Many of you will know that I have an interest in Gippsland's place names and how they came about. Some of the stories behind them are a little uninteresting, but a few provide stories from our past that we should remember.
When I added Barry's Beach to the list I assumed there was a bloke called Barry, or a family, down there on the coast of Corner Inlet, just south of Agnes. I was not quite accurate in the assumption but not quite accurate, either,
It is sometimes called just Barry Beach, and sometimes Barry's, and it is named for William Baragwanath, a surveyor and geologist who had a real impact on Gippsland.
He was born on the Ballarat goldfields in 1878 and his father was a Cornwall-born surveyor. Young William went to normal state schools, then to Victoria College and on to the Ballarat School of Mines. In 1894 he went to work for Robert Allan, a mining and land surveyor.
1897 saw him switch to the Department of Mines. He continued to study and the school of mines certified him as a Land and Mining Surveyor in 1903. Working full-time he continued to study at night and in 1911 graduated as a geologist.
His first task with the Mines Department was as assistant surveyor and draftsman on a survey of the Walhalla goldfield in 1897 and he was in charge of that survey from 1898 to 1900. Among other goldfields he led the survey of the Aberfeldy field.
Perhaps his most important role was in Gippsland. From the end of 1916 he was exploring the brown coalfields of the Latrobe Valley. Working with great precision and accuracy he carried out the necessary topographic surveys and chose the bore sites for exploration. He provided the information on which the SECV relied upon in establishing the Yallourn open cut and power station.
He was promoted through the Mines Department until he became its head in 1932, with a fearful reputation as a man to whom perfection was barely good enough..
There was simply no-one else with such an encyclopaedic of Victoria's mining and geology and this was matched by an incredible ability to remember what happened and when, and what the results were. He was frequently asked for advice by mining companies and one of the things that made his advice valuable was that his advice was always carefully given and never too 'carried away'
His work was so respected that he was elected president of the Royal Society in 1944. He was a councillor for the Ballarat School of Mines for 34 years and was for 30 years a committee member of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. He retired in 1943 but was retained as a consultant by the department for the seven years after his retirement.
Surprisingly, the only two 'honours' he was awarded was when he was admitted to the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1952 and when he was elected a Fellow of the Victorian Institute of Surveyors in 1958.
There was, though, one rare honour he got in 1925, when his 1910 report on the Aberfeldy area, which covered many things, listed an ancient plant genus that he'd discovered. That species was named Baragwanathia in 1925. Not many of us have had a plant named after us. I know of no Wellsia, for instance.
I said that he made two major contributions to the development of Gippsland and that one was his skilled laying of the groundwork for the SEC's work in our Latrobe Valley. The second, almost as important, was that he was the driving force behind finding our oil and natural gas fields in Bass Strait.
His almost-obsessive attention to detail, while seeing the 'big picture' as well, led him to conclude that parts of Gippsland would have oil underneath, He decided this by studying the literature on similar places around the world.
The Department of Mines drilled a series of bores 'west of the Gippsland Lakes' but only traces were found. There had been other attempts to find oil in the area, including a small find at Lake Bunga in 1924 that cause some excitement, and there was a strong belief that the oil was there if we could only find it.
The discovery of the Bass Strait oilfields was largely due to his work and his reports. The fields were discovered by following his projections.
Marlin A and B, Kingfish. Seahorse, Tarwhine, Barracouta, Perch, Bream A and B, Dolphin, Perch, Snapper, Tuna and West Tuna, Flounder, Snapper, Whiting, Kipper, Flounder, Halibut, Cobia, Mackerel, Kingfish A, B and West, Halibut and Blackback represent the seaward end of a huge production system that made Sale the oil city. For a time, and that provided great wealth and much employment at the peak. They might well never have existed without Baragwanath.
Production from those wells is slowing but there is still much to extract. We've already had over four billion barrels of crude oil and eight trillion cubic feet of gas come ashore, and there is more to come for a long time yet.
Their importance also lies in more than 600 kilometres of pipeline bringing the oil and the gas to Longford. Imagine, too, the work and the cost of building 23 offshore platforms, then add the employment created by the on-land delivery from Longford.
There was also was a huge investment of time and labour in building the Barry Beach Marine Terminal (Barry was the name everyone used in talking about him).
One of those happy things that can happen had the Barracouta oilfield discovered in 1965, so William Baragwanath had lived long enough to see his projections proved true.
Apart from his obsession with accuracy and precision there seems to be little recorded about his private life. I know he married Clara Jones in the Flemington Presbyterian Church in May 1900 and that he had a large family of two sons and seven daughters. I know that he died on 20 September 1966 at his home in Prahran.
The Australian Encyclopaedia of Biography does let fall the snippet that he relaxed by building model boats – and I'll bet they were meticulously accurate. There is even a certain irony in it, in that the greatest fruits of his work lay under the sea.