Trusses Above Rapids

Photographed from the rocky bed of the Snowy River in 2018, this frame looks up at the steel Warren trusses of McKillops Bridge as they cross the gorge on their tall concrete A-frame piers. The wide brown river runs across exposed rock below. Wooded hills rise behind the structure under a blue sky scattered with cloud. McKillops Bridge carries a single lane across the Snowy River in East Gippsland, 255 metres of timber decking on electric-arc-welded steel trusses and reinforced-concrete piers. The Country Roads Board designed and built it in two stages between 1931 and 1935. The first bridge was completed but never opened. On 8 January 1934, a flash flood off the Victoria and New South Wales border country rose sixteen feet above any previously recorded height. Debris piled against the trusses for up to half a kilometre upstream; the pressure tore the superstructure off its piers and swept it downstream. Part of the wreckage reached the bridge at Orbost. The planned opening, set for around 19 January 1934, was gone with it. The Country Roads Board rebuilt higher. The piers were raised fifteen feet, the open A-frames filled in to shed flood debris, and the original abutments turned into additional piers. The trusses were cantilevered back to the higher approaches. The replacement bridge opened on 20 December 1935, after a postponement for weather pushed the ceremony from 6 December. About 250 people were present. Mrs Lind cut the ribbon; the Minister for Public Works, the Hon. G. Goudie, dedicated the bridge to George McKillop, who had brought cattle through this crossing in 1835. The crossing itself is far older than the bridge. A government-subsidised ferry ran here from 1889, worked by a Scottish-born ferryman named Duncan McKellar at £75 a year, split between the Victorian Government and the two local shires. The site was known as McKellar's Crossing for decades. The bridge is listed on the Victorian Heritage Register as H1849 and was awarded an Engineering Heritage Marker by Engineers Australia in November 2019. It has stood through every flood since 1935 without damage, the tall piers and filled A-frames doing the work they were redesigned to do. From the riverbed, the engineering logic is plain enough: get the steel high, let the water through.