bottom of the pipelines.  Last time they did it, they copped that much flack from the consumers that they decided not to do it ever again!  (laughter).  If it was an extreme circumstance - really critical - they would, but they’d have to be desperately short of water before they’d pump from the river.  If they did, they would have to flush the mains fairly well before they did it, to try and reduce it, but there would still be some contamination of the water from the salt.  It’s a long time since ... (can’t decipher rest of sentence here)..... Myponga has a limited catchment and there’s an ever-increasing demand from the metro area - although they keep putting the water rates up.  I think they are saving water consumption that way - too expensive for people to use frivolously.

Jim, although you weren’t down here in the 1956 flood, I’m sure you heard about what happened down here then.  Can you tell us something about that?

When a big flood hits the lake, it basically spreads out, it’s about 55,000 acres, the surface area of lake Alexandrina, and lake Albert about another 20,000 acres. The Goolwa barrages were designed to pass 300,000 megalitres of water per day at pool, in 1956 the water level rose by about 850 mls, about 42”, above pool - not so much by restriction of the structures, but because the Mouth didn’t scour wide enough, and the effect of the tides, it just couldn’t get away - that’s what caused the back-up. It flooded all the low-lying areas. When it came through here at South Lakes it ended up nearly at Middleton, down this creek, all that country behind Treager’s, all got flooded, and a lot of those lower areas down Lucas’s way on Hindmarsh Island on the north side went under, right to Mundoo channel - all that went under.

I suppose all the gates and barrages went under?

Everything was out, you had to take the boat to get from Mundoo to Tauwitchere - there was no way you could drive, there was about 3’ to 4’ of water across the islands, it spread, it actually crossed the Princess Highway out north of Cook’s Plains, all that low-lying country out east of Lake Albert behind  Meningie – Ashville, it went right out to all those little flats, right out to Cook’s Plains. Bob Osborne was telling me he saw a ring-mark there one time, there is a spot where it actually crossed the highway. I think it extended something like 40 km’s from the lake in total.

What about, how far out to sea, did anybody measure how far the fresh water could be seen?

Apparently quite some way, there was a fair volume of water, 340,000 Megalitres of water going out. The Mouth was about 1/2 mile wide.

They tell me the mouth has moved quite a huge distance since white man first saw it?

Yes, they talk about the settlement down at Barker’s Knoll, but the original Barker’s Knoll was about 160ft high and somewhere about where the Mouth is now.  I believe the Mouth started to move south.  Captain Pullen surveyed the Mouth in 1841 and Barker’s Knoll then was 160ft high and the Mouth moved - I believe Barker’s Knoll was washed away in the 1880’s.  It went further south.  I understand that the furthest south it has been in recorded history was in 1970.  They had to shift the northern-most shack down at Barker’s Knoll - whatever you like to call it - Sleepy Hollow - Fisherman’s Camp.  Geoffrey Burns was a boy at the time and his uncle, Blue Johnson, had a shack down there and Geoffrey said he used to be able to lay in bed, look out the window, and look straight out the Mouth.  That was in 1970.  Since then it started to travel back.  Where it was about three years ago, about 1996, was about the furthest north it’s been.  It’s now - it’s sort of vacillating a little bit - it’s wandering backwards and forwards in a zone of two

or three hundred metres, but since 1970 the maximum distance it’s moved is 1.6kms. 

That means at some stage, even in recorded history, it could have been way further south?

Not recorded history.  It’s been further north.  If you look at aerial photographs around    Gerry Newell’s place, which is about three miles this side of the Mouth on Hindmarsh Island, you see there’s a pattern of dunes and swales, and according to our eminent

local geomorphologist, Professor Bob Borman, those structures were only formed through exposure to the open sea and wind.  Also Bob has done an archaeological survey of Sir Richard Peninsula, and there are no middens south of roughly the line behind the number nineteen beacon.  That’s fairly recent that the aborigines were well aware of it - they didn’t have any ceremonial sites from number nineteen to the Mouth - no camp-fires, no middens.

There’s plenty just down here

Yes, from this way back.  It was quite a big graveyard just up here behind Traeger’s.  Plenty of aborigines - a well-populated area

They had plenty to eat didn’t they?

