Stan Dunkley, Maitland’s Town Clerk, 1949-1966
Stan Dunkley, early in his time as Town Clerk of the City of Maitland
(Dunkley collection)
Stan Dunkley (1900-83) arrived in Maitland with his family in 1949 to take up the position of Town Clerk, the most senior staff position in the Maitland City Council and more recently titled ‘General Manager’. He had been a lifelong officer on councils of local government, beginning his career during World War I as an office boy on the staff of the Sydney City Council in the Sydney Town Hall before progressing to become Town Clerk of the Blue Mountains Municipality and later in a like position at Cootamundra. The Maitland posting was to be the last of his career.
Underlying his time as Maitland’s Town Clerk was the need to properly integrate the several local government areas and parts of local government areas which had been amalgamated in 1945 to form the City of Maitland. He also had oversight of the development of the several new subdivisions on which Maitland’s considerable growth was to be based in the first two decades after the end of World War II.
The proposal to relocate central Maitland
Dunkley’s time in civic affairs in Maitland was to coincide with a period of many floods, several of them severe and including the greatest flood of Maitland’s history which struck in February, 1955. Floods were to be defining events during his time in the job.
Maitland had lived with floods for the whole of its history, but between 1949 and 1956 the community was tried by flooding as never before. Flood management became a matter of huge importance and opinions on what should be done to deal with the consequences of flooding were many. One view was that the Central Business District and surrounding houses should be moved to higher ground at East Maitland.
In 1952, Dunkley and then-mayor of Maitland Jack Harvey spoke against this notion. The pair released a press release saying that such a proposal was ‘the last word in defeatism’. But three years later, after the calamity of 1955, Dunkley and several aldermen had come to the view that relocation was the best solution to the flood problem: ‘Our children, and our children’s children, will call us blessed’, somebody on the council said, if the problem was tackled by moving the old town to the high ground of East Maitland.
The plan that the council developed in the weeks after the 1955 flood involved creating subdivisions in Eastville, Tenambit and part of East Maitland and encouraging residents and businesspeople of what had formerly been known as West Maitland to take up the opportunity to move to flood-free locations in those areas. Essentially, in today’s terms, a land swap programme was developed. The council wanted movement to be mandated so that the whole of central Maitland below the 40-foot contour (including High St, Horseshoe Bend, the streets south of High St and South Maitland but not Lorn) would be relocated off the floodplain.
With Dunkley’s involvement, the council sought means of ensuring that the costs to individuals of moving their interests to the new subdivisions would be kept as low as possible.
Relocation never quite happened as the council hoped: the cost of wholesale movement would have been enormous, there was much local opposition especially from the businesspeople of the CBD, and the state and federal governments were distinctly unenthusiastic. Instead, Maitland was to put its faith in the development of a modern flood mitigation scheme comprising levees, spillways and control banks. Some people made the move as council had sought, and many were also assisted by a parallel scheme devised and implemented (with council assistance) by the Lions Club of Maitland which created a new mini-suburb of 55 houses in Telarah.
But the element of compulsion that would have seen a complete abandonment of the town of Maitland’s origins, growing from the Port of Maitland and along and back from High St, was never incorporated. The CBD remains intact today though it is markedly less ‘central’ to the business (especially retail) economy of Maitland than it was before 1955. Indeed it is now smaller, in terms of total numbers of business (especially retail) enterprises than Stockland Green Hills at East Maitland.
Incidentally, the creation of a new CBD in East Maitland would have rendered the location of Lorn, within walking distance of the shops and offices of High St, much less advantageous to its residents.
It would also have changed the more working class Horseshoe Bend, South Maitland and the streets joining High St from the south, making them in effect outer rather than inner suburbs and taking away the advantages of proximity to the main business area. How far the people of these areas would have co-operated in attempts to have them relocate their dwellings is not clear, but it would without doubt have been a difficult public relations exercise for the council to engage in.
