The first failed attempt to move Maitland
After the devastating flood of 1955, there was much discussion in Maitland about relocating the original town to the high ground of East Maitland. This was not the first time such an idea had been entertained: it had been a live issue during the late 1820s after several floods. A governmental attempt at relocation failed, as was to happen again after 1955.
The idea and problem of relocation
In 1829 George Boyle White, on orders from Surveyor General Sir Thomas Mitchell, laid out East Maitland which the colonial government sought to promote as the administrative centre and primary business focus of the Hunter Valley.
George Boyle White’s Plan for the Town of Maitland, 1829.
(NSW State Archives)
Wallis Creek (with the original bridge over it) is at top left and Metford is at the bottom.
The boundaries of George Boyle White’s 1829 plan superimposed on today’s street pattern.
(Google Maps)
Surviving survey markers at Metford and Tenambit, with the plaque on the Tenambit marker.
(Photographs: Kevin Short)
Other markers were at East Maitland, Pitnacree and perhaps elsewhere. Those at East Maitland and Pitnacree no longer exist.
When White did his survey in 1829 Maitland as a built-up entity was largely confined to the Port of Maitland and along nearby High St. A ragged, loose, strung-out ribbon of commercial premises and dwellings had formed at the jumping-off point for overland travel to the upper Hunter and beyond. All of it was liable to flooding, though parts were inundated only in very big floods.
The government’s effort to shape Maitland’s development in a way that made it less prone to the depredations of flooding was not immediately successful. There were water supply difficulties on the high ground of East Maitland, and those who had dwellings and were pursuing livelihoods in High St and at the Port rejected the longer commuting trips that would have been needed to get to work. The original town was raw, lawless, ‘unkempt and unblessed’ as W. Allan Wood had it in Dawn in the Valley, but it had the magnetic attraction of a bustling centre where money could be made. It also had a wharf, a store, inns, regular ship visits, plentiful fresh water and grass for bullocks to graze.
In 1833 land was made available for purchase in the officially ordained, planned Town of [East] Maitland as laid out by White. From the outset it could not match the advantage that West Maitland’s critical mass had already generated. Few people took up sites in the planned town until much later.
The reason is clear. People needed to be close to the action of the existing town on the floodplain, despite the danger and the loss which floods periodically caused there. Jostling for custom and work meant being where the customers and the work were. Floods were a serious nuisance, but unless they were big ones they were, to most people, not critically important. Few people died, houses and shops could be cleaned of mud, and ruined items and life could go on after inundation.
Growth in the ‘government town’ east of Wallis Creek was thus slow despite provision having been made for public buildings and open spaces, churches, schools, a cemetery, a glebe, police barracks and a grid network of streets. Some West Maitland people even petitioned the Governor to abandon the planned town on the hill and relocate the post office to the original town.
Another relocation proposal
A few, indeed, had wanted West Maitland re-established across the river on McDougall’s Brush (today’s site of Lorn). In 1832 it was reported in the Sydney Monitor:
… finding by repeated floods [there had been at least seven since 1818] that the site [of West Maitland] has been injudiciously chosen, they are about to petition the Governor that [the town] may be removed to the opposite bank of the river where the bank is higher.
The bank, in fact, was scarcely higher at all, and certainly it was not free from flooding: probably, the site had been inundated by the very big flood of 1820. This proposal was even less practicable than the one to develop White’s planned East Maitland site and encourage people to relocate from the West.
A continuing issue
The matter of relocation (or at least the idea of limiting growth in flood-liable areas) did not go away. Years later, White was still arguing against development in the original Maitland. In a letter to the Maitland Mercury after a particularly damaging flood in 1857 he raised his ‘warning voice against building on the low lands of West Maitland’. But East Maitland was to match the West’s growth only when West Maitland was essentially full, apart from very low-lying land which was inundated even more frequently than the parts already developed for commercial and residential uses.
George Boyle White
Floods mattered, but not enough to remake the town ꟷ whatever the authorities thought or wanted. In the end the government would have had great difficulty in forcing people to live where they did not wish to live, and no official coercion was applied. Had genuinely big floods like those of 1820 and 1955 occurred more often, bringing more severe consequences, things might have been different.
The original town continued to suffer floods after the planned town was designed, and some caused great damage. Yet none could make it move. Nor, as was shown much later, could the great flood of 1955, though in the aftermath of that event many dwellings were relocated to higher ground in East Maitland, Telarah, Largs and Bolwarra. The original town that grew from the first settlement at Wallis Plains was evidence of the benefits that an established site holds when it maintains utility in economic and (perhaps especially) psychological terms.
References
Keys, Chas, ‘Our past: the plan to relocate Maitland to beat floods once and for all’, Maitland Mercury, 17 July 2020.
Maitland Mercury, 1857.
Sydney Monitor, 1832.
Wood, W Allan, Dawn in the Valley: the story of settlement in the Hunter River Valley to 1833, Wentworth Books, Sydney, 1972.
