The Maitland Lions Club and ‘Lionsville’
The 1955 flood broke many Maitland hearts. It came at the end of a period (1949-55) which had seen flood after flood invade the urban areas of Maitland, some dwellings taking in water several times. Over and over again, their owners had to go through the wretched process of raising or relocating items of property, then cleaning up the mess, and then waiting for the next flood, which would force them to do it all yet again.
It was thoroughly demoralising for hundreds of people throughout the area. They became sick and tired of floods, and many wanted desperately to get off the floodplain of the Hunter River. In effect, they were waiting for an opportunity to relocate their lives.
The Lions Club initiative
Into this scene of personal desolation came the Maitland Lions Club, which had been founded in 1953. Looking for a task which would be of value to the community, the club came up with the idea of creating an area above flood reach to which houses from the flooded areas could be trucked for re-erection. Thus began a heroic act of community service that was to unfold over the next three years.
Once the decision had been made to create this flood refuge, things moved quickly, with many people applying for blocks. Within only a few days of the flood, 30 people had expressed an interest in the idea. The Lions purchased 12.5 acres (about five hectares) of farmland at Telarah, subdivided it into 55 dwelling blocks by agreement with the Department of Lands and began negotiations with the Maitland City Council, leading to the installation of drains, the building of streets, kerbs and gutters and the provision of water, electricity and gas.
Part of a 1955 Maitland Mercury article on applications for land off the floodplain.
(Maitland Mercury, 11 March 1955)
Land was set aside for a children’s playground, willow saplings were planted to beautify the streets, and negotiations were undertaken with removalist companies to truck houses from the floodplain to their new sites. The blocks were made available free of charge to people from the areas that had been flooded. They would be able to put their lives back together, free of the fear of future inundation.
The Maitland Lions, under the leadership of inaugural president Clive Greedy, were involved from start to finish and in virtually every aspect of the project.
A lawyer, Cec Hill, who was a member of the club, volunteered the legal work associated with the titles, transfers and registrations of the conveyancing process. The state government waived the stamp duty and the club organised the trucks to move the dwellings. Each house cost about £200 to relocate, or roughly $6000 in today's terms. The first of them was installed on its block in November 1955, only nine months after the flood, and the club held a special dinner at which the title deeds of the properties were presented to the new owners. This was presumably an occasion of much joyousness on the part of those who were about to benefit.
Taree and Lismore, themselves towns with considerable flood histories and which had given particularly generously to the public appeal that was set up to help Maitland, were honoured by having streets in the new development named after them. For the Maitland Lions Club, the success of the project did much to prove the worth of the Lions movement to Australia. For years, the area of the project was known unofficially as 'Lionsville' or 'Lions Heights', an informal tribute by the community to the club. Perhaps it would have been appropriate had one of those names been made official.
The street plan of ‘Lionsville’
(Leo Club, 1984)
To finance the project, the club set up a trust fund which handled more than £27,750 (the equivalent today of well over $800,000) in its first year. About a hundred Lions clubs from all over the world, along with their parent body, contributed financially to the project to cover the costs. The project made a mark internationally when the President of the International Association of Lions Clubs, John L Stickley of Charlotte, North Carolina, visited Maitland in 1956 and inspected progress.
This resettlement initiative was surely one of the finest community contributions the Lions organisation has ever made in Australia, and it generated excellent publicity for the Maitland club in the Australian Women’s Weekly and the International Lion Magazine. It would have given peace of mind to many who had felt the emotionally exhausting and demoralising effects of flood after flood in the lower-lying areas of Maitland. The period between 1949 and 1955 had been extremely taxing on the residents of these areas, and the sheer repetition of floodwater invading houses broke people’s spirits.
The Lions’ project was a noble initiative and a godsend to many Maitlanders.
A beneficiary
One of those who benefited was Margaret Mary Thursby, who lived at 126 Elgin St, south of the railway line and within a stone’s throw of Maitland Station. She and her husband had bought the property in about 1908. By 1955, widowed and thoroughly sick of the tribulations created by having her house flooded repeatedly, she applied for and was granted one of the blocks in Lions St. As it happened, everybody who sought the Lions Club's help to move off the floodplain secured a block: there was no need to resort to a ballot.
left : Margaret Mary Thursby (Louise Clifford Collection)
right: The Thursby house (in the middle of the photo, bush behind), during the 1955 flood. (Doreen Skelton collection) None of the dwellings in the lower two thirds of the photograph exist today.
click on above images for larger views
In all, some 230 houses from various parts of Maitland's low-lying built-up areas and from the farmlands were removed by truck, bodily or in pieces, to higher ground in Telarah, Bolwarra, Tenambit, East Maitland and Largs between 1955 and 1958. Almost a quarter of them were part of the Lions initiative. Separately, several farmhouses were relocated to Largs from Dunmore, Golden Grove and Narrowgut. Some created another mini-suburb of relocated dwellings in Morpeth St, Largs, with a few others going to other streets in the town.
A Maitland house being moved in 1955
Notice men on the roof ready to raise power lines
(Hunter-Central Rivers Catchment Management Authority)
Some of the photographs of houses being moved available through Maitland Library’s Picture Maitland.
click on above images for larger views
Margaret Mary's house was dismantled and taken to Telarah and reassembled by a contracted builder using as much of the original high-quality red cedar as possible. It became 16 Lions St, Telarah, and Lillian's mother lived there for the rest of her life which came to an end in 1975 when she was 97 years old.
The dwelling is still occupied today, though it is no longer in the family's ownership, and it little resembles its former Elgin St self. Margaret Mary took the opportunity on re-erection to make some design improvements: the house was more than fifty years old by this time and some modernisation was made possible by the dismantling and relocation.
Downsides?
For all the good that was done by moving houses away from the inevitability of flooding, there were impacts that were not unambiguously positive. Horseshoe Bend and South Maitland, for example, lost population and some who stayed felt an element of ‘gutting’ of their communities. Renters could not take advantage of the scheme, and neither could the owners of brick buildings which could not be relocated. And those who moved to Telarah sacrificed easy access to shops, schools, clubs, pubs and other facilities. The Council’s near-moratorium on development after the 1955 flood made improvements to the remaining dwellings difficult, which encouraged deterioration in the quality of those houses that remained.
A visible legacy of the Lions’ initiative is readily apparent in inner Maitland today. Many vacant blocks, on which houses once stood, have never found alternative purposes of economic value. Part of the struggle of the CBD to maintain its viability in the face of competition from the modern, planned shopping centre of Green Hills can be traced to the decline of the population of the area between Wallis Creek and the Long Bridge. That population in 2025 is roughly a third of that of 70 years ago.
References
‘Lions Club Receives Applications for Flood-free Land’, Maitland Mercury, 11 March 1955.
Keys, Chas ‘Our past: the Maitland Lions Club and ‘Lionsville’ (Part 1)’, Maitland Mercury, 28 February 2025.
Keys, Chas ‘Our past: the Maitland Lions Club and ‘Lionsville’ (Part 2)’, Maitland Mercury, 7 March 2025.
Leo Club, The Lions Club of Maitland: its History from Charter 1954 to 1984, the club, Maitland, 1984.