................fish, water fowl

Jim, can you think of the names of any of the fellows that worked on the barrages that we’ve met in recent years?

A lot I’ve met, but I can’t remember their names.  Pat and Berry Reid - the Reid boys, Max Pearson, Bert Lundstrum, Sidney Smith, the late George Foster - there’re not too many of them left now.

At the Reunions that have been held in the last couple of years, has it been the descendants of the families mostly?

A lot of them are children, especially from the female side of the family.  A lot of daughters seem to be very keen to commemorate their fathers’ efforts.

Harold Bedford - did he or his father work - his wife’s father was the chief engineer wasn’t he?

Parker Lim  was Wif – short for Winifred -  Bedford’s father, and he was the first superintendent on the construction.  Don’t ask how many superintendents there were, because I can’t quite remember - there’s not that many - probably about six.  When I was at Lake Victoria there would only have been about six of us superintendents.  I think it’s much the same down here, I’ve been here twelve years - George Fergusson before me for six, Owen Cleggett before him for quite a long period, because Owen Cleggett actually worked on the Tauwitchere gang during the construction and stayed on as a barrage attendant before he got the superintendent’s position.

So that’s since 1939?

Since 1940.

Is that when Goolwa barrage was opened - were they all opened together?

Yes. I’ve got a book home, which was the official hand out book on the day.  It gives a brief run-down of the construction.  It’s got all the particulars of the barrages. I can’t remember the date, but they had the big auction in April 1941. It was a five-day sale. They sold up everything. This was the last project of the whole sequence of events, the lock building, the barrage building.  There was nothing else coming on after that, so they sold all their gear, the camps, huts, equipment, timber - the lot - and it took them five days to sell all that stuff.  There were huge flitches of timber - great masses of mattresses and iron, - nine items of floating plant were sold, including the Capt. Sturt, it must have been one hell of a week.

The workshops at Tauwitchere and Goolwa were the original workshops weren’t they?

They were built after the construction was finished, they were built to hold the logs, originally the idea was the old wooden stop-logs would be housed in the shed when they were not being used, but I don’t think that ever happened.  They stored the gear, but not the actual logs - it was too much work to cart them in and out, or deemed to be not necessary.         The barrages have been decked three times since they were finished.  The original deck had wooden beams with wooden planking, back in the Sixties they replaced and put in steel beams with the trolley-rails and the train-rails welded to the top of them. Initially they were dog-spiked to the wooden beams, and they actually tried fibreglass slabs - they weren’t real flash, they were only part of the way across from Hindmarsh Island into Goolwa - there were still some left when I came here in '87.    But in the early to mid-Sixties, about 25 years after the place was built, they put down these steel beams with concrete deck slabs - they were then again replaced in the mid-Nineties.  We started about 1995, that was about another 30 years.  The biggest maintenance problem we had was the maintenance of the steel components of the barrages.  It was a problem at Goolwa, we used to spend about five or six months of the year, two men every day out spot-blasting and patching the steel work, it was seen as labour-intensive, and very expensive, and not very acceptable from the welfare and safety point of view, because of the hazardous materials being used.       So we started looking at alternatives, the concrete deck slabs were spalling, and were getting near the end of their lives,  we initially looked at replacing them.  A little bit of lateral thinking resulted in a new deck unit that incorporated the slab and the rail, entirely made of mass reinforced-concrete which completely eliminated the maintenance problem.  So, for the third time, the Goolwa barrage was re-decked in the mid- to late-Nineties.  With the improvements in concrete technology in the intervening thirty years, we expect the new units to last considerably longer than the first deck slabs.  We re-decked Mundoo in the mid-Eighties, 1986, I think it was.  In 1988, we re-decked Boundary Creek, Tauwitchere, and Ewe Island, which have different sort of deck units and far more of them - it’s nearly a thousand units involved - we are part way through an on-going programme which will cost up to $1,000,000 and take at least ten years, to replace the concrete decks over there.

Do you get sub-contractors in?

