Slide 41

Then at stations such as Kyneton, Malmsbury and Castlemaine, swinging standpipes were progressively erected beside the tracks to slake the trains’ boilers with fresh water.

Slide 42

During the railway’s construction in 1861 Joseph Brady left the employment of the BWWC, and joined the civil engineer contractors, Cornish & Bruce, of Castlemaine.

Brady was placed in charge of the works on the toughest section of the new railway to Bendigo, from Woodend to Castlemaine.

Slide 43

Along this section Brady supervised the construction of the massive Taradale Viaduct, built of massive stone piers and box-iron girders.

Slide 44

The viaduct was completed on time without incident.

It is still used today along the Melbourne to Bendigo rail line, though intermediate iron piers were added in the early 20th century to enhance the bridge’s load-bearing capacity.

Slide 45

Brady also supervised the erection of the largest stone viaduct in Australia: the Malmsbury Viaduct.

Slide 46

This massive structure, built from locally hewn basalt blocks, straddled the Coliban River.

And during its construction Brady would have gained an intimate knowledge of the local countryside, and the river’s flow patterns.

Slide 47

This knowledge allowed Brady to confidently propose an award-winning proposal which he dubbed “Progress”, but which was generally called the Coliban Water Scheme.

Slide 48

Brady’s plan was simple: he would erect a large earthen dam across the free-flowing Coliban River, just upstream from the village of Malmsbury.

Slide 49

Brady then proposed to divert this stored Coliban water along a gravity-fed channel (that also included five tunnels, two syphons, and various chutes and flumes).

Eventually, after a journey of 102 kilometres, Coliban water would flow into local reservoirs to supply the Castlemaine and Bendigo goldfields, further north.

Slide 50

Brady originally wanted to construct his Malmsbury Reservoir embankment immediately behind the newly completed railway viaduct.

Some asked why the embankment wasn’t built first, and the train track run along its top – to save time and money!

Eventually, the new Victorian Water Supply Department decided to erect the massive embankment further upstream away from the viaduct, to create a bigger storage.

Slide 51

Once built, this ambitious scheme would capture rainfall from across a catchment that stretched for over one hundred square kilometres of the Great Dividing Range.

This catchment centred on the remote highland towns of Tylden and Trentham.

Slide 52

The gravity-driven, open channel technology Brady proposed to flow Coliban water north to Bendigo was certainly not new.

Rather, such technology had been perfected by the Romans almost two thousand years earlier, with aqueducts such as the Gard du Nord still standing in provincial France as a reminder of such amazing hydrological engineering.

Slide 53

Brady’s gravity scheme depended on the fact that a dam across the Coliban River at Malmsbury would sit at an altitude of 1,430 feet above sea level, whereas distant Bendigo sat almost 300 feet lower.

Certainly this scheme would be expensive, but the returns in terms of employment for miners, and the gold they would reap, easily made the venture attractive to government, and the thirsty public.

Slide 54

But it came at a difficult time for the government.

Across Victoria, at least forty other goldfields also demanded action over water provision.

So the government made a measly allocation of funds, that led to the construction of numerous small town reservoirs across Victoria by 1865.

Slide 55

The Bendigo Advertiser, however, was unimpressed with such meagre handouts, or the government’s delays in full-scale action.

It complained that ‘after ten years of talking about water … we are drifting on to another ten years of doing nothing…’

Slide 56

Concerned residents of Bendigo and Castlemaine now organised large whole town meetings and public gatherings to lobby the government to pass legislation granting sufficient funds to commence Brady’s Coliban Scheme.

This public action culminated during one of Victoria’s worst recorded droughts, the ‘great drought’ of 1865–6.

Slide 57

The ‘great drought’ brought untold misery across Bendigo and Castlemaine.

With no water, many mines were forced to shut, throwing hundreds of miners out of work.

The Advertiser reported ‘it would be impossible to convey in anything we could write an accurate impression of the alarm that prevails throughout the district at the absence of rain.’

Slide 58

Fortunately, the government did complete an additional reservoir for Bendigo.

The new Spring Gully Reservoir near One Tree Hill brought some relief for alluvial and deep lead miners at Huntly and Epsom, north of the main Bendigo field.

But the rest of the district’s miners suffered through the drought without any water.

Slide 59

Following the successful passage of the Victorian Water Act 1865, funds eventually trickled through to commence the giant Malmsbury Reservoir.

Its construction employed hundreds of navvies, but soon became the centre of notorious wrangling between shady contractors and their interfering and inept government supervisors.

Slide 60

Even before Malmsbury was completed, monstrous faults emerged in the embankment’s construction.

Other faults were soon found in works right across the Coliban and Geelong Water Schemes, forcing the government to call several high-level inquiries.

Eventually, the government hired a hydrological engineer from India, Lt-Col Richard Sankey, to probe the alleged shoddy works along the two schemes.

Slide 61

Sankey’s report on the Malmsbury works was the most damming.

