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The Dry, Dry Darling . . and Memories |
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When the Sunraysia Daily announced in February that the Darling at Bertundy had stopped flowing altogether, President Pauline Bartels, June Greatz, Shirley Dedman and Barrie MacMillan, decided to make a special trip there to see things for themselves. Pauline hadn't been to Bertundy before, so she asked Len Hippisley to go as their guide, and who better could she have asked, Len doesn't just know the area, he lived at Tulney Point Station on the west bank, 4 km upstream from Bertundy for many years. Len helped his father build the first part of Bertundy Weir in 1941, and in 1958 he raised the height of the weir with the help of some of his neighbors.
Pauline reports that they saw 48 species of birds at Bertundy that day, mostly
at and around remaining waterholes, and we list these briefly for the record as
follows:
What Pauline most wanted us to share with you however, was some of the memories which they gleaned from Len that day - and with Len's help and the help of a few of his photos, we now present some memories of times gone by, from our own 'Old Bushman from the Darling'.
"My grandfather, John Hippisley, had a store just upstream of Bertundy homestead in 1873 - we've got a ledger he used then, but it doesn't show addresses, so it is difficult to accurately identify his customers. He took up the first section of Tulney Point Station in 1878, and built a house there, but he was flooded out in the 1890 flood. After that, at different times he also owned the Bertundy Hotel, and the Maid and Magpie Hotel (also known as Middle Yards Hotel). He died at Tulney Point in 1925. My father started irrigation at Tulney Point in 1938, but drought saw the river dry many times between late 1940 and 1946, and towards the end of 1941, when the river was dry for the second time, I helped my father build the first 18 inches of Bertundy weir to hold back a small pool to pump from. There were two rock bars on a sharp bend near our house, which were known as Bertundy Rocks, but 10 ft depth of rock had been blasted from these in the early days of the river trade, so we built the weir at another rock bar on a straight section about 4 km downstream. The initial low weir first held water in 1942, and it lasted Okay until 1958 when we raised the level of the weir by 2 ft with the help of 14 of our neighbours. Nothing else was done to the weir until December '02, when Laurie Strachan who bought Tulney Point in January '83, strengthened it with extra concrete. |
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 Building the weir in '41, using Boldy and a tumble scoop |
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The last time the river dried up at Bertundy was in 1946, when work started on the storages at Menindee. After that the storages enabled the river to be kept flowing, even though the scheme was not finally completed and officially opened until 1960. From then on there were no more real shortages until 2002 when the flow at Bertundy reduced to a trickle. Then in February this year the flow stopped completely, although more recently water has again been able to be released from Menindee following heavy rains in Queensland. |
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I was the gauge reader for the Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission for 42 years from Jan '41 to Jan '83, and when we built the first low level part of the weir the Commission gave us 12 bags of cement to cap the surface of the weir because they wanted to have a permanent weir reference level for the gauge. Then in 1958 when we raised the weir, they put in a continuous graph recorder showing the reading 24 hrs per day, but I still had to read the gauge and phone in the height every day. Today however, there is just a small, gas-filled pipe down to the water from a recording mechanism on high ground, and they read the stream height by making a phone call to the recorder from Wentworth or Sydney! How times have changed! There's also been floods of course. There were major floods in 1950, 1956 and 1976, and crossing the river was always a problem, so in 1969, with Graham Wilkinson of Jamesville Station, we built our own low-level bridge below the weir. We bought logs from the old Wentworth Bridge and built the bridge on bed-logs held in place by ⅝" rods drilled into bedrock. The bridge and the weir both stood up Okay to the 1976 flood, which was our biggest ever. For a short time it was 4" higher than the 1956 flood, although it didn't last as long (at Bourke the '76 flood measured 499,000 mgl/day at its peak, but of course it was much less than that at Bertundy). The bridge that we built, was raised about 10 years ago by putting shipping container bases on top of it, and it is still being used for local traffic". Len Hippisley |
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