Jim Mynard – On The Swamp
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The pristine, three hundred square mile Kooweerup Swamp, south east of Melbourne, was drained during the 1890’s, when the government lured hundreds of unemployed family men from city streets for the work.
The men were promised they would receive title to a twenty-acre farm if they worked alternatively two weeks on their farm and two weeks paid work digging drains. In order to gain a work certificate for each two-week shift, the drainers were required to complete listed improvements on their farms. This provided bureaucrats with dictatorial control over the drainers.
Read the history of the Kooweerup Swamp and how it will probably affect all Victorian’s in the future.
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Preface
The pristine, three hundred square mile Kooweerup Swamp, south east of Melbourne, was drained during the 1890’s, when the government lured hundreds of unemployed family men from city streets for the work.
The men were promised they would receive title to a twenty-acre farm if they worked alternatively two weeks on their farm and two weeks paid work digging drains. In order to gain a work certificate for each two-week shift, the drainers were required to complete listed improvements on their farms. This provided bureaucrats with dictatorial control over the drainers.
The families built wattle and daub homes, some decrepit shanties, some not so bad, but they struggled on what was known as the Kooweerup Village Settlement. Don McAllister persisted to the end, during which time he lost a son in a horse accident, and his daughter, Winsome, was raped by three hoodlums. Winsome ultimately sought her own bush justice by shooting two of the rapists. Noted policeman, Sergeant Bob Whiteside, a district icon, made it his life’s work to prove the girl killed the men, but drainers with knowledge of the ‘murders’, kept it ‘close’.
Andrew Madden, grew up on the swamp from the 1940s and argued the area was in danger of tidal wave type flooding from rain on the Dandenong Ranges because the Main Drain was built in the wrong place and cut through the centre of the swamp with banks as high as rooftops in Kooweerup Village. While growing up he became enthralled by early settlers’ tales about the swamp. Later, when working as a journalist he became reluctant to write about the issues because of a general animus from farmers.
Lives of people on the swamp unfold, sometimes quite dramatically, told during discussions between Andrew and a married Sydney doctor who visits Melbourne on secondment to the Royal Women’s Hospital. They enjoy a warm, romantic friendship, held together by a strange attachment.
A major outfall built by order of a Royal Commission into the devastating 1934 flood on the swamp was blocked at the South Gippsland Highway just south of Kooweerup when the highway was duplicated.
The future beholds?
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