About three decades ago I was sitting over a glass of wine with George, an old teacher mate, and Paul, an old army mate. We were nearing our magic 50th birthdays and we agreed that we needed to have an adventure or two before it was too late.
One adventure would be hang-gliding but I'd need a very big hang-glider so that has not (yet) happened. One would be to run a marathon, and we did that twice. Not good. The third was to canoe down the Thomson – and there I got the fright of my life, or one of them, anyway. I've had a few in my time.
That fright was the very scary whirlpool we came across at the mouth of the Oriental Tunnel. That will all be part of another story.
The tunnel has been known by various names, including the Chinese Tunnel and the Horseshoe Bend Tunnel. Nowadays it is usually called the Thomson River Diversion Tunnel and it takes the flow of the Thomson out of its original bed and under Stockriders Spur, returning the water to the river further down, so the curve of the riverbed around the end of the spur was left almost dry so it could be panned for alluvial gold.
The Stockriders Spur comes down to the river from the north-east and has a narrow neck linking it to the final piece, an almost-island running south-east to north west. The tunnel runs under that narrow neck.
In 1898 George Weeks took up a lease on Horseshoe Bend and had a plan for lengthy diversion races – and for a tunnel under Stockriders Spur. It was grand plan but too big to finance.
It was a comparatively late development in the Walhalla goldfields saga. The tunnel was begun in August 1911 and was completed by the end of October that year. It ran below the river level at the upstream end and came out of the mountainside a little above river level on the downstream end. It ran for 720 feet.
The tunnel was built for the Thomson River Alluvial Gold and Tailings Recovery Company, the name showing that it was a latecomer and would work the 'tailings' of old mines for gold missed in the crushing, almost always something that happens when the field is dying. There were other diversion tunnels and channels in the hills, too, but most of them were for bringing water to the site of the mining work to sluice for gold. This one was to divert the river altogether.
The tunnel was continued by contractor Jack Hannaford after only 215 feet had been completed due to 'labour issues'. I was surprised to learn that it has two sharp changes of gradient, one near each end. The site was perfect for a diversion, with a wall of hard rock crossing the riverbed to help divert the flow. It also meant exposing almost the whole of the river bed of Horseshoe Bend, over a kilometre long as it wound around the end of the spur. Hannaford was a mining engineer, born at Moonta, a copper-mining town, 6 January 1884, so he was still short of his 30th birthday at the time. He married Clare Irene Matthews and they were to raise seven children.
There were about 20 Hannafords in Walhalla at the time, with some still at Moonta and some at Broken Hill. Mining must have run in the Hannaford veins, though it is possible that not all of these were related to Jack and Clare.
The grand opening was to be well celebrated on 11 November 1912 but there was very nearly a tragedy at the opening. Jack Hannaford took his wife and the eldest three of his children into the tunnel for one last ride on the trolley. There had been a trolley with a light rail track, to carry the rocks out of the tunnel, and what child of the time would have refused a ride on the trolley with mum and dad?
There was only a thin wall of slate to be breached, and dynamite had been placed there, with a miner posted to light the fuse. Either the miner got impatient or the watches were not synchronised, because he lit the fuse while the Hannafords were still in the tunnel.
The blast and the sudden rush of water blew the Hannafords out of the tunnel and into the river. Mrs Hannaford, Clare, was a good swimmer and managed to get everyone to safety. Had any of them hit the jagged rocks of the tunnel sides, the story might have had a far less happy end.
The curve of the river around the end of Stockriders Spur was known as Horseshoe Bend and according to one Mining Registrar it was the last part of any of the stream gravels around Walhalla not to have been turned over.
I read that miners – they were alluvial 'miners', not pit men – were making about 4 pounds a week at Coopers Creek, just below Horseshoe Bend, and while I'm not sure of the date of that report that was a very good wage through the 1880s and 1890s.
It took only a short time to sluice all the available gravels, and a fair amount of gold was recovered, but once the river bed had been sluiced there was no point in continuing and the Horseshoe Bend lease was declared void on 10 March 1914.
Now the tunnel is under threat. One proposal is that a narrow channel should be cut into the exposed bed of the river round Horseshoe Bend to allow fish an easy upriver access, particularly the Australian Grayling. This would mean finding a place to dump the excavated rock without damaging a sensitive site. There has even been talk of dynamiting the tunnel entrance to close it, thus returning the river to its 1911 state.
Horseshoe Bend and the diversion tunnel were classified by the National Trust in 2011, and that classification covers the adjacent sites of alluvial mining and the camps, though the camps have, of course, long gone. The Victorian Heritage Register covers the tunnel at both ends.
There are two other Acts that might have relevance, and of which I was unaware. These are the Heritage Act and the Heritage Rivers Act.
The various bodies involved in making the decision include the Baw Baw Shire, the National Trust, the Vic Heritage Register staff on the one side and the West Gippsland Catchment Management Authority on the other.
Both sides present good arguments and I have no intention of taking sides because I simply do now know enough, and that is a very rare admission from me.