Southeastern Australia, June 1952

The late autumn of 1952 had seen abundant rain in Victoria and southern New South Wales, and the ground was already saturated, when on Saturday 14 June a low pressure system developed and intensified east of Bass Strait. As the low intensified, strong onshore winds dumped torrential rains over those parts of southeastern Australia exposed to the south and southeast. Tanybryn, in Victoria’s Otway Ranges, registered 587 mm in three days, an enormous quantity of rain for a midlatitude location. The resultant surge of water down narrow, steeply-sloping river valleys washed away parts of the Great Ocean Road, isolating Apollo Bay. The swollen Barwon River flooded cement works and other buildings at Geelong, and rendered the woollen mills along the Barwon inoperative. Flooding in the town of Barwon Heads left 600 homeless, not to mention marooning Sir Hubert Opperman MHR!

The same system generated vast amounts of rain in eastern Victoria and southeastern NSW, causing major flooding on every river in Gippsland and adjacent southern coastal NSW. Sale was isolated, with all rail and road links cut. A railway bridge was washed away, as was the railway line between Bairnsdale and Orbost. Further east, a man was swept away in the Deddick River. Flood waters poured into the open cut coal mine at Yallourn North. In Walhalla, an old gold-mining town in a narrow valley, disaster struck on the Tuesday night as an avalanche of water, rocks, silt and logs swept down over the town. Residents barely had time to escape, and their town was covered in a metre or two of debris.

Meanwhile in NSW, the rising Lachlan river sliced the town of Forbes in three, and there were two metres of water in the Commercial Hotel on the 18th. The rampant Murrumbidgee prompted the evacuation of 1200 people at Wagga: one man drowned, and 40 homes in the lower part of Narrandera were flooded. Many highways were cut in NSW, and landslides rendered the Unanderra-Moss Vale railway unusable for two months.

Ten days after this deluge, torrential rain fell in Tasmania, causing major flooding in the Derwent Valley. Parts of Hobart were flooded and water entered the streets of Huonville. The remainder of 1952 continued to be very wet over southeastern Australia, with further severe flooding in October and November.