There are three generations of Maitland people who have never experienced a flood, are unaware of the city’s devastating flood history and the realisation that it can happen again.
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The message about Maitland’s flood risk was driven home to the public at Maitland Town Hall yesterday in time for the 1955 flood’s 58th anniversary.
Residents, flood survivors, members of the community and school students were invited to look at photographs, watch a film and collect information at the event.
Rarely seen photographs on display included images from Maitland’s 1875 flood, taken by Arthur Curtis.
Photographs of the damage and devastation of the 1955 flood were on display from the late Jim Lucey collection and restored by David Sciffer.
“Today is important because it is about keeping the message alive that flooding is still a risk in Maitland,” Hunter-Central River Catchment Management Authority flood education officer Amanda Hyde said.
“There are a lot of new people living in Maitland who are unaware of the flood history and we need to reinforce that message to them.”
Ms Hyde said it was the first time a flood display had been opened on such a scale at the town hall.
“There are people here who have a personal connection to the 1955 flood, people who lived here, and we also opened it to area schools and to the public.”
JOHN LANE’S MEMORIES OF ’55 FLOOD
As a nine-year-old living in Maitland in February 1955, John Lane thought Maitland’s biggest flood on record was a “wonderful, exciting adventure”.
Mr Lane was living with his family – father Ken, mother Jessie and sister Judith – in a house on the corner of Bourke and Michael streets (now Ken Tubman Drive) in Maitland.
Ken Lane had opened his speciality draper shop in High Street in 1948 and the family moved into their so-called flood free home in 1949.
It had been described as flood free because it had not been damaged in the 1949 flood.
But in the 1955 event there was four feet six inches of water inside it.
“We had to move out and live in the back of the shop and we joined the High Street village.
“There was a part of High Street which was a water free zone. It stretched from our store to the intersection of Elgin and High streets because there was a rise in the road.
“From huge windows I would watch the DC3s drop food and water relief packages by parachute.
“I could see the pilots and sometimes the packages would hit awnings, the streets and cars.
“They would drop fresh water in long, torpedo-shaped containers and these would hit the ground and burst at times.
“We survived on canned food which mum had brought with us from the house and some came from the discarded items swept out with the mud from the food shops in High Street.
“We often had a mystery meal because some cans no longer had their labels.
“Sometimes we got spaghetti and meatballs and other times vegetables. We cooked on a metho stove and many others joined us and shared meals.
“I became a child of High Street, a scavenger really, because I would collect things I found in the mud swept out of the former Coles variety shop (opposite Maitland Post Office), such as pencils and toys and food.”
Mr Lane was sent to live with family at Cessnock for the following six weeks and did not attend school during that time.
“I remember when we got back to school at the-then Marist Brothers (now St Peter’s campus). There was a huge mound of flood mud in the playground.
“For our exercise every morning the teachers would tell us to run around then up and over the hill.
“Dad’s shop was affected only slightly because stock had been placed out of reach of flood waters and he could re-open quickly.
“Part of dad’s contribution was to offer blankets, sheets, pillow cases and towels which people paid for with vouchers and there may have been many who were unable to pay but received the goods anyway.”
Mr Lane said the clean up took some time, but Maitland received remarkable help from a clean-up crew of volunteers from Newcastle and from the coal mining community at Cessnock.