No, we contract four very good concrete-product manufacturers in Adelaide who make pre-stressed units, and we put them in.       They come in through Narrung, they follow the bitumen around Meningie in that way.       Every second year we do an assessment, every deck unit is inspected and rated, then we tot up the results and make a budget application for sufficient money to cover what we think needs to be replaced, then the following year - when we get the money - we let a contract, then our gangs lay them.

Are they off-loaded at the southern end of Tauwitchere - the trucks don’t go on the barrage?

No, we cart them off on our own truck one at a time and end-up with a big stockpile under the trees over there.  The steel radial gates, - there are 122 bays in Ewe Island and 311 in Tauwitchere, all with radial gates - were initially coated in tar, which is not a long-lasting protection. There was a lack of diligence back in the Fifties and Sixties, I would say, and those gates deteriorated to fairly poor condition.   They started, in the Seventies, refurbishing them, not all that successfully.  They tried all sorts of things - they tried to use baked enamel - they grit blasted them back to bare metal - recoated them - they had some contractor who had a big oven set up in the shed at Tauwitchere to bake this coating on as an experimental thing.  It wasn’t considered to be totally successful.      Then in early- Eighties they started with a vengeance - things got that bad they had to take every gate out, most of them had to be re-built.  They all had new skins and they were coated with the coal-tar epoxy that was then available.  They were still part-way through that progamme when I came here in 1987, what we have done as a follow-on to that is instigated a five-year cyclic-maintenance programme, and we do a certain number of gates every year.  There’s 250 gates altogether.  Because of the poor condition of those radial gates, they decided to replace them with 5ft-deep, 6-inch-wide concrete logs.  They had to bolt in pre-fabricated log-guides to take these things.  The operators at the time weren’t happy with it, because it’s very difficult to operate these things and to handle them.  There was a bit of an argument about them and they got about half-way and there was a compromise reached.  This was when they decided to go all-out, and refurbish the remaining  Taintor gates, so we’ve basically got half and half, Taintor gates and concrete logs, and these logs we only have to take out when the flow gets in excess of about 120,000 mega-litres.  252 radial gates - we do fifty a year.  They’re taken out, inspected, spot-blasted and patched, and put back in.  They’ve got sacrificial anodes bolted to the faces so that corrodes instead of the epoxy protection.  The anode is corroded instead of the gate.  That way we hope never to have to refurbish those gates that we’ve been maintaining in good condition.  That gets over the problem in the past, where they were let go in such a way that it was so expensive to put them back into suitable condition.

Jim, just going back to the Goolwa barrage and the operation of the lock, has it always been linked to the Goolwa power?

                                                                       

 

TAPE 2

Side B

Continuing interview, now with Maria Marsh, Sunday, 13th February 2000

Interviewer:  Rose Geisler, continuing with Maria’s life to complete the picture

 

Maria, first of all where did you come from?

I came from Holland when I was five, with my family

And how many in the family?

I have three sisters and two brothers

Were they all born in Holland?

No, only my sister, the rest were born in Australia

Have you got many memories of your life in Holland?

Only very basic, bits and pieces

You remember the weather?

I remember the weather, my grand-parents, my uncles

Any of them still alive?

Yes, I had an uncle visit - about three or four years ago, I think.  He came out with his wife.  I used to write to him - he was trying to improve his English

What did your family do in Holland?

My father is an accountant.  When we first came out to Australia he got an office job and then he studied and became an accountant

Where-abouts did you come to?

We first went to a Migrant Camp in Sydney out near Windsor.  My father hitch-hiked around the countryside looking for work, and my mother was pregnant and we stayed in the camp.  I can remember he found a job in Tamworth, and he sent for us and we had to get on a train, and of course none of us spoke any English, and we got on the wrong train and we had to get off.  Fortunately before we left the outskirts of Sydney we had to get off and get on another one.  (laughter).   We were only in Tamworth a few weeks and my sister was born.

How long did you live in Tamworth?

We lived in Tamworth a couple of years, then we moved to Moree.  We lived in Moree quite a few years then we moved to Grafton.

What sort of work was your father doing in those days?

He was an accountant.

He did get that sort of work?

Yes, he worked in a store in Tamworth, then he moved to Moree to work with an accountant - an accountant’s office.  You needed to if you were studying at that stage.

Do you remember finding it difficult to learn English?

