The Alchemy of Gold: The chequered history of the Coliban Water Scheme

The Alchemy of Gold was a series of lectures, workshops and field visits which took place in and around Castlemaine between 16 to 18 May 2025. It brought together professional  historians and archaeologists, as well as inspired amateurs, to examine the effects on the goldfields region of the discovery of gold in 1851. It was an event which will live long in the memories of those lucky enough to have been in attendance. 

This is my own talk, delivered on Sunday afternoon, May 18 

The Alchemy of Gold : The Coliban Water Scheme

The chequered history of the Coliban water Scheme

When I was originally asked what would be the title of my talk today I glibly replied “Exploring the chequered history of the Coliban Water Scheme. How water from the Great Divide was brought to Bendigo and Castlemaine”. I can assure you I would need a lot longer than 25 minutes to do justice to that topic so I’ll opt for the low hanging fruit.

Specifically, I’ll be looking at how a famously bizarre decision ended up derailing the scheme as well as the careers of several engineers.

There are many roads that lead to a love for historical research. In my case, I came to appreciate the Coliban Water Scheme, in particular, through my love of bushwalking, or field rambling as I’ve been known to call it. And while I’d been walking along sections of the channel for years, I was led to a deeper interest in the channel and its history through people sharing historic photos on social media.

Photo 01:  M. Law  1894,  Flume No 3, Mount Alexander

Photos like this one, downloaded from the State Library website. This is the photo that ignited my interest. It’s M. Law’s 1894 photograph of a wooden flume, or water bridge, on the eastern side of Mt Alexander. It was my search for the location of this flume which eventually led me to write a walking guide to the Coliban Main Channel.

By the way, I believe the plant in the right foreground here is the once widespread Silver Banksia, Banksia marginata, which no longer occurs in our district. Back in the 19th century it was known as Honeysuckle.  Sadly, perhaps because of its sensitivity to pasture improvement, or due to a determined effort by pastoralists to remove it, it slowly disappeared. 

Photo 02: Myrtle Creek Flume

And here’s another photo of a lost flume, again a photo that can be found on the State Library website. This one straddled Myrtle Creek, near McKittericks Road, between Faraday and Sutton Grange.

As a result of investigating the old flumes it dawned on me that the Coliban Main Channel could well be one of this region’s most underappreciated attractions. And one with a fascinating history.

Photo 03: George Rowe's watercolour, Bendigo, 1857

In this symposium, the focus has been on examining the transformational effects on this region specifically and Victoria generally, of the discovery of gold and the subsequent gold rush. I think this watercolour by the artist George Rowe from 1857 is a dramatic depiction of how quickly and extensively the landscape was transformed in just a few years.

A number of historians and archeologists, some of whom are in attendance at this symposium, have written on the way gold miners shaped the land, including excavating races and ditches to lead water, quite often from many kilometres away, to their diggings. I’ve learnt a lot from David Bannear and the La Trobe team of Peter Davies, Susan Lawrence and Jodi Turnbull. In fact, their in-depth investigations into how water was marshalled in the service of gold miners has led me to explore other 19th century water schemes around Victoria.

Dr Lloyd Carpenter, writing on the Bendigo’s Rise and Shine Sluicing Syndicate, claims that ‘water races are the most significant heritage of alluvial goldfields’. In the case of the Coliban Water Scheme, we can see the truth in that statement. Still delivering water to the goldfields, to our region, 150 years after its construction.

In the same way the arrival of rail transport was an important step in securing the future of closer settlement in this region, so to was the arrival of a predictable supply of water, not only to itinerate miners who relied on it for gold production, but also to those who had no intention of moving on once the gold ran out. 

Photo 04 :  Horse powered puddling machine

In 1863, Thomas Dicker, in his monthly mining journal, had this to say about the relationship between water and gold:

‘Water is only another name for gold- in other words, the yield of gold throughout the colony fluctuates more or less with the abundance or deficiency of water…(so) were a supply of water of reasonable cost, and without stint, provided for miners at the older gold-fields- the amount of gold obtained would eventually equal the highest escorts in the most prosperous times. As a natural occurrence the population would become more settled, mining as a whole would be less precarious, and the public revenue would be amongst the first to show signs of improvement.’

What could be a more dramatic display of the transformational effects of the gold-rush on this region than that it drove the search for a reliable supply of water? That, through the promise of the financial returns from the sale of water to the main industry, wealthy enough to afford it, our region ended up with reservoirs and water races that allowed the survival of Castlemaine and Bendigo, despite neither of those towns being situated on a major river.

In early 1878, not long after water finally flowed along the Coliban Channel to Bendigo, the Melbourne Age looked back on the history of the scheme:

‘As far back as 1860, if not earlier, general attention was directed to the scarcity of water in the Castlemaine and Sandhurst districts, and various schemes were suggested whereby the deficiency could be supplied. At Sandhurst in times of drought, the rates charged for water rose to famine prices, and the almost absurd sums paid for buckets of water gave rise to sanguine speculations as to the profits that were in store for the company that would bring in a copious supply of water to the rich goldfields of Castlemaine and Sandhurst.’

