Some time ago we had the first part of the Tarago story, but there is a lot more yet. For such a small river it is an important part of our water supply systems.
The Pedersen Weir and the Tarago Reservoir (at Neerim South) have great importance in managing fish stocks and the welfare of the river.
About nine kilometres west of Neerim, the Pedersen Weir was built in 1963 and served to divert water into a pipeline to Warragul. The weir stands almost 15 feet above the original river level and is 95 feet long. There was a leak detected almost immediately about 10 feet below the weir, apparently not a leak in the weir itself but caused by the water having found a way under the weir.
In 1968 the Warragul Waterworks Trust asked Mr J.L. Neilson, a geologist, to look at the leak in the weir. It had to be completely drained to allow Neilson to fully identify the leak. All is well again, the Pedersen Weir is home to many platypuses, or it was when I last saw it.
Of more importance on the Tarago now is the Tarago Reservoir, historically a source of water to places as far away as the Flinders Naval Base, HMAS Cerberus. At first the Bunyip Weir supplied the Beaconsfield Reservoir through the Bunyip Race. This was then augmented by the Tarago Race. The water went by pipeline and aqueduct to the Beaconsfield Reservoir and thence by pipeline 'down the hill' to the Mornington Peninsula. The 'races' were open channels. That is a whole story in itself, and not altogether a happy one.
The dam was built in 1969 and holds 37,840 megalitres of good Tarago water. It is an impressive structure a hundred feet high and nearly a thousand feet wide.
The surface area is 360 hectares. It draws water from 11,400 hectares of the hill country and it has a capacity of 37,500 megalitres. My computer says "One megalitre (ML) is equivalent to 1,000,000 litres. It would fit in a container 10m high, 10m long and 10m wide and it weighs 1000 metric tonnes." That brings the dam capacity to 37,840,000,000 litres (I think). The dam wall is 34 metres high and 300 metres wide (or 934 feet if you are my age).
Melbourne Water stopped taking supply from it 2004 due to water quality issues, not that they were as bad as in the past when dead creatures drifted in the open channel section. In 2009 the Tarago Water Treatment Plant was completed and the reservoir's waters again supported the metropolitan water supply. That was in 2009, after the end of the millennium drought.
The reservoir and the Tarago itself have been stocked with brown trout and rainbow trout on many occasions, though rainbow trout were released into the river only in 1916 and 1964. The first stocking of the river was back in 1898 when 800 brown trout hatched in Geelong were released into the Tarago. The reservoir was stocked annually from 1969 to 1976 with rainbow trout and no browns.
The stocking has been of rainbow and brown trout only, so far as I can tell. Nonetheless, one reason for the careful environmental control of the Tarago, and hence the reservoir, is the protection of the Australian Grayling, a fairly small fish growing to about eight or nine inches and somewhat threatened.
In many nights fishing in the Tarago as a little bloke I never saw a Grayling. Truth to tell, I didn't see too many of the released trout, either.
The stocking seems to have ended when the reservoir was closed to fishing in 1977. I did not know how scientifically controlled are the water flows. They are monitored closely to ensure there is an environmental flow sufficient to keep the river 'alive' and a certain amount of water is reserved for this purpose.
This is the second 'Tarago' story, and I want to tell you a little about the name itself. This will show you how much research leads into dead ends. Well, mine, anyway.
At the start of all this I complained about the Toyota Tarago dominating my research into the name on the web, but there were other red herrings. Let me illustrate some of the many other places the name has been used.
In 2000 a ship called Tarago was launched. It is a Norwegian-flagged medium car carrier, weighing 39516 tons (how did they weigh it?) and 245 metres long. She plies the Pacific and was just off Acapulco as I wrote this.
There is a type of potato called Tarago.
Ancestry.com lists 353 records of people called Tarago.
There is a Tarago in NSW, between Canberra and the coast. It was first called Sherwin's Flat, but when the railway came through the name was taken from the original Tarago, 7km to the north, so the current Tarago is now outside the Tarago Parish. It is an old settlement with a pub that dates from 1848, but it has a modern problem in that the rail yards are contaminated from loading lead ore from the local Woodlawn mine.
Spotify says there is a song called Tarago, sung by Jonah Myers in 2019. Ron Snarski sings a song titled "A Town called Tarago".
Howtopronounce.com gives both pronunciations – Tar-ah-go and Tarra-go. There is no help there. As another example of this sort of thing we say Man-you-kar for Manuka and everyone else seems to say Marn-uk-ar.
There is a Tarago olive oil produced down in Inverloch, but that is probably named from the river.
In NSW the word is said to mean "country" – some say that our Tarago means "bird's wing" and that it might even be a version of Toorongo (which is said to also mean "bird's wing" but is also said to mean "bulrush" elsewhere).
There is even a Tarago farm in Queensland, out west of Springsure and Emerald, west of the gemstone country.
Who knows how our river was named? If you do, please let me know! In he meantime, remember that the Tarago is an important little river in many ways, and there are complex riverine environments along it about which we need to be just a little careful.