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01 McKillops BridgeDeddick Valley
Series · 0 prints
McKillops Bridge carries a single lane across the Snowy River in East Gippsland, Victoria, on McKillops Road in the Deddick Valley. Built by the Country Roads Board in two stages between 1931 and 1935, the bridge replaced a century of stock crossings and a government punt. The first bridge was destroyed by flood before it opened; the rebuilt structure opened 20 December 1935 and has stood through every flood since.
The Country Roads Board first proposed a crossing at Turnback in 1928, abandoning a low-level design once flash floods were recognised as the governing risk. A contract for the first high-level bridge was let to Gardener Constructions of Melbourne in 1931 for £11,950, with electric-arc-welded steel trusses on reinforced-concrete A-frame piers and a traditional timber stockbridge deck. A few days before the planned opening, a flash flood on 8 January 1934 tore the completed structure off its piers and swept the superstructure downstream, with the river running 16 feet above any previously recorded level.
The Country Roads Board rebuilt the crossing higher: piers raised 15 feet, the open A-frames filled in to shed flood debris, the original abutments turned into additional piers, and the steel trusses cantilevered back to higher approaches. The replacement bridge opened on 20 December 1935, with about 250 people present. Contemporary press reported the replacement as costing about £12,000. At 255 metres long and 4.5 metres wide, the single-lane structure carries a timber deck on two parallel welded steel Warren trusses across five reinforced-concrete piers.
The bridge replaced a punt run from 1889 by Duncan McKellar, a Scottish-born ferryman; its honorific name is for George McKillop, who crossed the Snowy here while overlanding toward the Omeo plains in 1835. It sits at the northern access point of Snowy River National Park, declared in 1979. The bridge has stood through every major flood since 1935 without damage, underwent major timber restoration in 2012, and was repaired again by Transport Victoria in 2025 with closely matched replacement timbers.
Hand-signed limited editions, printed from the original RAW file. Editions run from 100 down to 25 and are not reissued once they sell through.
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Made to order by Brett in Sydney, from the original RAW file. Each print is hand-signed and numbered before it ships.
Paper
Ilford Galerie cotton rag, 310 gsm. Acrylic on metallic gloss, 260 gsm.
Lead time
Unframed: 5 to 10 business days. Framed and acrylic: 10 to 20.
Often I'd find myself looking at the machines and architecture and challenging myself to find one single object designed purely for aesthetics. Craftsmanship made way for efficiency in engineering long before I'd even left school.
The Guardian
On the LC archive.
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Broadsheet
On the LC archive.
There's this sense of wonder you get when looking at abandoned buildings. You try to imagine what these spaces were like when they were filled with busy workers trying to meet production targets. And why did they close?
The Guardian
On the LC archive.