Memories of 1956 flood back as Murray River town of Mannum braces

Rosemary Dawes knew things were serious when she saw an ­entire house float past her along the Murray River.

The Pretoria Hotel in Mannum was underwater for three months during the town’s worst flood on record in 1956.

Rosemary Dawes knew things were serious when she saw an ­entire house float past her along the Murray River.

She was just 16 then, one of the many kids of Mannum who turned out to marvel in 1956 when the South Australian riverside town was inundated by its biggest flood on modern record as the vast waters made their way down from the eastern states.

Almost 70 years on, South Australia is bracing itself for another slow-moving catastrophe with the inevitable impact of high rains and surging waters from the east.

From the northern Riverland towns of Renmark and Berri to the Murray Mouth in Goolwa, the river’s unstoppable surge is the talk of SA, with Premier Peter Malinauskas confirming on Tuesday that peak river flow will now reach “at least” 150 gigalitres a day, a huge jump from the 135 gigalitres being forecast last week.

Sandbagging is already underway to save low-lying shacks. Irrigation-reliant farmers are fearful their pumps will be submerged. And towns face being cut in two as the punts which ferry vehicles back and forth face extended closure, forcing people in some towns to drive hundreds of kilometres to the nearest bridge crossing.

“Time is running out very quickly,” Riverland Liberal MP Tim Whetstone says. “We all know what’s coming. We just don’t know how big it will be.”

The state government is warning of a potential “blackwater” event where so much organic waste gets flushed into the river from the east that fish and amphibians suffocate and die, which is exactly what happened in Mannum after the flood hit in ­August 1956 and the water stayed until 1957.

Rosemary Dawes and the rest of the Mannum “kids” are all now aged in their late 70s and 80s. They gathered this week to reminisce at the Pretoria Hotel, the flagship Mannum pub where the cellar and ground floor remained under water for a full three months after the 1956 flood.

The 1956 Mannum flood was witnessed by Lynette Taylor and her little brother Robert.

“As a child it seemed exciting at first,” Ms Dawes, now 78, told The Australian. “The town was flooded for weeks and so many people would come up from Adelaide and other towns to have a look. My friend had a rowboat and we used to row the tourists down the street for two shillings each.

“When the flood hit, I remember looking out over the river and marvelling as sheds and rubbish floated down. But it wasn’t until I saw somebody’s entire house float past that it really struck me how bad it all was.”

Her friend Brenda Taylor was a young mum in 1956 and her children Lynette and Robert, then aged three and 18 months, are featured in the cover photograph of a book entitled Where Were You When The Waters Broke: Memories of the 1956 Flood.

“It was really quite scary and it had a huge impact on the town,” Ms Taylor said. “You couldn’t get around for months and the water stayed here for so long afterwards, it really was terrible.”

When the waters hit, local teenagers were enlisted to assist the hundreds of volunteers who came from Adelaide and across rural SA and used 100,000 sandbags to buttress the river’s edge.

They included 82-year-old Ron Greening who as a fit 16-year-old spent whole days submerged in the river, swimming while lugging sandbags to plug holes in the makeshift underwater walls.

Council manager Tarik Wolf, Premier Peter Malinauskas and Paringa mayor Neil Martinson at the Renmark levy. Picture: NCA NewsWire

“I could swim like a fish,” Mr Greening said. “I can remember having to dive into the front bar of the Pretoria and swim under the wooden door frame to fish out bottles of wines for the owners.”

As the flood-ravaged eastern states deal with the immediate effects of this year’s rains, South Australia is again faced with an immutable law of physics – what goes up must come down. Rather than facing a sudden inundation, these downstream SA towns have had about two months to prepare for the water’s impact, with the Murray still not expected to peak for around another four weeks.

The gradual but relentless ­nature of the flooding process in SA is told through the story of the 1956 Mannum flood.

The town’s bowling green was inundated on August 3 when the water hit 4.2m, but it wasn’t until September 9 when the peak came, with the water level reaching 5.35m and the rowing club holding races down the main street.

The water hung around for so long that the Mannum punt, the chain-driven ferry that takes vehicles over the river, remained ­inoperable until February 1957, meaning the town was cut in half for almost six months.

Experts and old-timers do not expect the impact to be as dramatic as 1956 when the water hit a statewide high of 12.3m in Morgan and the flooding stretched more than 100km from the river’s usual banks in every direction.

The line at the top marks the level of the 1956 flood.

While no lives were lost, the 1956 flood caused immense property damage, and other floods since while smaller were equally damaging.

The current rains are being compared to the early 1970s when the Murray flooded in SA every year from 1973 to 1975. The 1974 flood was the biggest of the three and, as is the case now, occurred during a La Nina event with SA ­recording annual rainfall of 1407mm, roughly three times the amount it normally receives.

It is this fact which worries Ron Greening and his wife Carol, whose business was almost destroyed in 1974 when they had started work on a marina at Greenings Landing, 12km upstream from Mannum.

“It changed our life,” Ms Gree­ning said. “I used to joke that Ron’s toenails went rusty because he spent so much time in the water.”

Mr Greening said: “If it is as bad as 1974 then we are looking at the caravan park being flooded, the ferry not working, and a lot of lower lying properties being affected too. I would not want us or anyone to go through it again.”