The origins of flood mitigation in the Maitland area

Floods were a threat in the Maitland area from the time of the first European settlement on the banks of the lower Paterson River (1812) and along the Hunter River and Wallis Creek at what was then named Wallis Plains (1818). The first settlers between what are now Raworth and the Central Business District of Maitland were assailed by two floods in 1819, within months of taking up their allotments. Then a very big flood struck in 1820, every holding being affected. Simple slab and bark dwellings were probably destroyed and crops, livestock, sheds and fences lost. Nobody died, however, though some needed to be rescued.

Thereafter, farm operations especially were frequently afflicted by floods. As what was to become the town of Maitland grew, more and more people and enterprises felt the economic and other problems brought by inundation.

A slow beginning

It took some time for efforts to control floods to take root. There were proposals during the 1830s for canals to speed the drainage of floodwaters from and past Maitland, and for an embankment to encircle the town and keep floods out. But in the early years of settlement in the Hunter Valley the priorities of the colonial government were elsewhere, funds were scant and there were no councils to carry out what eventually became known as ‘flood mitigation’. Moreover the main concern of the owners of the large floodplain estates, settled in numbers from the early 1820s, was to clear the forest and drain the lakes and swamps.

People were making farmland rather than protecting its crops, livestock and productivity. Activity to lessen the impacts of flooding had to wait.

The first embankments

As more people and livelihoods were affected, consideration given to managing floods increased. From the 1850s, embankment-building initiatives began to take shape. The first embankment whose origin can be precisely dated was built in 1857 to block off Halls Creek (north of today’s Mount Pleasant St): this creek drained Oakhampton rainwater to the river but during floods it took water from the river and inundated the several small, intensively cropped Oakhampton farms.

Using wheelbarrows and shovels, the local farmers blocked the creek off with what was called a ‘dam’. They also built a wood-lined ‘tunnel’(culvert) through the ‘dam’ (embankment) so that water could drain to the river both when it was not in flood and as flood levels on it fell.

Other embankments were constructed at O’Briens, upstream of Halls Creek, and along the lower Paterson River in the Woodville area. In those days the French word ‘levee’ (meaning raised bank) was never used as a descriptor in the Hunter: always, they were ‘embankments’. In association with the embankments, drains were cut at Scobies (Oakhampton) and Loch End south of East Maitland. Drains and embankments were beginning to spread throughout the area as ‘control’ over the scourge of flooding was sought by the farmers.

The first embankments built to give a measure of protection to the town of West Maitland were constructed as a flood approached in 1857. They amounted to the blocking of low points on the riverbank, volunteers doing the work. At that stage there was no council to take the lead.

Part of an old embankment, built by the Bolwarra Embankment Committee on the former Pig Run loop next to Glenarvon Rd.

It was breached in the late 1870s and not rebuilt: it had become irrelevant because the river had changed its course and cut the meander off. The former channel in this location is still visible but most of the old levee has been bulldozed.

The consequences

These initiatives were adjuncts of the major swamp- and lake-draining efforts that created land for farms during the 1820s and 1830s. Lake Paterson (between Woodville and Wallalong) and Lake Lachlan (Louth Park, and named for Governor Macquarie’s son) were transformed from virtually permanent wetlands to productive farmland: this was at least as much land reclamation as it was flood mitigation. Much the same thing happened at Phoenix Park, flooded from both the Paterson and the Hunter.

This creating farmland land from wetlands was to be a hallmark of much mitigation activity in later decades along the north coast of New South Wales.

The embankments helped keep floodwaters at bay and the drains sped the return of the land to farming purposes after heavy rain and inundation. Thus the periods in which farmland was workable and productive were lengthened and crop yields improved. By the 1870s, farmer-based ‘embankment committees’ were proliferating in the lower Hunter Valley. At the same time the West Maitland Municipal Council, which had been formed in 1863, was continuing the earlier work of raising low points along the river’s banks behind High St. This was to give a measure of protection to the built-up areas of the Central Business District and Horseshoe Bend.

Eventually, the embankments became continuous over considerable distances rather than being built only at the locations where small, intermittent creeks entered the river. They were also built substantially higher than the river’s natural banks.

Flood mitigation by the 1870s had become a significant activity in the Maitland area, both on the farms and on the edges of the town of West Maitland. But the embankments and drains were destined never to solve the whole problem of flooding; rather they acted to palliate it. They went a long way towards eliminating the threat posed by frequently occurring, relatively small floods, but they were frequently defeated by the less frequent big ones.

References

Keys, Chas, Maitland, City on the Hunter: fighting floods or living with them?, Hunter-Central Rivers Catchment Management Authority, Tocal, 2008.

Keys, Chas ‘Our past: how our early settlers dealt with flood control’, Maitland Mercury, 12 August 2022.