No, I learnt it very quickly - picked it up.  Children do.  At first I was sent to a public school in Tamworth, and the kids weren’t very nice to me, and I think the people we were staying with when my mother was having my sister, arranged for me to go to the Catholic school.  That was just a small one, and I picked up English very quickly.

Can you remember much about your Primary school years?

Oh yes, I’ve got a good memory

What did you enjoy most?

I quite liked Tamworth - I got on really well.  When we moved to Moree I didn’t have a very good few years up there.  I went to a Catholic school in Moree.  The nuns used to use the cane, so I used to get the cane (laughter)

You did?

Oh yes, I used to get it for the most peculiar things

Were they Sisters or Brothers?

Sisters ... and in both cases the convent wasn’t at the school, so it was like a sub-school of the main.  I used to travel there.  Then I went to a public High school in Moree and then to Grafton.

Did you find Secondary school interesting -were you interested in school?

Only interested up to a point (laughter)

How far did you go?

I did finish - I went to Year 12 - I didn’t go further than that.  My parents couldn’t afford for any of us to go on to study, so I got a job.  I got a job in a bank for a while, and then, when I was a bit older, I could see myself settling into a rut for ever.  I threw it all in and bought a tent and came to South Australia.

How old were you then?

I would have been twenty-two, I think, and that’s where I met Jim

In the Riverland?

Yes, at the Cannery, I was working at the Cannery

And that was the beginning of another part of your life.  When were you married?

We were married in September, 1975 in Stanthorpe - that’s where my parents had moved to in Queensland.  Jim and I lived in Brisbane for a while, we were married in Stanthorpe and were heading back this way, and Jim had a job interview to go to.  He didn’t get the job, so then we were down here, and we had a caravan

In Goolwa?

No, in Renmark.  His parents lived in Renmark.  We came down to Renmark and he got a job in a cannery driving a truck for a few months while we decided what we might do, and I think we might have taken off somewhere else, but then he got the job out at Lake Victoria, so we moved out there.  I had never been out there.  He said we were going out in the middle of nowhere and it was a weekend when we went out and the fish were running, and all the banks of the river were lined with people - I’d never seen so many people in the ‘middle of nowhere’.

What sort of fish?

Callop.  For a while when we first moved there, I used to fish occasionally and you would go down and throw a line in to catch one for tea.  But it wasn’t that many years before that stopped and the Carp were just terrible

Maria, you had your first daughter out there?

Yes, Daniel was already born.  Daniel was ten months old when we went out there, and then Fran was born - she’s twenty months younger than Dan, and then Jo is two years younger again.

Did you have any help out there with young babies?

Oh no.

Were there any other wives out there?

Yes, there were.  We were away a bit from the other people living out there.  There were a few other households and there were some on the locks that were a few miles away, Locks 7, 8, and 9.  It was a dirt road and it wasn’t an all weather road.  If it rained, it was a bit tricky getting into town - not having a four-wheel drive

Town was still Renmark, then?

Town was usually Renmark.  Wentworth was actually a bit closer, but because Jim was employed by the SA Government, his headquarters were in Berri, and of course his parents were in Renmark, so usually we went that way.  Just before Jo was born, and after I had Fran, I used to take Daniel in once a fortnight or every three weeks, to the pre-school, to give him exposure to other kids.  Once Jo was born, with the three young kids it was getting a bit difficult to do that.  When they all got a bit older, we used to come in and Daniel would go to the Renmark West School, which is a little school out of town. On the day that we’d come to town, he’d go for the day.  The girls didn’t really want to.

How old would he have been then?

By the time he was going regularly he must have been about eight

So he was having Correspondence lessons?

Oh yes, we had Correspondence at home.

And you managed that?

Yes, I did that.  They all did Correspondence, and then when the kids were about half way through school, we went on School of the Air as well.

Did you find it difficult getting them disciplined to do their daily work or did it become a habit?

It becomes a habit, but the kids are different so it was different for each kid.  With Daniel he just hated doing it - it was a bit of a drag.  And of course, being the first, you are not quite sure what you are doing.  By the time Jo came along, and even Fran, I was much more relaxed about it, and realised what could be left and what was important.  When you first start you don’t really know.  I suppose he was a guinea pig in a way.

