Rochester

 

One of my earliest memories is peeping into the back lobby of the old Rectory at Rochester. River water had surged through to a height of one or two feet. Cold and clean, the water looked quite at home regardless of its recent arrival in our residence. Nature is like that. Its intrusion into our domestic arrangements was due to flood, the bush garden of the Rectory sloping slowly as it would down into the Campaspe River. Whether this memory draws on tiny black-and-white photographs of the same scene, I’m not sure, but the images are strong in my mind and include colour and sound. These memories are further coloured in by events of which I have only later reports: the arrival of my brother Michael into the world, so this was August 1958. Because the town was under water, the road between the Rectory and Rochester and District Hospital, in other words the Northern Highway, was blocked by river and rainwater. A long circuitous drive around back blocks was out of the question. The expectant mother chose to stay at home, against doctor’s orders, walking to the hospital being not wise in her condition. The ultimate decision was the child’s, who obliged by waiting until the flood had receded. This story is told to this day as though it were the norm. It was due to this particular flood that the vestry was propelled to build a new Rectory in the centre of town beside Holy Trinity Church itself, a home built with the fashionable white cream brick of the period. Flood was a regular hazard of life in Rochester in those days. Breaking its banks was what locals called ‘coming out’, i.e. the river would come out and go down again overnight; except when it didn’t. Walking from my new home a few doors to the main street, during the season I could witness that street completely covered in swirly floodwater that had ‘come out’; I was instructed not to go past the hotel on the corner. All the shops were shut for days as water slowly receded down drains and back into the Campaspe from whence it had risen. August, and Spring in general, was always a good time for a flood. At the age of six we left Rochester for Melbourne and more new homes, though in Melbourne they were called the Vicarage. This clear demarcation date tells me why all my early childhood memories of Rochester must have occurred before Melbourne Cup Day in 1961, the day of the shift. The thoroughbred Lord Fury led all the way to win the Cup that year. It was also the year they started work damming Lake Eppalock. Eppalock was a magical word of childhood, as adults extolled the happy resolution to the flooding history of the Campaspe River. Happy if you believe in regulated farm irrigation and safe, dry towns, doubtless, though presumably if Eppalock is full to the brim then floods will 'come out' again, as they have in recent years and spectacularly in 2022 when Rochester experienced the once-every-100-years event of being national frontpage news, the entire town being issued with an evacuation order.

 

Photograph: Silo art in Rochester, picture taken by my brother Seb during a visit to the town in August this year. He was born in Rochester in May 1961.