The fountain in Coonamble Park, Central West New South Wales, circa 1920.

Sepia photograph on glossy printing out paper, 140 x 95 mm, tipped onto a card mount, contemporary caption in ink across bottom margin of mount: ‘Coonamble Park, N.S.W.’; fine condition.

The Coonamble fountain is mentioned in the opening stanza of Along the Castlereagh, a poem by commercial traveller and bush lyricist Jack Moses (1861-1945), first published in the collection Beyond the City Gates (1923):

‘Now, this Coonamble fountain, that’s dripping in the park, / Came it in commemoration or put there for a lark? / A weird and plucky struggle to show the stranger, eh? / You still can squeeze a trickle from out the Castlereagh’.

These lines were certainly prescient, given the severity of the drought which is currently affecting this region of New South Wales. That said, the Castlereagh has always been known for its extreme variations in flow – from catastrophic floods to a river bed that is completely dry – and has even erroneously been referred to as “the upside-down river” (it is not in fact subterranean, although some water does flow through the sands under the riverbed).