Despite such a carrot being dangled in front of the Government, it took some time for them to act. The Victorian Government was millions of pounds in debt to British financiers because of the investment in the rail network but in the end they simply had no choice.

In 1862 the lack of water on the goldfields led to thousands of miners heading off to New Zealand to try their luck. But maybe it was embarrassment that tipped the hand of the Government in that same year. In October, the first train finally steamed into Bendigo carrying the Governor of Victoria, Sir Henry Barklay, as well as other dignitaries and Melbourne’s social elite. They’d come to celebrate the opening of the railway line. Unfortunately, water was in such short supply, there wasn’t enough to fill the boilers to allow the trains to return to Melbourne until the next morning. This couldn’t have served as a clearer illustration to Melbourne’s power brokers that there really was an acute water shortage in the goldfield regions.

Something had to be done. The gold industry was simply too important to the local and state economies, to be allowed to run dry. That same month, the Government announced a competition to find the best designs and plans to bring Coliban River water to Castlemaine and Bendigo. Prizes of 250 and 150 pounds were on offer.

Now, the idea of taking water from the Coliban River had been floating around for some years but these days we usually associate the idea with the Irish engineer Joseph Brady.

Photo 05: Joseph Brady, 1865  

  

Brady seems to have been involved in quite a few of Australia's most important infrastructure projects of the mid to late 1800’s.

Born in Ireland in 1828, he arrived in Australia in 1850, and by 1858 he’d been appointed engineer to the Bendigo Water Works Co, designing the first major reservoir, the No 7. Reservoir at Big Hill. As the name implies, this was just one of a series of reservoirs Brady planned for Bendigo.

By 1862, Joseph Brady had already submitted a plan for a reservoir to be located at Malmsbury just south of the Railway viaduct, and he’d sketched out a proposed route for the Coliban Channel. So he’d had a head start in the competition and he duly won the 250 pound prize for his proposal. There was still plenty of lobbying to be done, and another extremely dry spell to help focus the minds of the politicians, but eventually Brady’s Coliban Water Scheme, with a few modifications, got the go ahead.

So let’s look at the Coliban Water Scheme before I get to the chequered history part of the talk.

Photo: 06 Coliban Scheme map

Here’s a simple map of the Coliban Water Scheme. You can find this and a history timeline on the website of Coliban Water. 

The length of the Coliban Main Channel is about 70 kilometres. It consists of open water channels and races, and six tunnels. Originally there were two siphons or underground pipelines.

The construction of the scheme would begin in 1866 but surprisingly perhaps, not with Joseph Brady in charge. The job was given to the railway engineer Henry Christopherson, and more of him a little later. 

But meanwhile, an issue needed urgent attention down in Melbourne.

Photo 07: The 1862 Elizabeth St. flood.

This is a photo of Elizabeth Street during the 1862 flood, one of many since. It was obvious something had to be done about Melbourne's appalling drainage problems, especially along the old creek gully that was now known as Elizabeth Street.

In 1864, the engineer Mr A. K. Smith delivered a paper to the Royal Society. It was a detailed examination of the rainfall records going back to 1840. He showed that the large open drains of Elizabeth Street would never be capable of handling the runoff associated with extreme rainfall events. What's needed, he said, is a large tunnel built under the city to channel the flood waters out to the West Melbourne Swamp. 

He went on to state that the tunnel could be paid for by selling off a huge pile of rusting cast iron sewer covers that had been lying near the swamp for over 9 years. The Melbourne Age was impressed by the idea and it seems someone in the newly formed Victorian Water Supply Department was paying attention. 

So these sewer covers were cast iron segments, quarter arcs, 6 feet or 1.8 metres long, designed to be bolted together to form a semicircular cover for the sewers. There were something like 1500 of these segments!

Photo 08: Henry Christopherson

Whether it was the newly appointed Chief Engineer Christopherson, shown here in the topper, who came up with the idea to use these sewer covers for the Coliban Water Works or, perhaps a superior, the covers were rescued from the West Melbourne Swamp and shipped up to the worksites.

The idea was that pipes could be assembled from these covers by bolting together 4 of the segments. Huge patchwork pipes, 2.3 metres in diameter!

There were two major parts of the Coliban Scheme where pipes would be needed, the outlet of Malmsbury reservoir, and the siphon to be laid across the Back Creek valley on the border of Taradale and Malmsbury. This siphon pipeline would carry water across to the flanks of the Fryers Ranges, where it would continue its slow descent to the Expedition Pass and No. 7 Reservoirs.

