I spent the last week on holiday with my family in the Ovens Valley, in the little town of Porepunkah. It was hot all week so much time was spent swimming.
While my brother and sister-in-law, my niece and nephew, my son and daughter, and my wife, were all swimming in a deep hole in the Buckland river, I sat on the bank wondering to myself what the river might have been like prior to European settlement. The river looked like it had been dredged, and probably dynamited, in the search for gold. The bed of the river was large fragments of stone – no sand. The banks of the river were steep, made of uneven jagged bits of rock, and overgrown with European weeds: purple-flowered scotch thistle, the rusty stems of docks, and blackberries just coming into fruit.
There is a much larger dredge hole at Eldorado near Beechworth. There the dredge is still sitting derelict in the middle of the flooded dredge hole, like a strange castle that has subsided into its own moat. Eldorado was deserted when I visited.
The Tronah Dredge Hole at Harrietville, “Lake Tronah”, on the other hand is a popular place for swimming. It’s probably about as big as the playing surface of the MCG and there is no rusting machinery (at least, none visible above the surface of the water). On this side of the dredge hole there is a little jetty that a bunch of people, kids and adults, were jumping from into the cool dark water. On the far side a rope hanging off a tree that was preferred by a group teenagers, loud music playing from a speaker. Out in the middle, groups of people were floating on lilos, inflated rings and paddle boards. God only knows how deep the thing is.
Drop slow gum leaves
to the surface
of the Harrietville dredge hole
Actually, an environmental history of bucket dredging in Victoria published in 2018 notes that the Tronoh dredge could go as deep as 130 feet. Despite disrupting 156 acres of the Ovens River, and creating extraordinary quantities of tailings (much of which has never been remediated), the Tronoh dredge barely broke even.
Read my other posts and haiku, here.
References:
The Environmental History of Bucket Dredging in Victoria, Davies P., Lawrence S., Turnbull J., Rutherfurd I., Grove J. & Sylvester E., The Journal of Australasian Mining History, Vol. 16, October 2018.
hook turn 