Gundagai is known as a town with a rich, deep history that spans decades and decades, but one story that has remained on the tongues of many locals were the Gundagai floods of 1852.
The story begins during a dark June 24 night in 1852. Waters began to rise and quickly swept through town, ruining everything in its path. The raging torrent swept whole buildings away and left people clinging for their lives in trees.
Once the water left, only three buildings remained. Between 80 and 100 people died, and the disaster remains the deadliest flood in Australia’s recorded history.
In the early days of European colonisation, they had little understanding of the river systems set up by the Indigenous people. Australia’s rivers worked differently than what they were used to with an unpredictability.
In south-east Australia, in Wiradjuri land, the Murrumbidgee River was a major source of food. In Wiradjuri language the word ‘Murrumbidgee’ means ‘big water’ or ‘plenty water’. Knowing the country and the location of Gundagai for at least 50,000 years, they had found ways of dealing with the unpredictability that the Europeans did not. Hamilton Hume and William Hovell first passed through in 1824 while creating a route from Sydney to Port Phillip (Melbourne). The site that became Old Gundagai was a natural place to cross the Murrumbidgee River.
By 1836 the area was being used as a squatting run by early pastoralists. The site was surveyed on the low-lying river flats and a town plan was drawn up. Gundagai was gazetted as a township in 1838, by which time settlers were already building on the river flats. Warnings from the local Wiradjuri people who had seen the potential impacts of the river that the area was prone to flooding went ignored.
During Gundagai’s early years, the Murrumbidgee River flooded several times. In 1844 a flood already claimed two lives and caused extensive damage. Gundagai residents grew concerned about the town’s location and petitioned the New South Wales government for help. However, there was a view within the government that the ‘big one’ was behind them and no moves were made to relocate the settlement.
On Thursday 24 June 1852, after weeks of heavy rain, the Murrumbidgee River broke its banks and surged into Gundagai. In previous floods, residents sought shelter in their attics and on rooftops. This time the water rose rapidly and soon there was no escape. The island that Gundagai had become was sinking fast.
A sight of terrified people clinging to trees and raging torrents became all that you could see in the pitch black night. Some people clung on for two nights before losing their grip and being swept away. Others died from exhaustion in the branches. Estimates of the death toll are between 80 and 100 people, more than one third of Gundagai’s population of about 250 giving it the name of Australia’s deadliest flood. The final death toll will never be known, as it was not known how many travellers were in town.
This was a sight that caught the eyes of local Wiradjuri men who took no time to spring into action and help the town that once casted them out. Of the four men involved, only two are known by name, Yarri (Yarrie or Yarra) and Jackey (Jacky or Jacky Jacky). Over three days they navigated the treacherous waters in a bark canoe and a rowboat, pulling survivors from the trees and carrying them to safety.
Wiradjuri men were renowned for their skilful use of bark canoes. Such canoes were only able to carry one passenger, so Yarri made many trips, taking people one at a time. He rescued 49 people while Jackey rescued 20 using a rowboat.
The Wiradjuri people had been decimated by introduced diseases including smallpox, tuberculosis and measles, and violence as they were displaced from their homelands, but they did not hesitate to rescue the settlers when disaster struck.
The disaster forced the Government’s hand and they agreed to exchange any allotments at risk of flooding for land on higher ground. By the end of 1859 the old town was completely abandoned and Gundagai was settled on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, where it remains today.
It was years before Yarri and Jackey received any recognition for their heroic acts. In 1875 they were given an en-graved breastplate each, and granted a lifelong pension from the settlers.
In 2017, on the 165th anniversary of the great flood, Gundagai unveiled a bronze sculpture of Yarri and Jackey with a bark canoe, immortalising the heroes forever in the township.
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