"It was one of my more interesting cases, starting, as so many have done, with a false lead". That might be a pretty good start to a detective novel but as this is semi-serious history I should keep to the straight and narrow.
Given my special interest in the Coliban Water Scheme my attention was immediately caught by the above photo on the State Library website. This and the one below were quite obviously of settling ponds and both were labelled 'Malmsbury Reservoir, ca.1900 - ca.1953, State Rivers and Water Supply Commission'. But I knew there were never any settling ponds at Malmsbury Reservoir because there was no need of them there. Raw water was sent down the Main Channel to No 7 Reservoir and Crusoe Reservoir at Kangaroo Flat, Bendigo and both of those reservoirs, at least at one stage, had settling ponds of their own.
Unfortunately, mislabelled historic photos are pretty easy to find on the State Library website. And they're even found in professional reports. For instance, here's a photo that appears in the Victorian Water Supply Heritage Report, Vol 1, Final Report 2007 prepared by Context P/L for Heritage Victoria. Yet another reference to the phantom settling ponds at Malmsbury Reservoir. And once again, this is a mistake. Instead of the 'Water Treatment Plant at Malmsbury, 1970s' the photo is of the now decommissioned settling ponds at Crusoe Reservoir.
If the above photos weren't of Malmsbury Reservoir then where had they been taken? Putting on my deerstalker cap I began my investigations. I knew the photos were of early water infrastructure by the architecture of the octagonal tower. This narrowed down my search to reservoirs built in the 19th century. I went up a blind alley investigating Yan Yean Reservoir, one of Victoria's first major reservoirs, but then another photo was found on the State Library website. It was labelled 'Melbourne Reservoir' and was obviously part of the same series. It gives a wider view and so offers some very useful clues.
The landscape is unlike that of Yan Yean or Central Victoria. This is plains country, and wasn't that the sea in the distance in the top photo? It wasn't long before I found what I was looking for in old newspaper reports on Trove. In addition, Google Earth, once again, proved extremely useful. The above photos are of the settling ponds and service reservoirs at Lovely Banks, near Geelong. They were designed to accept and clarify water from the Upper Stony Creek Reservoir, Staughton Vale, before being sent down to Geelong. And while the settling pond below might no longer be used, the three circular service reservoirs which surround it look like they're still in operation.
Below is a view from Tower Hill Drive, Lovely Banks, courtesy of Google Earth Street View. You can see that the tower and octagonal valve house have survived the years.
The tall 21.3 m (70 ft) tower was erected in 1894 to balance the water pressure. Quite how it did that is a puzzle for another day.
Interestingly, just as with the settling ponds at No. 7 Reservoir and those on top of Monument Hill in Castlemaine, early attempts at using filtration beds to clarify the water at Lovely Banks proved a dismal failure. Perhaps, back then, UK trained water engineers revealed their lack of experience in dealing with the highly turbid waters of the kind they encountered in Australia.
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