The Newstead Dredge, Loddon River, Victoria

Newstead Dredge, Loddon River, Victoria

Few Victorians alive today would remember the enormous dredges which worked rivers throughout Australia and New Zealand, despite one or two surviving almost up to this century. Their main task in Victoria was to work their way up river valleys, ploughing their way through river gravels, sifting them for gold. The considerable environmental damage these mammoth floating factories did was the subject of countless complaints from adjoining landowners and numerous government inquiries. It was only their steadily diminishing returns as the gold bearing gravels were slowly exhausted that finally caused their banishment but only after they had completely transformed river flats and in many cases converted rivers into little more than drains.  

    More detailed information about these extraordinary machines can be found in the paper, available online: 'The environmental history of bucket dredging in Victoria'  by Peter Davies, Susan Lawrence, Jodi Turnbull, Ian Rutherford, James Grove and Ewen Sylvester  (Journal of Australasian Mining History, Vol 16, October 2018).

    Recently, while researching a completely different project I discovered the Victorian Gold Dredging Company's Newstead Dredge on aerial photos from 1945 of the Loddon River near Newstead. The photos give an interesting insight into how the Newstead Dredge worked the Loddon River flats at this location. 

    By the way, the Historical Photo-maps site on which aerial photos of large areas of Victoria from 1945 can be freely downloaded has been extremely useful in putting together these history blogs. They're courtesy of the State of Victoria (Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action).

    The black and white historic photos are of fairly low resolution so I've used arrows and labels to highlight areas of particular interest.

    By the year 1945 (when these aerial photos were taken) the Newstead Dredge was parked a little to the east of the current Antares Iron Art Gallery (needless to say back in 1945 this property would have been a farmouse). It can be seen here just off the channel it had dredged from nearer Strangways, a locality to the south east (Photo 1). You can see that, rather than tear up the Loddon River (the tree lined watercourse running parallel to the straight channel), it was creating a completely separate path for itself. This channel later became the new course of the river. Nowadays the old course of the Loddon River can no longer be discerned, at least on Google Earth (Photo 2).

    The remaining two photos are of the Dredge's excavated channel a little further south east near the confluence of what used to be known as Jim Crow Creek but is now Larni Barramal Yaluk.

    Some idea of the extraordinary transformative effects of the activities of the Newstead Dredge can be gained from examining the above photos.