The Bolwarra Embankment Committee
The building of embankments to keep floods off farmlands began in earnest in the lower Hunter during the 1870s, though some were constructed even earlier. Farmers banded together, forming what were known as ‘embankment committees’, and in due course there were more than 20 such groups between Oakhampton and Hexham. One was the Bolwarra Embankment Committee which existed under that name in 1888 but was probably founded more than ten years before and perhaps as early as the 1860s.
By the late 1880s the Bolwarra farmers had built an embankment (a levee, in today’s language) along the left bank of the Hunter River from the hill at Bolwarra to the high ground of Largs. All of the Bolwarra Flats, including the site of the future suburb of Lorn, were enclosed. A ‘tunnel’ (drain) was built to take water from rain falling within the ‘protected’ area through the downstream end of the embankment and into the river near Largs. It had a trapdoor (a floodgate in today’s terms) in it.
The levees of the Bolwarra, Oakhampton and Maitland areas as they were in 1953, towards the end of the active life of the Bolwarra Embankment Committee
(Department of Public Works)
Eventually, the section of the embankment that protected Lorn was taken over by the Lorn Vigilance Committee. Lorn was subdivided from former farmland beginning in 1889 and built up over the following decades. The Vigilance Committee was probably formed soon after the suburb began to take shape.
Organisation
The Bolwarra Embankment Committee represented a formalisation of community endeavour in seeking flood protection. The Committee had an executive elected by its members, it held regular meetings in the Bolwarra Hall and the local school and its farmers worked on building and maintaining the embankments.
The Committee achieved a high level of organisation during its century or so of active life. It levied members on a per-acre basis to obtain the money to build and maintain the banks, and it kept detailed financial records showing which farmers had paid the levy, who owed money, what hours had been worked by individuals and what workmen’s insurance had been obtained.
In 1930, the sum charged was five shillings per acre ‘protected’. Like similar committees elsewhere in the lower Hunter Valley (including the one in the Oakhampton area across the river), Bolwarra’s was not a statutory body, and the levies could thus not be enforced. This problem was solved in part by allowing members who were not financial to work off their contributions in what amounted to working bees. Men who had paid their fees worked for wages, too, and were remunerated for horses and drays supplied. This was a commercial endeavour, after all, and the adopted rules reflected the fact that protecting livelihoods was the central purpose.
Five ‘section committees’ (each with a works foreman) were formed to monitor the banks between defined points and recommend to the main committee the work needed by way of repairs and other maintenance. Breaches occurred during some floods, wandering cattle wore down the crests and rat-holes and rabbit and bandicoot burrows appeared. Such things were threats to the integrity of the banks and needed attention.
Stocks of jute sandbags were held in farmers’ sheds for use in blocking leaks or raising crests when floods occurred. At such times members would patrol the banks, if necessary on a 24-hour basis and with kerosene lamps at night, to identify weak points at which failures might occur. Real-time monitoring took up much time during floods. Afterwards, especially after severe events, there was always repair and improvement activity to be undertaken. This is still the case as far as the modern levees and control banks are concerned: repair works after the several floods of 2022 took nearly two years to complete.
Left: Men and boys augmenting the Bolwarra embankment with sandbags at McKimms Corner, 1962: Harold McKimm, Robert Worboys (rear view), Walter Worboys, Ross Muirhead and Bruce Worboys (Robert Worboys collection)
Right: Post-flood repair work on a levee, early 1950s (Noel Mead collection)
click on above images for larger views
Improvements
Over the decades, the embankments were progressively strengthened by being raised and thickened. The crests were ‘ploughed down’ to facilitate the bonding of the old soil with the new, and cracks that emerged on the tops and sides during dry periods were filled with loam.
Initially the construction work was carried out with shovels and wheelbarrows to win and transport soil to the sites of the embankments. In due course, horses and tip drays were used and eventually, after World War II, tractors and bulldozers were employed and some of the work was done by contract. But for the majority of the life of the Committee, the work was done by the local farmers using their own shovels, barrows, drays and horses.
When part of the embankment was undermined during a flood and fell into the river, a ‘ring levee’ (or ‘loop bank’) would be built inland from the line of the original structure. Changes to the river’s course, usually occurring during floods, were always problematic. When the ‘Pig Run’ meander was cut off in the late 1870s, a considerable length of embankment was left useless. Some of it is still there, off Glenarvon Rd.
Outreach activity and lobbying
There was a heavy load on members of the executive in terms of meetings, letter writing and participating in deputations to the local council (and occasionally the government) from which financial help was sought. The Committee showed itself to be aware of the need to make its case to the wider community of the Maitland area: it appointed a publicity officer and organised media tours of the Flats after floods to demonstrate the damage done to primary producers. The farmers were clearly attuned politically to the need to ensure their food-growing activities were understood in the community.
