Sunday, January 13, 2019

Carlo and the Sale Canal

As early as the 1870s there was agitation for a canal to link the town of Sale to the Thompson River. In 1885, Sir John Coode drew up plans for this canal and a swinging basin and William Thwaites carried out the survey work for the project*.The canal was to be one and a quarter miles in length. You can see the plans and a description of the work to be undertaken, in the Gippsland Times of August 12, 1885, read it here.  The Tender for the first stage was let in 1886 and for the final stage in 1888. The Leader of November 3, 1888 had this report about the canal works  -
The tender of F. G. Mattinson, for the construction of the final section of the Sale canal, was accepted on Thursday by the Minister of Public Works. The amount of tender is £16,750, and £13,675 has already been expended upon the works, which are designed to enable vessels to navigate the Thompson river up to the town of Sale. The canal, when finished, will be one mile and a quarter in length, 85 foot wide at the top, with a basin 1200 feet by 200 feet.There will be 10 feet of water in the canal at low water (See article, here)

The work was finished around March or April 1890. I can't find a report of an official opening, but there surely would have been one - Politicians both Local and State have always loved those sort of events. A crane was approved for the wharf and a railway spur line from the main Gippsland line was also built, opening in  September 1890.

It was in November 1890 that we have our first mention in the papers of Carlo Catani's involvement with the project. He visited Sale and it was decided that they would erect an eighty foot long wharf shed and extend the wharf another 200 feet. Another paper reported that Carlo said the Public Works Department will also lay gas and erect a lamp at the wharf.


Gippsland Times November 14, 1890.

Two years after the canal was opened there were demands for it to be extended to the Thompson River to provide it with a continuous flow of  fresh water for 'sanitation purposes' - it was called a scour channel. Another report said that Flooding Creek, the creek that goes through Sale had been had a fresh running stream through Flooding Creek before the canal works stopped its course, and he thought they were entitled have a stream of fresh running water instead of the insanitary dead water of the canal basin. (Gippsland Times January 13, 1896). 

To extend the canal, land had to be purchased from landowners and negotiations were mainly successful on this front except with Mr Luke Murphy, who refused the offers. Carlo visited Sale on a number of occasions to help with the  negotiations but as a paper reported  The price demanded by Mr Murphy was considered altogether too exorbitant, and Mr Catani said it could not possibly be entertained. (Gippsland Times October 5, 1892) In the end a new plan was drawn up that deviated around the Murphy property, but even these plans were not acted upon and the canal extension or scour channel never happened.



Steamer leaving Sale for Gippsland Lakes
Photographer: Hammond & Co. Studios.
State Library of Victoria Image H82.96/147

Another side effect of not having a scour channel was that the canal began silting up, as early as 1895 there were demands that the Public Works Department send up a dredge to clean out the canal.  There are various reports in the papers about Carlo visiting Sale to discuss the dredging requests. The dredge, Wombat,  worked on the canal in 1898-1899 to restore the official depth, which had been materially reduced entirely by the erosion of the banks. In carrying out the work the original slopes of 2 in 1 were practically obliterated, and the bottom width of the canal increased from 40ft to nearly 60ft. The Wombat was engaged hereat on this occasion for 16 months, at an outlay of £5,664. But the eroding and silting is not likely to be recurring on so extensive a scale, but some erosion will always be inevitable. (Gippsland Times June 10, 1909)

The erosion did continue and in 1910 the Council still had concerns with the erosion and the shape of the banks. Carlo wrote a report for the Council which said, inter aliathe Sale canal, so far as this department is concerned, is not an improvement scheme designed with the object of pleasing the eye, but is merely an excavation made for navigation purposes, and so long as it answers that purpose it matters little what final shape the banks will assume.  (Gippsland Times June 9, 1910)


Sale Steamboat Company - SS Omeo, passing the swing bridge, near Sale, c. 1910
The Swing bridge over the Latrobe River is about three miles from Sale. The bridge was opened in 1883, it was the first movable bridge built in Victoria. It was designed by John Harry Grainger (1854-1917) - the father of Percy Grainger, the pianist and musician. It is listed on the Victorian Heritage database, see the citation here. You can read more about the work of John Harry Grainger, here.


By 1913, there were reports that the canal was now only eight feet deep, and in 1914 Carlo reported that around seventy pounds had been spent on the Sale wharf but another 400 pounds was still needed to make the repairs permanent. (Gippsland Mercury January 30, 1914)

In December 1915 Carlo, along with the Minister of Public Works and various other official visited Sale  and the issue of dredging of the whole waterway between Sale and the Entrance was on the agenda  at summer level the depth of water in some portions was so low that even the small steamers of the Sale Steamboat Company bumped and dragged through mud. With the larger vessels - like the Queenscliffe - which regularly traded to Sale, the master had a very difficult matter to navigate through safely.

Carlo, who was introduced as an an old friend of the borough [of Sale] is reported thus -   Mr Catani in acknowledging the complimentary references to himself said that it was 20 years since he was last in Sale, and he was very much surprised to see that that vital piece of work, the scour from the Thompson River above the pumping-station to the Sale Canal, still unfinished. (Gippsland Mercury December 21, 1915)

And that is how it remained - no scour channel and continual siltation issues. At its busiest more than sixty ships used the port of Sale** and I don't know when commercial traffic stopped plying the Sale Canal - there is a report in a 1935 paper that the wharf was in a dilapidated condition and it was demolished in 1952.

I have created a list of article on Trove about the Sale Canal and the involvement of Carlo Catani, you can access it here. The full articles from all the quotes in this post can be accessed on the list.

*Engineer to Marvellous Melbourne: the life and times of William Thwaites by Robert La Nauze (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2011) William Thwaites (1853-1907) later became the Engineer in Chief at the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works. You can read his entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, here.

**Sale: the early years and later by O.S Green (Southern Newspapers, c. 1978)

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