Published Resources Details
Conference Paper
- Title
- William Clark, the forgotten hero of colonial hydraulic engineering
- In
- 19th Australasian engineering heritage conference: putting water to work: steam power, river navigation and water supply
- Imprint
- Engineering Heritage Australia, Barton, Australian Capital Territory, 2017, pp. 233-242
- ISBN/ISSN
- 9781922107923
- Url
- https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.384707715603518
- Subject
- Chronological Classification 1788-1900 Applied Sciences Engineering and Technology
- Abstract
William Clark was the English engineer responsible for the investigation for and design of a number of water supply schemes in the Australasian colonies, including the comprehensive Walka scheme supplying Newcastle and the lower Hunter Valley in NSW. He also worked on schemes for Goulburn, Bathurst, Orange, Brisbane and Port Adelaide and Wellington and Christchurch in New Zealand.
Prior to his short stay in Australia, he had spent much time in India engaged in railways, drainage and water supply. He was also the joint patentee of the steam roller. Clark's main contribution to the Australian colonies lay in the transfer of hydraulic technology evolved overseas, although that with which he was most closely identified, the tied brick arch, appears to have been applied only in the NSW Hunter Region, and that not specifically by him.
While Clark remains well-known in the UK, and to a lesser extent in India, his contributions to Australian hydraulic engineering have been little explored, and his Antipodean reputation is obscured accordingly. It is this that this paper seeks to redress.
- Source
- cohn 2018
Related Published resources
isPartOf
- 19th Australasian engineering heritage conference: putting water to work: steam power, river navigation and water supply edited by Engineers Australia and Engineering Heritage Australia (Barton, Australian Capital Territory: Engineers Australia, 2017), 536 pp. Details