Reading Location Clues: Coliban Channel work crew

 

This is one of the few photos that show the Coliban Main Channel under construction. As such it has special value by providing an idea of how the work crews approached their task. The State Library labels the photo as 'Early development work on Malmsbury Reservoir, pre 1900'. Here we can see a work crew engaged in digging out the channel while using formwork to shore up the walls of the new channel. If this is the initial stage of the construction, as it seems, then the photo must date to the early 1870's.

    Initially I'd questioned the State Library's location for this photo. In it there's no sign of the reservoir or the railway viaduct or, in fact anything to suggest that Malmsbury Reservoir is nearby. I've found that a number of State Library photos are mislabelled so when I set out to find the photo's location I expected it might be anywhere along the Main Channel. I thought a place just north of Myrtle Creek at Faraday ticked a sufficient number of boxes. At a location here, just as in the photo, there was rising ground on the right hand (west) side, the channel bent to the left (east) and in the background was a low hill. The line of vegetation visible just behind the work crew I took to be marking the course of Myrtle Creek.

    However, I was recently given a copy of an article that had been published in the Bendigo Advertiser's Saturday Magazine ('In praise of the man who tapped the Coliban' by Frank Cusack, May 4th 1985).  In this story, about the engineer Joseph Brady, the above photo appears with the caption 'Workmen involved in channel construction at Malmsbury last century, photograph by courtesy Rural Water Commission'.

    This forced me to look more closely at the channel at Malmsbury. Had I been wrong? Was Malmsbury the location of this historic photo after all? In fact, I'm now satisfied that I'd been too clever by half. The State Library's caption might be incorrect but I'm now confident that we are indeed looking at the channel under construction in Malmsbury, but north of the Old Melbourne Road (Mollison Street) near the Adamson Street extension. Here's a photo that seems a pretty good match for the one above.

    Here's a diagram using a 1945 aerial map with the angle of view marked in.

    Am I confident I've got it right this time? No I'm not. Trying to read the location clues in very old photographs is extremely difficult. Consider my guess a work in progress!