From the first decade of the twentieth century, and perhaps even earlier, the Committee sought external help from the local council (Bolwarra, later part of Lower Hunter Shire and later again incorporated within the City of Maitland). It also sought assistance from the state government. Lobbying by letter and deputation sought funding, but in addition it brought to the council’s attention the Committee’s concerns when fences were erected across the floodplain. Such fences trapped debris during floods and potentially interfered with flood drainage.
The lobbying brought some success, funding being made available and the West Maitland council installing stonework to armour bends at which erosion was most likely. The Public Works Department contributed not insignificant sums to mitigation works as well and from quite early times.
Periodically there were contributions from community donations, too. These were administered by Maitland Flood Relief Committees which were routinely established after big floods; the donations were reported in the Maitland Mercury and donors named along with the amounts given.
Effectiveness
The levees built by the Bolwarra Embankment Committee and like groups throughout the lower Hunter kept many floods at bay. The Bolwarra farmers owed much to the leadership of men like Walter Worboys and Ray Vercoe, both of whom spent years on the Committee’s executive.
Walter Worboys, 1983
(Robert Worboys Collection)
Walter Worboys was a stalwart of the Bolwarra Embankment Committee for many years.
Minor floods were excluded completely from the farms and the frequency of inundation was thus reduced: crops were lost less often and growing seasons became less prone to interruption. Roads, too, were exposed to damage less frequently, saving the local council on repair costs. Undeniably, the impacts of the embankments on the rural economy and on the financial wellbeing of the farm community were positive.
But there were failures too, when the banks proved not to be equal to the task of keeping floods out of the Bolwarra Flats. On those occasions the costs in lost crops and livestock caused by levees being overtopped or breached were substantial.
In the end the embankments were found wanting: they had not been built to high engineering standards and their deficiencies were found by the bigger floods such as those of 1893, 1913, 1930 and 1949. Failures occurred all too often, and floods like these necessitated large-scale repair works. The damage was especially severe in the last of these years, several hundred metres of embankment being damaged in the June event. Some sections were washed away completely.
The end of the embankment committees
The flood of June 1949 ushered in a seven-year period of frequent, often severe floods on the Hunter River: flooding has never been more frequent in the Maitland area than during this period. The damage that was experienced exhausted the farmers’ ability to maintain their investments in embankment maintenance and repair. Much work was required, and most of what was done was undone by the Great Flood of 1955. This was the most severe Maitland flood of them all.
Sandbagging was attempted as ‘the 1955’ approached, but it was soon abandoned as hopeless: the unprecedented peak height at Singleton indicated that the coming flood was huge. Serious levee breaches led to massive deposits of sand and gravel between Lorn and Flat Rd, near the site of today’s Harry Boyle Bridge and elsewhere. These were highly damaging to farm productivity. Removing all the sand was economically impossible and farmers resorted to mouldboard ploughs to bring the buried topsoil to the surface.
The 1955 flood threatened the commercial viability of the Flats, a vital supplier of food to Maitland, Newcastle, Sydney and elsewhere. Several farms lost houses and sheds along with crops and livestock, and some farmers were forced out of agriculture altogether. Others took to living on higher ground, especially in Bolwarra Heights, and commuting daily to their holdings.
The resident population of the Flats was much reduced after 1955. Emotionally and financially worn down, and some with their dwellings and sheds destroyed, the remaining farmers were ready for a change in the ways by which the mitigation of the flood problem was sought.
This was to usher in the Department of Public Works which rebuilt the embankments to higher, better-engineered standards with even crest gradients and consistently-sloped sides. The result was improved protection being provided to the farmers of the Bolwarra area and elsewhere. The upgraded levees, built with their associated spillways and control banks between the late 1950s and the 1970s, have kept much floodwater off the floodplain farms of Oakhampton, Bolwarra and downstream areas ever since.
For some years the Bolwarra Embankment Committee maintained an active interest in the activity of the Department, providing advice. But the committee itself was voluntarily disbanded early in the twenty-first century. An era in the history of flood mitigation had passed.
References
Bolwarra Embankment Committee Minute Book, no date, Noel Mead Collection.
Keys, Chas and Mead, Noel ‘The evolution of rural levee building in the lower Hunter Valley: from farmer self-help to the work of the Hunter Valley Conservation Trust and the Public Works Department’, Bulletin of the Maitland and District Historical Society, 25/4, 2018, pp 4-13.
Keys, Chas, ‘Our past: our farmers’ war on flooding’, Maitland Mercury, 19 August 2022.
Keys, Chas, ‘Our past: protecting the Bolwarra flats’, Maitland Mercury, 26 August 2022.
Keys, Chas, ‘Our past: families forced off the land after flood of 1955’, Maitland Mercury, 2 September 2022.
Personal communication, Noel Mead, Robert Worboys and Michael Clarke