During the nineteenth century, virtually wholesale relocation of NSW floodplain towns including Gundagai, Bega, Terara and Moama was undertaken, but the volume of fixed investment was by the mid-twentieth century too great for such radical actions to be taken to protect communities from flooding. Levees and floor-height controls became the favoured means of dealing with flooding in areas developed on floodplains in earlier times when governmentally-instigated flood mitigation measures had yet to be devised.
Other flood-related initiatives
Dunkley was a central player in the flood management initiatives that were undertaken in his time. He was the Executive Officer of the Hunter Valley Flood Warning Net which was set up in 1954 and linked flood gauges at Sandy Hollow, Muswellbrook, Bulga, Singleton with a base station in the Maitland Town Hall. Gauge readers (including staff of post offices in riverside communities) read river heights which were transmitted by radio ‘hams’ so that rates of rise could be calculated, likely peak levels estimated and assessments of consequences (such as areas which would be inundated and require evacuation) made. Needed responses (including communicating with local populations over radio stations including Maitland’s 2HR) were then put in train.
The net and the arrangements by which it operated constituted at the time a state-of-the-art flood warning system. Inevitably the system did not always meet the expectations of some in the community and as Executive Officer Dunkley would have attracted criticism for its perceived inadequacies and imperfections of performance, for example its failure to anticipate all flood effects or communicate all the information people sought as floods were approaching and occurring.
The base station of the Hunter Valley Flood Warning Net, located in the Maitland Town Hall and the point of reception for flood information from higher up the valley
(Jim Lucey, digitised by David Sciffer)
After the 1955 flood a new, state-initiated flood management agency, the forerunner of today’s State Emergency Service, came into existence with volunteer local units established in council areas throughout the state. The first Local Controller of the Maitland Unit was the Mayor, Harry Skilton, with Dunkley his deputy. Probably these appointments suggested that the council wanted to keep the new agency under its controlling hand, countering state government influence ꟷ always a concern to local government.
Dunkley guarded and fought for the council’s role in flood management. For example, he opposed the flood forecasting task being managed from afar by the Bureau of Meteorology, believing that the federal organisation lacked the locally-based expertise to do the job effectively. Nevertheless the Bureau was to become responsible for flood warning activity during the 1960s and over time it developed a specialist hydrology unit to manage the flood-prediction function by tapping an increasingly dense network of gauges to model stream flows and forecast flood heights.
Dunkley, the man
Dunkley was a respected council officer. Kay Sharp, who on leaving school in 1956 was employed as his secretary, remembers him as ‘gruff but kind’. He was a sound manager, quiet and practical in his approach to staff leadership but not ‘riding’ them hard or imposing himself on them and their efforts. It was his habit to take upon himself the job of delivering the mail to the various departments of council rather than delegating it to a junior member of staff. This might have indicated a certain humble touch, but performing the delivery task also allowed him to check quietly on what was going on beyond the narrow confines of his own office. He was able to both see and be seen. As a supervisory style, this method of operating is sometimes known as ‘management by walking around’.
Dunkley also cultivated good relations with mayors and councillors who appear to have had respect for him and his approach to the job of Town Clerk, and he steered effective courses between the various party political positions on the issues of the times. He could operate in the public arena when required, for example in interacting with and providing information to radio station personnel and the reporters of the Maitland Mercury, but he recognised the need for mayors and others who had been elected to public office to be at the centre of the political action and with important functions to discharge in relation to the media. He could operate behind the scenes as well as in an up-front capacity and seems to have won the trust of mayors like Harvey, Alex McDonald and Skilton.
Stan Dunkley retired from Council in 1966 after 17 years as Town Clerk, a long stint. He had been a significant player on Maitland’s civic scene. His son Graham was later to become a councillor and the Mayor of Maitland as well as a Liberal Party candidate for the Legislative Assembly for the seat of Maitland.
Graham Dunkley, May of Maitland 1991
(Dunkley collection)
References
Keys, Chas Maitland, City on the Hunter: fighting floods or living with them? Hunter-Central Rivers Catchment Management Authority, Maitland, 2008
Keys, Chas ‘Our past: Dunkley legendary town clerk’, Maitland Mercury, 14 April 2023
Personal communication: Kay Sharp, Graham Dunkley
