Our Fruitful Record - Water
The River Torrens and Third, Fourth and Fifth Creeks were important water courses for the Kaurna people and the many generations of farmers and market gardeners who have worked in the Campbelltown Council area. The market gardeners whose land was close to the river had ample water supply which they pumped to their vegetables using canvas-lined channels. Others who lived further away on smaller gardens relied on the creeks or had bores on their properties. The River Torrens was also a feature of children’s play and some families fished successfully.
"…they had a dam up the top and he was getting the water from… the creek and he used to fill up this dam and this dam used to water his potatoes with – no sprinklers – all done by the ground." - Charlie D’Angelica
Pictured: Emery family, first day’s planting, looking West, 31st December 1986.
"We had a …very steep embankment [with] a pump … pumped up to top of the cement tank wall, that was 160 feet … and I reckon the bank would have been about 100 foot…" - Paul Emery
"Mr Grey’s and Mr Pitt’s land… it was between eight and ten acres… and they had a horse and they had a little old tractor and they used to wash celery… They used to pump water from the river… I remember there was a big loquat tree, we used to always go and pick loquats down there as kids, and went down the river. It’s not lovely and clean like it now…" - Maria Matteucci
"There was an aqueduct which was an open channel that you had it for water channel, it ran from the Torrens gorge to the Hope Valley reservoir and when the reservoir was full the Red Fin used to migrate up that channel and we’d sneak a drum net into the channel and the small fish would pass through the netting and it’d just retain the edible size and we had a ball catching Red Fin out of that channel and even got a photograph of a large brown trout that caught in that aqueduct." - Hartley Ey
Pictured: Hartley Ey with 8lb. trout which Hartley and Merv caught in the aqueduct on the Highbury side of the River Torrens.
"Away from the Torrens most of the bores were very brackish, fortunately the Ey family had a very, very good bore that in the time of drought it provided the water for two market gardens non-stop, at night it pumped for our market garden and in the day time our cousins and we got by that way." - Merv Ey
"And they used to give us an allocation of water every week in the extreme time of the year, with the hot summers, and that water used to come from past Skinners’, Larsens, Wicks’s, and by the time it got to our place it was water that was, released at 9 o’clock in the morning, got to our place about half-past five or six Saturday, Friday afternoon. It was always let go Friday mornings, and we used to start the pump as soon as there was enough water to cover the pump, and then I would start watering, and I’d water around the clock until we had watered everything." - John Lomman
"...Fifth creek run through our place and while there was water in there we’d use out of the, the creek, had a big cement tank which was built in the early 1940s, 50,000 gallons and they’d pump the water into there and there was also a dam, they’d run the water into the dam. But then the creek doesn’t run all year round, there was a bore on the place, but the bore water wasn’t real good. And they would mix the bore water with the mains water and use that when the creek stopped running. You couldn’t use the bore water on most vegetable because there was too much salt in it, but it was alright if you mixed it and made a shandy of it. Back then you could grow your vegetables on mains water because it was that cheap." - Dennis Lorenz
Pictured: Emery Family. Charlie, Max and Doug Emery on the raft on the River Torrens, circa 1930.
"We were one property back from the river, we had one bore down there and we had a very good well. The well never let us down, summer, winter, drought, flood, we could extract 5000 gallons an hour out of that well. So that was the mainstay of the irrigation down there." - Jim Pierson
"Some of the market gardens in the area did have bores, we had mains water by virtue of where we were and mains water was very cheap up until probably the late eighties … Then it became a lot harder from just using the techniques that they’d applied before became a lot harder because the cost of water went up, the prices stabilised; there was a big push of people moving to Virginia and growing the same things in Virginia, so the price came down; they had bore water." - Robert Parletta
Pictured: Lorenz family, Linear Park, works have started on the river bank, April 1992.
"…when you grew celery, when you first transplanted it out, you water every day and then every couple of days. Just depending on the weather. That was always a horrible job of mine, trench irrigating, because you had the water, you had to run it down the trenches, get it to the end of the rows and not to waste it, and you’d be standing there in the heat watering it. It was try to water everything up Saturday so you didn’t have to do too much on Sundays. But it took a lot of time…" - Jim Pierson