Sir John Coode's canal
Gippsland Times, August 12, 1885 https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/61923851
You can read 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 (3)
Footnotes
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 (4)
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. (5)
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 newspaper reported that Carlo said the Public Works Department will also lay gas and erect a lamp at the wharf. (6)
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
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. (8) 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.
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. (9)
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 alia, the 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. (10) There were discussions about methods of controlling erosion in the Canal as early as 1896, when William Davidson, the Minister of Public Works suggested that -
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 (4)
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. (5)
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 newspaper reported that Carlo said the Public Works Department will also lay gas and erect a lamp at the wharf. (6)
Plans to be drawn up to erect a wharf shed.
Gippsland Times November 14, 1890. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article65299890
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. (8) 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. (9)
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 alia, the 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. (10) There were discussions about methods of controlling erosion in the Canal as early as 1896, when William Davidson, the Minister of Public Works suggested that -
As to the erosion of the banks he suggested the planting of blackberry bushes, which would grow quickly, and would hold the ground together just as well as willows or other plants more difficult to cultivate. (11) This advice may have been acted upon in 1896, but in May 1912, Carlo suggested the planting of willows on the Canal bank and in January 1913, it was reported that - Mr. Catani was pleased to learn that the willows were succeeding along the canal banks (12)
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. (13)
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. (14)
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. (15)
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 (16) 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. (17)
Trove list - I have created a list of articles on Trove about the Sale Canal and the involvement of Carlo Catani, you can access it here. Nearly all of the information in this post comes from these newspaper articles.
Sale Steamboat Company - SS Omeo, passing the swing bridge, near Sale, c. 1910
Museums Victoria https://collections.museumvictoria.com.au/items/771127
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.
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. (14)
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. (15)
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 (16) 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. (17)
Footnotes
(1) Gippsland Times, November 20, 1876, see here.
(2) 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.
(4) The Leader, November 3, 1888, see here.
(5) Gippsland Times, September 1, 1890, see here.
(7) Gippsland Times, January 13, 1896, see here.
(8) Gippsland Times, October 5, 1892, see here.
(9) Gippsland Times, June 10, 1909, see here.
(10) Gippsland Times, June 9, 1910, see here.
(11) Gippsland Times, January 13, 1896, see here.
(14) Gippsland Mercury, December 21, 1915, see here.
(15) Ibid.
(16) Sale: the early years and later by O.S. Green (Southern Newspapers, c. 1978)
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