Woady Yaloak

Smythes Creek comes down from the north and meets a stream from the west, 800 metres from Haddon. From here the maps call it the Woady Yaloak River.

Smythes Creek is the same water higher up, and in 1852 the two names were used for it. Wikipedia puts the source about 7 km further north, below Black Hill.

The river runs along the west side of the town, with a gravel walk beside it through Parks Victoria’s Smythesdale Streamside Reserve.

Friends of the Woady hold working bees on it every month. In 2025 they were given $7,000 to make habitat for rakali, the native water-rat, at Swamp Rat Flat, after a remnant population was found there.

Past Scarsdale the river goes under the old Glenelg Highway and then the new one, with a rest area named for it on the highway’s west side. Browns and Scarsdale was a borough of its own from 1862 to 1915.

A timber trestle of 17 spans, built in 1890 for the railway from Ballarat to Linton. Its deck is 103.6 metres long and stands 19.2 metres above the river. It was rebuilt with steel joists after a fire in 1953, and it now carries the rail trail.

The National Trust says the line closed in 1985; Victorian Places says 1983.

The river winds through a gorge walled with basalt columns. A gravel track goes down into the reserve and fords it.

A party sent out by Geelong’s Gold Exploration Committee reported gold here on 7 August 1852, in what was then Paterson’s Crescent. In 1864 its superintendent, Herbert Swindells, was paid £100 as the official discoverer of the Woady Yaloak goldfields.

The Woady Yaloak diggings ran south from Smythesdale and Linton along the river, and Cape Clear was near their southern end.

The state has measured the river here since 7 August 1917, at a gauge beside the Rokewood–Skipton Road bridge. It drains 309.6 km² of country above it.

The old bridge beside the new one is a wrought-iron Warren truss of two 26-metre spans, on bluestone abutments that may be from a timber bridge of about 1870. The road was once the Upper Portland Road.

George Augustus Robinson’s journal of 11 August 1841 gives the crossing here a Wadawurrung name, Currarerer.

Mount Misery Creek joins from the east. The heritage register calls it the Little Woady Yalloack River where McMillans Bridge crosses it, 7 km away: an 1856 bridge given wrought-iron trusses made at the Vulcan Foundry in Geelong in 1888–9.

The last big creek comes in from the north-east. Rokewood and Rokewood Junction stand on it, about ten kilometres from the river.

The second gauge, at Yarima, has measured the river since 8 May 1955, with 1,145.3 km² of catchment above it. Both gauges had their highest water on 14 January 2011.

Cressy began with Jean d’Auvergnay settling by the river, in 1840 by Victorian Places and 1837 by Wikipedia. A bridge was built over it in 1849.

After the floods of 1950 to 1953, a channel was cut to send the river east, away from Lake Corangamite, into Warrambine Creek and the Barwon above Inverleigh. It was commissioned in May 1959, to protect the farms round Lake Corangamite and Lake Gnarpurt.

The named river ends at Lake Martin, a shallow freshwater lake of 2,200 hectares. The Woady Yaloak is both what flows in and what flows out.

From Lake Martin the water goes on west, under the Cundare–Duverney Road, into Lake Corangamite: Australia’s largest permanent salt lake, about 230 km², and part of the Western District Lakes Ramsar site.