The Shire of Rainbow Creek

History is not always about things ancient.

On July, 23 1979 Thomas Barnes led the breakaway of the Independent Nation of Rainbow Creek from the Australian Federation, and even declared war on Victoria. Fortunately for all concerned, Victoria had no military forces at the time, and nor did Rainbow Creek.

There have been several such micro-nations formed in Australia (Bumbunga, Wy in Sydney, Hutt Creek in the far-off west, etc) but Rainbow Creek was Gippsland’s own.

Let me set the scene, lest you imagine lines of soldiers trampling the crops and tanks manoeuvring in muddy lanes, or even micro-gunboats coming up the Thomson.

Rainbow Creek is the name given to an ‘accidental river’ caused by public service incompetence and while it might sound like a minor disturbance to some of us, the issues were very real. In fairness, this was the end of the Great Depression and government budgets were tight.

Rainbow Creek is part of the Cowwarr area, on the Thomson River, about 25 kilometres northeast of Traralgon, between Toongabbie and Heyfield.

The Thomson can be a wild old river at times, more so in the old days than now, but it is still capable of surprising as most Gippsland rivers can be in their short runs from the mountains to the sea, in this case through the La Trobe and the Lakes.

In the years just before the Second World War a road bridge was built over the Thomson at Cowwarr by, I think, the Country Roads Board. It doesn’t really matter who built it, but they built it too low, just above the ‘normal’ flood mark. Local farmers warned that it needed to be higher and be built to let food-borne debris through, but they were ignored.

In 1952 they were proved right. It had taken a long time, but the proof came with a particularly strong flood that stacked debris against the bridge until the flow of the river was about fifty per cent blocked.

The floodwaters banked up, and then found a new course around the problem, as rivers in flood will usually do.

Rainbow Creek was formed. It swung around the end of the bridge, cut the rad and then cut three or four farms before finding its way back the normal Thomson watercourse. Suddenly there were farmers who could not reach part of their land. They had to build bridges, at their own expense.

Now, farmers are hardy souls who tend to just get on with it when things go wrong, but various government agencies now added insult to injury.

The farmers had thought that as they now had a river running through the places they could at least use the wat for mirrigation, making the best of a bad situation. Not so.

The State Rivers and Water Supply Commission imposed a levy for the use of the water. The farmers still to pay municipal rates for the land now under water, because, after all, the new Rainbow Creek did not appear on the Council’s maps at all and therefore it was not really there. Two levies were not enough, however.

The Thomson River Improvement Trust also charged a fee for contributions to river control and improvement works.

Those works were largely invisible to the farmers, because Rainbow Creek grew with every flood and the farms lost land each time. The private bridges they built were not grand structures because of the costs, and those bridges tended to disappear with every flood. They were not happy.

The SR&WSC, now long gone, then built a weir across the Thomson downstream from Rainbow Creek.

That was in 1954 and one entirely predictable effect as that as the Thomson backed up from the weir and the water level rose, more water took the turn into Rainbow Creek, which grew and grew and …well, you get the idea.

The cockies were less than happy, and their efforts to get any support in the form of reduced levies, compensation for the lost land and even help establishing the bridges they now needed between the sections of their divided farms were a complete waste of time.

In some places Rainbow Creek grew to be more than eight metres deep and in some places was one hundred and fifty metres wide, a fair intrusion onto a farmer’s title.

The cockies were still paying rates on land eight metres below the surface.

You can understand the frustration, I’m sure. It all came to a head in 1978 when another major flood washed away the bridges and washed away, too, more of their land.

One badly-affected property was that of Thomas Barnes. I know little about him other than that he was a policeman in the UK and the, I think, in Traralgon, and he was known to be a crusty old bloke, but no-one’s fool.

He thought the problems needed a little publicity after more than twenty years of the problem being ignored by all the various authorities involved.

Barnes decided that a little publicity was in order, so with about twenty five other cockies he set up the Independent State of Rainbow Creek.

It was all done quite formally and the new “state” stayed loyal to the Crown. To ensure maximum publicity Rainbow Creek declared war on Victoria. On 16 January 1979 the declaration of war was formally delivered to the Governor of Victoria, Sir Arthur Henry Winneke, AC, KCMG, KCVO,OBE and QC, an eminent judge and the 21st Governor of Victoria. None of the previous 20 had had to deal with a rebellion or local war.

There had been that little disturbance at Eureka, of course, but that was in 1854, more than a hundred years earlier. Winneke did not quite know what to do, so he didn’t do much of anything.

It was little more than a good news story for the television cameras. Barnes and his supporters pressed on.

They did not need to dig trenches or build a defensive moat because Rainbow Creek was quite big enough.

On July 23, 1979 Barnes and the Independent State of Rainbow Creek seceded from the State of Victoria.

His new micronation issued its own stamps and created the Rainbow Dollar, which was, fortunately, of the same value as the Australian Dollar.

There were only three denominations – fifty cents, a dollar and two dollars. Barnes was the Governor of the new state and he even issued passports.

He took the grievances of his loyal local population to the International Court in The Hague, and to Buckingham Palace.

The whole thing then went to a series of court cases as the Public Service decided to “bury Barnes in process”.

He won a few cases and lost a few, but he was not a man to give up easily. The government offered loans to the farmers but would not yield on compensation.

Barnes was not a young man, of course, and the whole thing took a huge toll on him. He was serious about standing up the government, and not just a publicity-seeker, and continual effort battling an unmoving and unsympathetic bureaucracy weakened his resolve and then his health, despite his determination to stand up for the victims of public service intransigence and incompetence.

Late in the 1980s he gave it up and retired to Queensland, where he died.

His departure from Cowwarr meant the end of the Independent State of Rainbow Creek, and that is in some ways a great shame.