So it was a South Australian Correspondence?

South Australian, except with Fran.  When she was about Year four I changed to the New South Wales Correspondence and School of the Air, because I felt their curriculum suited her better.  So she did that and the other two did the South Australian Correspondence

It wasn’t difficult for you with the two systems?

No, I kept pretty well up to date.  I read a lot - the teachers used to visit once a year from the SA Correspondence School, and the kids used to go to a camp once a year. We also used to go to the School of the Air once a year, and we had a travelling teacher at one stage.  That was under a country area programme where they funded a travelling teacher based in Wentworth.  That had nothing to do with any school - that was a separate thing altogether, and she used to come out - all kids in the area, about six or eight, and she used to do group things with them - craft things and ball games because ball skills were a bit - not so good - and that type of thing.

It must have been reassuring for you when she came?

Yes.  We had a couple of people, but the last one, Jenny, we still keep in touch with - we see her - keep in touch with the kids, plus one other teacher from Adelaide, Betty.

So you came from Rufus River to Goolwa?

Yes we did

When?

Daniel was just going into High School

What would have happened if you still had been up there, would he have had to board somewhere?

We were looking at that, because it was coming up to the end of Primary School for him, and I think - it was pretty expensive about thinking to send him away - we might have thought about boarding him in Renmark and sending him to school there, but I was still thinking about keeping him home another couple of years maybe - so that would have been an option.

The girls were doing Primary School?

Yes, Fran was just finishing Year 6 and Jo finished Year 3

And did they fit into the Primary School scene easily?

Yes, they weren’t too bad, because we went to Goolwa - we had a look at the school before they went.  Academically they had no problems - so that helps, I think

You must have done a good job, Maria

Yes  ...I don’t know - they’ve all done OK   Daniel probably was the hardest, I think he always found it harder to make friends anyway, and at school when he went to school.

Probably had the most problems socially - not so much settling in, but finding friends

And they all need them at that age don’t they?

Of course boys at that age can be really silly and he didn’t quite fit into that..............No, they all turned out OK I think

Certainly have.  He went by bus to..?

Yes, once we knew we were coming, we came in a big rush so that he could actually go to the Primary School for the last month of that year, so that he could at least know some of the people when he got on the bus.

Was it different for you coming here to live?

Yes. It was a big adjustment, all the kids went to school, me staying at home, so my days were a bit different as well, I use to have a lovely big garden, I don’t have that any more.

I would have thought that living down at Rufus would have been a bit lonely?

No, it was a bit close, some times when we were out there it might be about six weeks before going into town.

Did you have big fridges?

We had a freezer and a fridge, but we had a big garden which supplied most of our needs - we kept chooks, a lot of poultry, pigs, a milking cow, and I used to make my own bread, make my own cottage cheese, make my own ice cream, make my own yoghurt.

Teach three children at the same time.

Yes. it was all a bit different really.

When I first knew you, you came to the library.

That was one of the benefits of coming to town, was the library. So when the kids went to school, I used to go one day a week to help at the library. I did a few other community things,  I joined an adult literacy programme as a tutor. I first did a short course at the town hall in Goolwa, Margaret Brown did it, I can’t remember the two girls who helped us run it.

How did you get your clients?

They allotted them, I only did one person, that was Joy - she used to live on Barrage Road behind the service station - they’re not there any longer. The main thing was to get her literacy up to speed, so she could sit for her driving licence test.

How old was she?

She would have been thirty, mid-thirties.

What had happened that she hadn’t picked it up along the way?

She just hadn’t, I mean she had some very basic..

Got lost in the system on the way.

We did some arithmetic as well, just the basics, stuff like that, we just couldn’t find the material she was interested in reading. She was at a level that didn’t make it too hard,   then we would go through the driver’s test - the questions,  so she could understand.  I did that for a while. Then, when Daniel was coming up to Year 12, they looked like they’d have to go to town.  I went to TAFE and did a year’s commercial studies course.

You had great initiative to do the things that needed to be done, Maria.

Well you have to get a job, and my age was really against me by then, not having worked for so long - that’s really against you in the job market.