I should stress, these cast iron sewer covers were never intended to be joined together in such a way. The castings were quite thin, just over an inch in thickness, and they were so rough that they didn’t even meet flush. This meant that the cast iron was already under stress through the tightening of the bolts to make a firm fit. Doubts were soon being expressed about this and other decisions that had been made by Christopherson. In 1868, with the rumour mill working overtime, the Government called in Thomas Higinbotham, Engineer-in Chief of the Railways, to report on the progress of the Coliban works.

Higinbotham’s report of December 1868 was highly critical of the administration of the Coliban works. The suggestion was that Christopherson had neither the skills nor the temperament to manage such an important project.

Christopherson soon replied and he came out with both barrels blazing. But at least one newspaper of the day wasn’t convinced by his rebuttal. The Melbourne Leader concluded that:

 ‘No unprejudiced person can go through the report of the Engineer-in-Chief, Mr Thomas Higinbotham, and the voluminous deliverance of Mr Christopherson in reply, without coming to the inevitable conclusion that the works already done bristle with blunders, that their history is one of engineering patchwork and that their principal characteristic is incompetency’. 

And yet Christopherson’s sheer chutzpah managed to hold his critics at bay, …well, for at least long enough to provide a thrilling climax that would keep the Australian printing presses clattering away for months. Higinbotham’s warning that the sewer cover pipes were fatally flawed went unheeded.

By mid July 1870, the fragility of the pipes had become obvious. As water levels rose in the Malmsbury reservoir, leaks in the outlet tunnel slowly worsened and it became obvious that the pipes leading to the tunnel had fractured. As time went on, these leaks caused the puddle clay surrounding the pipe to erode. And in fact, later, in early October, with continued rain and the further scouring of the clay packing around the outlet pipe, the embankment gave way on the crest above the outlet to a depth of 3 meters.

Photo 09:  outlet tunnel leaks

The State Library identifies this photo as the outlet tunnel at Malmsbury but it dates it to the 20th century. Nevertheless, when a hastily assembled team of consulting engineers headed by the respected civil engineer William Doyne entered the tunnel on the 16th July to inspect it, I’m sure this is pretty much the sight that would have confronted them. The tunnel outlet was leaking like a sieve. The outlet pipe would now have to be replaced entirely and the outlet tunnel repaired.

Photo 10: Punch cartoon, July 1870

The press, of course, had a field day. Here’s a cartoon published in The Melbourne Punch on the 28th July 1870. Presumably, the tiny figure on the left, tearing his hair out, is Henry Christopherson but it could also have been Thomas Higinbotham. He’d been extremely reluctant to criticise the work of a fellow engineer and yet once he’d done so, the Government seemed content to sit on their hands.

By the way, the illustrator has taken plenty of “poetic licence”. The embankment was never breached but among people downstream, the fear was very real that it was a possibility.

But we weren’t finished yet with the drama. The Back Creek siphon was approaching its first tests.

In the Age in September of 1870, an intriguing letter was published. It was attributed to a correspondent known only as ‘Iron Pipe’. I say intriguing because only an experienced engineer with a deep knowledge of the Back Creek Siphon could have written it. Was it Higinbotham? It wouldn’t surprise me. The letter tore apart the design and construction of the siphon pipeline. ‘Iron Pipe’ predicted the siphon would fail, but even the writer might have been surprised how quickly that prediction came true.

Photo 11:   Photo of Back Creek siphon, 1874

So just a reminder of what a siphon is. It’s a pipe that straddles a valley, and water will flow through it from one end to the other if the outlet is lower than the inlet.

This isn’t a photo of the original siphon, it’s of the much more modest one that replaced it, taken in 1874. But perhaps it gives you some idea of what a siphon looks like.

Iron Pipe’s predictions were soon borne out. Before the siphon was half filled, those patchwork pipes fractured, were replaced and then fractured again. The Coliban Water Scheme came to a dead halt and the public recriminations began in earnest.

It was a disaster of monumental proportions. It cost the Government a mint and Henry Christopherson his job, as well as two other senior engineers. The result of these two disasters meant a delay of about 4 years in completing the Coliban Scheme.

Nevertheless, eventually, the Malmsbury Reservoir was repaired and completed and the siphon replaced successfully, with the one you can see in the photo. At last, in 1874, water began flowing into the Expedition Pass Reservoir to supply Castlemaine with water and three years later it reached Bendigo and the two Big Hill reservoirs, a second, Crusoe reservoir, having been built in the interim.

By the way, did Thomas Higinbotham live happily ever after now he’d been vindicated? Sadly no. One of those sacked Malmsbury Reservoir engineers, John Woods, had his revenge not too many years later. Woods entered parliament, became Commissioner of Railways and was successful in achieving his aim of undermining, sidelining and finally dismissing the respected Engineer-in-Chief.

Higinbotham died only a few years later at the age of 61.

And so ends the story of how we came to be drinking Coliban water here today.   

Back Creek Syphon inlet, east side of the Back Creek valley