Originally published in the Dandenong Journal from 10 March to 22nd September, 1932.
This copy is taken from the original published then, not the book version now used by others.
As a sportsman’s resort Dandenong was even then one of the favored spots of city folk. Any species of native game, such as kangaroo, wallaby, pheasants (lyre birds), emu, native companion, etc., could be shot a few minutes’ walk in any direction; whilst the overflow from the creek provided a rare place for wild duck, swan, etc., which, upon occasion, swam serenely close to the door of Dunbar’s Hotel (now the Royal), the creek waters in time of flood backing up past the corner where now stands the Town Hall.
The contour of the creek overflow can readily be imagined, and, roughly speaking, there was a sheet of water at flood time from, say, the harrow factory at the end of Pickett street, around the railway station, and Bridge Hotel, up to the Town Hall, following the hill in Langhorne and Pultney streets, around the foot of the Presbyterian Church property, and so on to the creek near the site of the Old sawmill, or, in these days, the cricket ground in the Park.
From these boundaries there was a sheet of water in some places over a mile wide and many miles in length, and more than once I have seen a lake from the foot of the watch house to the Diamond Hill. The foregoing is a rough outline of the spread of the creek in flood in the early days.
Normally the creek kept within its banks for a distance of about two miles below Dandenong, where it merged into the Carrum swamp, a vast sheet of water in which grew luxuriantly titree and all the other individual rubbishy scrub which went to make up the herbage of a swamp. The Carrum was a great place for eels, and one of its thoroughfares (the Eelrace road) is a memory of the wrigglers which were sought regularly and industriously by fishmongers from Melbourne.
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