The Mystery of the Loddon River Bridge

The above photo was posted on a social media history site last year. It shows a person and a horse standing on a wooden bridge above a river with somebody engaged in some strange activity in the river bed. On the State Library of Victoria's website the photo is labelled: 'Crossing place on the Loddon Victoria, Caire, N. J., 1837-1918, photographer. Date: 1877'.

    As an aside, what IS the fellow with the strange hat doing below the bridge? A fellow sleuth came up with the answer. He's filling a water container, a leather satchel- throwing it out by its strap and then dragging it back towards him. And the hat covering is probably some kind of shade or insect screen which can be dropped down over his face when needed. 

    It's quite an intriguing, even dramatic image, and once again my first thought was "where is this photo taken"?  I like to think I'm pretty familiar with the Loddon River and the bridges which span it. I knew it couldn't have been downstream of Cairn Curran Reservoir because the river carries a lot of water there  (see photo below of the bridge at Baringhup).

    Because the river doesn't appear substantial in the N.J.Caire photo, I surmised that it had to be high up the Loddon River, either the old bridge at Newstead, or even further up, perhaps at Glenluce. I soon discovered that those bridges and surrounds weren't a good match for the historic photo. At Newstead the river has cut a deep path through the landscape and has been a settled district for a long time. Even as far back as 1877, I felt sure there would have been open fields to the south of the river. And we can tell the photographer was facing south because the ripples in the water lets us know the river is flowing from left to right in the photo. As the Loddon River flows west at Newstead I concluded that the photographer must have taken the photo on the northern bank of the river.

    What about higher up the river? I immediately discounted the Tarilta bridge at Vaughan. There are enough historic photos of that bridge to know that not only was its structure very different to the one shown in Caire's photo, but the river at Vaughan had been decimated by mining at that stage (see photo below, titled 'Elevated  view of Vaughan and Bridge, George Levi Carter, between 1870 and 1910, State Library of Victoria)

    That left the bridge over the Loddon River at Glenluce. No luck there either. That bridge turns out to have been  built in 1870 with stone piers. And the river surrounds there didn't seem a good match anyway.

    While I was puzzling over the location of the mystery  bridge, another photo came to light which  seemed to have been taken about the same time. On the State Library website it's titled:  'Scene on the River Loddon, Victoria, Caire, N. J., 1837-1918, photographer. Date 1877. Two men are shown fishing on the banks of a river.

    Here's a close up of the fishing party.

    Quite obviously they're the same two men shown in the bridge photo. Perhaps this photo will provide the clues needed to identify the bridge's location? In actual fact it raised even more questions. This doesn't look anything like the country along the Loddon River upstream of Newstead. And what was that waterfall in the background? I know of none like that on the Loddon. Here's a closeup.

    At about this point I realised I'd run out of ideas. Time to call in a Loddon River expert. I got in touch with Newstead resident, the ornithologist Greg Park. He was as puzzled as I was and so asked the advice of the traditional experts on the Loddon River and this region, our local indigenous clan, the Dja Dja Wurrung. In particular he asked the opinion of Oli Moraes and Caleb Dunolly-Lee from Forest Gardening, both members of the Dja Dja Wurrung Cultural Heritage team. It wasn't long before the answer came back. And the answer had been staring us in the face all the time.

    Both photos are not of the Loddon River, Victoria despite the State Library labels. They are of Loddon Creek, NSW. Here is a contemporary photo of the Loddon Creek near Appin Road, upstream from the huge Cataract Dam. This must be the waterfall shown in the historic photo. 

    A clue had been given below the second of Caire's photos. You can see that underneath the photo is the label 'Scene on the Loddon River, NSW' but someone has put a line through NSW as if they'd decided that a mistake had been made. There had been no mistake. Notice the great similarities in the vegetation in the 1877 photo and the modern day photo. There has been negligible change in the environment. 

    So where was the bridge in the 1877 photo located? My theory is that it's a photo of the old Appin Road bridge which is very close to the Loddon Creek falls shown above. A Google Earth image shows the relationship.

    I might not have solved the mystery by myself this time but at least I asked the right questions of the right people. And Dja Dja Wurrung scholars Oli Moraes and Caleb Dunolly-Lee obviously enjoyed the challenge. They sent back colourised versions of the 1877 photos!