But as an observer of your life you’ve certainly met challenges head on.  Even back when you took off from the bank -

My mother was horrified - my father said ‘Good on you’.  I probably would have gone overseas, except I had a German Shepherd dog, and my parents lived in Stanthorpe and the Council area had a ban on Shepherd dogs, otherwise they would have looked after her, but they couldn’t, and I wasn’t going to leave her so .....

How did you come to have her in Stanthorpe?

No I didn’t live in Stanthorpe - I still lived in Grafton.  I actually had a job when they moved and I stayed in Grafton.

And where did you get a job when Daniel was going into Matric?

I worked in the bank.

Did you have much difficulty getting in after that period?

Well I think the fact that I’d worked in a bank - although it was so many years ago - was probably a help, and I had done the course.  I didn’t get in initially - I got an interview, but then didn’t get it, but the person who got it didn’t like it and left.  They re-interviewed, and then I got it.  I was pretty lucky to get in - part-time work.

Maria, which bank is it and where?

It’s the National Bank.  I initially started in Victor Harbor, now I work four days a week in  Strathalbyn, and then one day a week at Victor Harbor.  I’m still part-time - I do thirty-three hours a week over five days.

That’s still a big commitment.

Yes, well my kids are still studying, so it’s mainly to fund them through, and it’s also allowed us to save a bit to buy the acres out there at Currency Creek - so we’ve been really lucky.

And you’re growing your own trees out there?

Grow a lot of trees, yes.  I started collecting seed and collected some last year for Trees For Life.

Where did you go to collect for them?

Down along here, because I actually collected Clematis seed last year, and some out behind our place near Currency Creek, and this year I’d like to do some. They send you a list of what they specifically want from the area.  I’ll see if I can get some and send it in.  I’m also doing a bit of propagating - haven’t had much time for it - I’ve got to help on the

Bush Care site at the old cemetery, so I’ve got some seed from there and I’m doing some propagating.  Hope to get a bit more time this year for that.

Are you going to re-tree that?

We do want to - because there’s some areas where there’s some Rosemary and there are the Pine trees - when they’re cleared you have to re-vegetate because the weeds will come in.

Have they started to plant yet?

I don’t think so

Who’s involved with that?

I go through the Bush Care, Graham  (?) who's based in Adelaide.  There is someone else who I haven’t met yet who works on that site.  The site is divided into two and there are some other people who look after the other site.  They are always looking for people.  I don’t have as much time as I would like.  When I took it on, I did a Bush Care workshop and they give you the basic equipment.  I’ve got a book which I’ve since picked up at a second-hand sale as well.  The book – “Bush Weeds - Identification and Eradication”, then they give you the gloves, some Roundup with a spray pack, and some other gear, and of course the help.  At any time you can contact the Co-ordinator who will help you decide and prioritise what needs to be done.  Occasionally you might organise a whole lot of people to come in and help with something like Bridal Creeper.

There was a lot of that on the road out from Goolwa towards the five-ways on those trees along the road..

There’s some shocking stuff between here and Strathalbyn, and behind our place at Currency Creek, there’s quite a lot.

Maria, tell me what the children are doing?

Daniel works for a computer firm in Adelaide.  He started an Associate Diploma at TAFE in computing which he didn’t finish, because he got the job - a good job.  Fran has got a degree in Natural Resource Management, first class honours in Freshwater Ecology, and she worked with Wet Land Care for a while, and now she’s going back to Uni to get another degree.  Leaving tomorrow, she’s going to study Communications and Media Management.

What a contrast!

Yes, but she hopes to combine.......

How long a course will that be?

I think it’s three years, but I’m hoping she may be able to get a bit of status.  Joanne’s in her third year of  Oenology, wine-making, at Waite. 

What does she hope to do?

She’ll be a Winemaker.  At this stage she’s really enjoying it.  She did start off with Chemical Engineering and switched courses - she didn’t like that.

She was good at Maths wasn’t she?

She was very good at Maths.

Do you use a lot of Maths in wine making?

You do use some, yes, it is one of the subjects, and chemistry.  She loves maths and chemistry, but she didn’t want to go into a maths degree, which she could have done - she had the ability, but she looked at jobs.  She didn’t want to be a Maths teacher or go into Research.

