The legacy that saved a town
Standing beside the floodbanks his father was instrumental in getting built 50 years ago, Lindsay Eunson is proud of his family’s legacy.
In February 2020, Wyndham was one of the eastern Southland towns evacuated as rising and bursting rivers caused millions of dollars of damage and stock losses.
The floodbanks, built 50 years ago, held firm.
Eunson – like his father Stuart Charles ‘‘Digger’’ Eunson and grandfather Ted Eunson – is a plumber in Wyndham. It was not until his father died in 2018 that Lindsay Eunson became aware of the effect Digger Eunson had on the town.
Not just the floodbanks but Digger’s decades of public service on community boards and as a councillor, Eunson said.
Fighting flooding is something most Wyndham residents can recall.
At 3.30am in 1978, Digger Eunson announced wearily but triumphantly ‘‘we beat the bastard’’. The people of Wyndham had been sandbagging furiously to protect their town from the October flood and they won.
Digger wrote Handling Water: A Tricky Business – My Life and Happenings as a Plumber, which was published in 2012. In it, he says the Mataura River had flooded Wyndham for many years and they had no form of flood protection.
‘‘The residents seemed quite happy to have their houses flooded every few years, and then restore their homes and hope next time was a few years away.’’
The book tells the story of the 1913 flood. The railway embankment was holding back the water but it was breached and ‘‘a wall of water came into town, apparently floating two houses away’’.
The embankment was rebuilt but with the railway no longer being used the embankment was removed, though bit by bit.
As land up-river was cleared and the run-off sped up, flooding got more regular and it was decided to start a flood protection scheme.
It ‘‘put a bit of confidence into the town and people started to build new houses for the first time in many years’’, Digger wrote.
In the book, under the subheading ‘‘Recommended Dress: Thigh Gumboots’’, Digger pokes fun at police.
He says officers came to a flood wearing dress shoes. As the police rowed through town, four people from Wyndham, in gumboots, lifted the boat every time it grounded.
When Lindsay Eunson received the message Wyndham was to be evacuated in February 2020, he was in Gore working as a civil defence radio operator.
After the water receded, Eunson remembered not much was said about his dad’s mark on the town.
‘‘There have been so many changes in town that we don’t have those old people around any more, those old ones who knew the story.’’ But without Digger, ‘‘we would have been flooded eight times since 1968 . . . That [floodbank] was his way of paying back the townsfolk.’’
The north and south banks run about 4.8 kilometres long, standing between 1.2 metres and 3m high. They guard the town from the Mataura River to the north, west and south and its tributary, the Mimihau Stream, to the nor-nor-east.
Digger did not build the floodbanks alone, and in his book he thanked fellow public servants Des Popham and Neil Farrell for freeing up funding.
The Wyndham floodbanks were built in the early 1970s and heightened after the 1978 flooding. In July 1968, the Wyndham Town Council requested flood protection from the Southland Catchment Board and a better warning system.
Michele Poole’s 1990 book, While Water Flows ... A History of the Southland Catchment Board, details the work was estimated at $13,516 with a 2:1 subsidy. By the 1978 flood, the floodbanks were in place and despite a couple of small issues, the people of Wyndham laid sandbags and kept the town mostly dry.
However, a Mataura River action committee was formed in 1980.
Poole’s book says Digger said the action committee was a reflection of ‘‘misunderstanding and dissatisfaction’’ leading to concern from lower Mataura catchment farmers that not enough work would be done to counter the effects of upstream stopbanking and channel clearance.
At that stage, Digger was serving as chairman on the Wyndham Town Board.
He was a Southland District councillor from 1989 to 2001.
Digger’s obituary says ‘‘flood protection, decent stormwater and sewerage projects were the hallmarks of his diligent halfcentury in local government roles’’.
The 1968 flood really hurt the town but it was the last time it was under water. Lindsay Eunson was a child at the time, and does not remember much of the 1968 flood but he does remember his father talking about carloads of people cut off from their homes and heartbroken and not allowed to check the damage to their houses.
‘‘And I think that is probably the reason why he was always reluctant to evacuate the town . . . People like to see what is happening to their house,’’ he said.
The floodbanks have been heightened over the years and will be further strengthened with funds from the Government’s shovelready scheme. The upgrades have been deemed critical after the February 2020 floods.
In an article Digger wrote for The Southland Times in 1998, he says ‘‘there were times when you would be convinced Wyndham had been built in a river-bed’’.
When a flood was coming, they would gather at the town clerk’s
office, ‘‘usually a bottle of whisky was produced to induce ‘fortitude’ and we went to the low areas to lift furniture, bedding, fridges, freezers and floor coverings’’, Digger wrote.
‘‘As each house was finished we moved on to the neighbour. What awful nights these were.
‘‘In hindsight, what a tough breed of people we had. No tears, no emotion, in fact they seemed more concerned about neighbours or friends than themselves.’’
As the value of homes increased, so did the cost of flood damage, and the town council made inquiries for a stopbanking scheme, Digger wrote. ‘‘Our first scheme cost $32,000 and we felt safe at last but then we started having 50-year floods, then 100-year floods and our banks were not high enough, so we have increased the height twice since the original venture and so far we have been safe. I am sure we all know in the back of our minds that one day . . . ’’ he wrote.
Emergency Management Southland acting manager Craig Sinclair said the floodbanks saved the people of Wyndham from a lot of heartache.
Sinclair was a police officer in Gore and Mataura, and relieved at Wyndham early in his police career. He knew Digger well, describing him as a valuable community asset in advocating for sewerage, drainage and all other water issues.
Digger would have advocated for the floodbanks from the day of the 1968 floods, Sinclair said.
Sinclair did not even want to guess how many millions of dollars the floodbanks had saved.
Developing catchments and floodbanks in Southland have historically involved many layers of local government, communities and hundreds of people have been involved in making them a reality.
Lindsay Eunson, on reflection, believes his father was so dedicated to his town that his years of service was a way to pay them back.
‘‘I think he realised it was the townsfolk that provided for him and his family,’’ Eunson said.
Standing in his workshop, Eunson is sentimental as he flicks through his father’s book and recalls how the floodbanks came about and how the people of the town rallied together to get them done. It is a legacy that continues to shelter the people of Wyndham, hopefully for decades to come.