Crossing the Deck

McKillops Bridge carries a single lane 255 metres across the Snowy River in a deep gorge near the Deddick Valley, its electric-arc-welded steel trusses resting on five reinforced-concrete A-frame piers and carrying a traditional timber stockbridge deck: transverse planking with gaps, and two running strips of six planks each for vehicle wheels. The tall white handrails were built with runaway cattle in mind. Photographed in 2018, the view here is head-on along those running planks, a white vehicle towing a camper crossing ahead, tail-lights lit, the forested hillside rising behind. The Country Roads Board designed and built the bridge in two stages between 1931 and 1935. The first bridge, contracted to Gardener Constructions of Melbourne for £11,950, was finished but never opened. On 8 January 1934, a few days before the planned opening, a flash flood off the Victoria and New South Wales border country exceeded every previously recorded river height. Debris piled against the trusses for half a kilometre upstream; the pressure tore the superstructure off its piers and swept it downstream, parts of the wreck reaching the bridge at Orbost. The centre pier came down with it. The river was reported 16 feet above any previously recorded flood. The CRB rebuilt higher. The piers were raised 15 feet, the open A-frames filled in to shed future debris, the original abutments converted into additional piers, and the steel trusses cantilevered back to the higher approaches. The replacement bridge opened on 20 December 1935, on the Friday, with about 250 people present. Mrs Lind cut the ribbon; the Minister for Public Works, the Hon. G. Goudie, dedicated the bridge to George McKillop, an overlanding squatter who had brought cattle through this crossing in 1835. A contemporary press figure put the replacement at about £12,000. The crossing McKillops Bridge replaced had carried stock down from the Monaro for the best part of a century before the bridge existed, worked from 1889 by a punt run by Duncan McKellar, a Scottish-born ferryman known locally as Punty. The bridge itself is listed on the Victorian Heritage Register (H1849) and was awarded an Engineering Heritage Marker by Engineers Australia in November 2019. In 2012 VicRoads undertook a major timber restoration of the deck and handrails. A further repair, replacing deck timbers with closely matched timber, was completed by Transport Victoria in 2025. Every flood since 1935 has passed beneath the trusses without reaching them.