19th century
Known as The Great Swamp, it was an impassable barrier for travellers between Melbourne and Gippsland. Although the fringes of the swamp were settled by the mid-19th century, farming was not possible on much of the land because of frequent flooding, and the rapid re-growth of paperbark and other swamp vegetation. An 1863 letter, from George McDonald, an assistant surveyor, to the Surveyor-General of Victoria, as published in The Argus, indicated that there was good soil where the swamp was supposed to exist.
In the 1870s, efforts were made by the Victorian Department of Lands to drain the swamp and open up the area for agriculture. A Koo-Wee-Rup Swamp Drainage Committee was formed by local landowners and, in February 1876, excavation of the main channel was commenced, to take water from the Cardinia Creek. That channel, leading into Western Port at Moody's Inlet, was 8 kilometres (26,000 ft) long and 1.2 metres (3 ft 11 in) deep. Other drains were also dug, including those for Toomuc Creek and the Bunyip River. Those early efforts tended to lack coordination and landowners carried out their own drainage works, sometimes to the detriment of adjoining properties.
The construction of the South Gippsland railway line required the swamp to be crossed via a series of pile bridges, completed in 1889. By 1890, the Victorian Public Works Department, under the direction of engineer Carlo Catani, began executing a large-scale drainage plan. A 15-kilometre (9.3 mi) main canal was dug to Reeces Inlet on Westernport Bay, fed by four subsidiary drains. However, massive floods in 1891, exacerbated by the clearing of forested country further inland, meant that canals had to be widened and deepened more than once. Contract labour was suspended in 1893, as part of the economic depression, and the work handed over to unemployed married men who were contractually bound to accept and improve a 8.1-hectare (20-acre) plot of land while also working on the general drainage scheme. Their families soon followed and primitive housing was gradually replaced by weatherboard structures. More floods in 1893 proved the main drain inadequate and the nascent efforts at cultivation were despoiled.
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