This week has really been a trip back into the past for me. All the news of the floods around Nathalia and Numurkah got me hunting through old photos my parents had kept. We had lived in Nathalia and Rushworth, which is not very far away. I used the photos I found of the Nathalia flood in the 1940s in a previous blog.
Then last night on Today Tonight Adelaide, there was a report, 35 years on about the Tasman Bridge disaster. We were living in Hobart when the bridge came down, on 5th January 1975 and our doctor was one of the victims. The Lake Illawarra struck the Tasman Bridge and brought down a huge span. Several cars went over the edge of the bridge and sank with the shipand two cars were left hanging over the edge. 
All this happened a bit over a week after Cyclone Tracey had wiped out Darwin. We had planned on going to the drivein that night for a benefit for the victims of Tracey and were watching tv until it was time to go, when the screen went black and in huge letters filling the screen, a message read “The bridge has gone”. We could see the bridge from our windows and realised that the lights only went half way and the rest was black.
Hobart was a divided city for so many months. The airport was on the eastern shore and it was a long drive over dirt roads to go down through Bridgewater and up to Hobart. We were lucky to have a couple of tourist ferries which took over transporting people back and forth. After the army finally built a bailey bridge things were a little improved. When we left Tasmania and moved to South Australia in 1976, the bridge was still not repaired and it was some time before it was finally fixed and opened once more.
This photo was taken a week or so before the bridge went down, with a ship going through the correct spans.
This was taken in the days following the bridge going down. As you can see the Lake Illawarra tried to pass through the wrong spans.
My trip down memory lane was very interesting. The photos of the bank in Nathalia made me really miss my dad so much. I hadn’t been through any of the photos for years and it was nicely nostalgic to see the people who have long passed once more.
