Waterwheel History ›
Rebuilt from one old photograph.
When the Melbourne Metropolitan Board of Works restored McVeigh’s Water Wheel in 1978, they used some of its original ironwork and a single old photograph to get it right. It stands at the Upper Yarra Dam today, still in working condition.
A short prelude
Two wheels, one story — and it helps to know which is which.
The wheel in this history is McVeigh’s Water Wheel, and it stands today in the picnic grounds at the Upper Yarra Dam. It is the original: 4.3 metres across, built to drive a generator at a goldfield, later moved to a hotel that now lies under the reservoir. The wheel outlasted the mine, the hotel and the fires.
The wheel you see at our own front door in Warburton is a replica, built to honour that history rather than to reproduce this particular wheel. Water wheels like it powered gold mines, saw mills, houses and businesses right across the Warburton area. The two are often confused; this page is about the original, and the last entry explains the one out front.
Where the record hedges, we have hedged with it. One detail — what the wheel first did at the hotel — was never settled, and we have left it unsettled rather than pick the tidier version.
Before the record
The land on which the Waterwheel stands is the unceded country of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. The river that turned this wheel, the gullies the miners cut into, and the country now beneath the reservoir were gathered, fished and cared for in a continuous practice long before any of the dates below. Our heritage record begins where the European paper trail begins; the older history is older still.
From a goldfield generator to a working exhibit.
Lighting the Contention gold mine.
A 4.3 metre wheel drives a generator supplying electric light to the Contention gold mine, in Contention Gully about 10 kilometres south of what is now the Upper Yarra Dam.
Local heritage recordMoved to McVeigh's Hotel.
The wheel is moved seven kilometres to Patti McVeigh’s Hotel — a site now under the waters of the reservoir. It was thought at first to have driven a chaff-cutter; what is certain is that it went on to generate electricity for the hotel’s lighting. About 1.6 kilometres of water race was cut through rock to bring water from the Birrarung (Yarra River), serving both the power plant and the hotel itself.
Local heritage recordA bigger generator.
The hotel’s original generator produced only 110 volts. The proprietor, Mr Frank Seymour, replaces it with a larger one.
Local heritage recordThe hotel burns. The wheel survives.
McVeigh’s Hotel is lost to fire. The Waterwheel comes through it, and the hotel is rebuilt around it.
Local heritage recordTwo fires, one survivor.
Both the rebuilt hotel and the wheel survive the 1939 fires. A year later the fires return, and this time only the Waterwheel is left standing.
Local heritage recordThe surveyor's camp, then the salvage yard.
The Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works purchases the property, and for a time the wheel powers a nearby surveyor’s camp. Before the filling of the Upper Yarra Dam begins in the fifties, it is dismantled and stored in the Board’s salvage yard — where it stays for some thirty years.
Local heritage recordRestored from an old photograph.
The Board of Works restores the wheel. Some of the original ironwork goes back into it, and an old photograph is used as the reference to keep the reconstruction accurate.
Local heritage recordTurning again at the Upper Yarra Dam.
McVeigh’s Water Wheel stands in the picnic grounds at the Upper Yarra Dam, together with a 44 metre timber water-race built to serve it. It remains in working condition.
Local heritage record