Maria, you’ve got a couple of hobbies/sidelines in you life - busy though it is.  Maria is part of the Goolwa Concert Band?

I’m Secretary - I have been for many years and I’m hoping someone else will do it this year   (laughter)

How did you become involved with them?

My daughter, Joanna - my youngest - was learning trumpet at school, and they suggested that she go along to the band, which she did, and I would often sit and wait for her, and they said had I thought about learning an instrument? I said no, but did in the end.  When you’re as old as I am to take up an instrument, but I picked up trombone and I play trombone in the band and I really enjoy it - it’s good fun.

Obviously the people in the band enjoy it or they wouldn’t stick at it would they?

Yes.  The band was originally a brass band, when I joined it, now it’s a concert band

Which means different additional instruments doesn’t it?

Yes, like clarinets, saxophones, flutes - they’re not in brass bands. The younger people from the schools tend to play those sort of instruments.  To keep the membership up,

we opened it up,  because we had to acquire those instruments, not just that - the music for brass bands - it’s really not much good for concert bands, it’s been an expensive exercise to change over.

Ron Turner was the conductor when you joined.

Yes. he was for many years, then he got sick, very sick unfortunately.  He is still in the band, he’s not one for giving up, so when he got really sick he took up saxophone      he’d never played a reed instrument before. First he played an alto sax now a tenor sax. He comes to band just about every week. He really enjoys it, he is on the committee.   He’s honorary  musical director, Keith Pope is the actual music director. Keith may be a year or two older than Ron - he’s getting on for eighty.  We have a range of members , Jack would be our oldest member, he would be around eighty-four, and the youngest would be about nine or ten.    Some of the good things about the band are the mix, old and young, male and female. Heather Grant and her husband from the Heritage club both  play.

Do you find the commitments the community ask are hard to meet when you are working?

Day ones are, but they are usually on the weekends.       We have had one concert with Strathalbyn Concert Band, since then the Strath. musical director has changed,    I don’t think he’s so keen on joint performances.

Do you have an annual concert in Centenary Hall?

We had one last year - it depends - to do a concert well, you really need a higher percentage of good players to learners. If you have it the other way around, you’re not really up to doing a concert on your own.  It depends on who we’ve got playing what at the time.

How do you raise your funds, does the organisation you play for give you a donation?

Yes, we ask for a donation, we don’t set a price like some people do,  sometimes we get a reasonable amount like $200,  sometimes $100, sometimes $50  and sometimes we get nothing.  It’s pretty expensive to keep a band going, a piece of music will cost $120.    

Does the council make a contribution each year?

No, not each year. We have an agreement that they let us use the hall free. They used to charge people before, so we were a bit upset about this, because we could not afford it. We have an arrangement with them, so that we can use Centenary Hall, and we will play for them on occasions.

I think they are on the better end of it.

People don’t realise it’s very expensive to keep the band going. Instruments are expensive to buy.  We run a raffle once a year and we have brought in membership subscriptions.

Do you buy your own uniform?

No, the band supplies the uniform. They had an initial supply of jackets, and when anybody goes in the secondhand shop, and they see a jacket of the right colour,   grey,    they buy it because it’s O.K.. People buy their own white shirt.

I’m very pleased to see you have got the sun hats.

We buy those ourselves, we haven’t had them that long. One reason we went that way, we had caps one time - the proper band hats are very expensive - the caps don’t keep the sun off.

What is your emblem?

It’s a Pelican, we had to have it on all our badges. That cost a bit, when we became a concert band and we became incorporated.   So we had to have our banners re-done and our badges re-done.

I can’t see how you can have time to have any other interest. You love to read don’t you?

I love to read. I’m always at secondhand book sales. I buy quite a lot of books.      I keep most of them.

Life goes on for the Marshes in Goolwa.   You still have to fund your two daughters, do you?

Not Fran, because she’s been independent and working. She is actually going to be eligible for Austudy, I’ve put her through one degree.   She’s going to do it at Whyalla. She looked at other places but they don’t run this particular component she wants, the only place is Whyalla, she hates the heat.............

TAPE FINISH

 

 

 

 

 

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