There he found the contractors had ‘scamped’ on the works, so that the outlet tunnel brickwork was not nearly as strong or as watertight as it should have been.

As a result, when the storage quickly filled during several weeks of abnormal rainfall, the embankment scoured out from within, and many feared the entire structure would give way, flooding all in its path as far as Echuca on the Murray.

Slide 62

Overall, Sankey’s report of 1871 found that the Coliban Scheme as proposed would not supply the amount of water promised by its supervising engineers.

He also queried the conflicting uses of the Coliban’s water, and denounced the entire scheme as a financial disaster.

Slide 63

The government’s own figures revealed that £590,000 had already been spent on a project originally costed (by Brady) at £253,982.

And Sankey estimated that to complete the scheme – including the building of Upper Coliban Reservoir – the total cost would hit nearly £1.24 million!

Victoria and its government were shocked by these revelations.

Slide 64

Yet Sankey’s report did nothing to ease the critical water shortages frustrating Bendigo’s golden future.

The Bendigo Advertiser and other local papers maintained their campaign to secure more water for Bendigo, both for drinking and for mining purposes.

Without this, their town would simply die.

Slide 65

In response, the Sandhurst Council struck a deal with the government to purchase the ailing Bendigo Water Works’ No. 1 Reservoir, and build a second larger reservoir at the foot of nearby Crusoe Gully.

In effect, the local council would now run local water supplies, independent of the government’s stalled progress on the Coliban Scheme

Slide 66

Joseph Brady returned to Bendigo (from Queensland) to design and supervise construction of Crusoe Reservoir.

Like all embankments of its time, it featured a central clay puddled core, to act as an impervious barrier to the water stored in the reservoir.

Work commenced in 1872, and within a year the structure was already filling with water.

Slide 67

Brady supervised the laying of the outlet pipe through the huge earthen embankment: an embankment even larger than at Yan Yean.

This would be the second largest reservoir in colonial Australia, and many across Bendigo thought that at last their water problems would be solved.

Slide 68

From the air, we can see the comparative sizes of No. 7 and Cruse Reservoirs.

Together, they could provide around 88 days supply of water for modern Bendigo.

But both have now been decommissioned, and their control handed back to the City of Greater Bendigo.

Slide 69

Bendigo’s plans for Crusoe Reservoir included the construction of a huge water treatment plant: the largest yet built in Australia.

This facility would use sand and specially perforated tiles to sift out suspended solids from the murky dam water, then store this ‘clear’ water in holding ponds, ready to pipes down to consumers in central Sandhurst.

Slide 70

The council adopted a variation of Brady’s original water treatment plant for Crusoe, and this operated until the early 20th century.

To help coagulate the suspended solids in the dam water, workers added ‘milk of lime’ to the water.

The resulting small clumps of muck were then more easily filtered out as the water passed down through the sand floor filter.

Slide 71

Today this remarkable site is still largely preserved, and offers an amazing insight into 19th century water filtration processes – long before chlorination and other advanced microbiological treatment processes.

Slide 72

As Sandhurst Council attempted to build its own independent water scheme, the government tried to cut its losses on the Coliban Scheme by completing the original works – but abandon the expensive construction of the Upper Coliban storage.

So during the mid-1870s, the navvies returned to the remote areas of Central Victoria, to hack out by hand the course of the Coliban Main Channel.

Slide 73

Some of this work involved the construction of elaborate stonework – not dissimilar to the massive earthworks required to build the railway, just fifteen years earlier.

Slide 74

By 1874 the Malmsbury Reservoir had been sufficiently repaired, and the main channel progressed far enough, to allow Coliban water to flow to Castlemaine for the first time.

Slide 75

After leaving the Malmsbury Reservoir, water flowed out beneath the viaduct, parallel to the Coliban River.

Slide 76

Some of the channel’s early path through porous soil around Malmsbury and Taradale required its boxing-in using corrugated iron, enclosed within a hardwood timber frame.

And along the entire channel route, contractors erected three rail fences to keep wandering stock at bay.

Slide 77

The Main Channel passes through five tunnels; the first passes straight under the main road and railway link between Melbourne and Bendigo – as it still does today.

The openings of these tunnels usually featured elaborate and overly ornate facades, adding to the scheme’s cost blow-out.

Slide 78

At times along its journey the channel’s fall is very steep, and the water accelerates around bends.

These areas were usually lined and strengthened with stonework, to guard against erosion and leakage (which was always severe).

Slide 79

At other times, the water flowed along clay-lined earthen drains, dug deep to follow the gently downward trending contours toward Bendigo.

Slide 80

To cross the broad, deep Back Creek valley the scheme’s engineers decided on a large inverted siphon.

Water dropping down one side of this large ‘U’ shaped pipe gained so much acceleration that it easily rose and flowed out the other side, at a slightly lower level.  

But the first tests of the siphon proved disastrous, with the enormous pressure exploding the second-hand metal plates that formed the structure.