Our History
Gunbar Water Trust to Wah Wah Stock & Domestic to Gunbar Private
Water Supply Board
From the earliest settlement by Graziers until the early 1900’s water was supplied from Wells, Bores and rain filled dams, in those days the holdings covered over 100,000 acres with few paddocks and large numbers of stock were watered at relatively sparse watering points.
After WW1 much of the area was divided into soldier settler blocks and more wells, bores & rain catch dams were dug. Unfortunately, most of the underground water was high in salt and stock did not do well on this water.
The Gunbar Water Trust was proclaimed by Sir Philip Game, Governor of NSW on the fourteenth day of August one thousand nine hundred and thirty.
In 1938 The Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission constituted the lands as the Wah Wah Domestic and Stock Water Supply and Irrigation District.
The Wah Wah Stock & Domestic and the Wah Wah Irrigation areas had a locally elected board called the Wah Wah Management Board when under the control of the Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission (WCIC) later called the Department of Water Resources.
Wah Wah Stock & Domestic channel system was constructed during the 1930’s, it was an open channel system which deliver water to properties in the WWS&D area so landholders could fill their on farm dams. The water management act stated that one farm dam filling would be provided per year and if water was available then two fillings could be provided. This system was added to during the 1970’s and then covered an area of around 300,000 Ha. This system allowed for an increase in the number of watering points and the area was able to be divided into smaller paddocks.
Murrumbidgee Irrigation took over from the Department of Water Resources in the early 1990’s and the whole area moved from a government run system to a shareholder owned company.
Like all other Stock & Domestic channel system in the area the WWS&D scheme was a great boost to the area. Unfortunately delivering water in an open channel has been found to be very inefficient and during the 1990’s Murrumbidgee Irrigation started looking at ways of reducing these losses. During 2006 Murrumbidgee Irrigation put forward 3 major water savings projects one of which was piping the WWS&D scheme.
Landholders opposed the first piping proposal which M.I. submitted for funding because they believed it was not adequate for the area and studies of other piping schemes led them to believe it would fail due to the poor-quality water it was proposed to use.
WWS&D Water Users held a meeting at the Hay services Club in July 2011 where landowners voted to support the current Gunbar Water pipeline funding proposal.
On 5 December 2014 WWS&D water users held a meeting at the Gunbar church hall and agreed to petition the Governor of NSW to form the Gunbar Private Water Supply District.
A submission was placed, through Murrumbidgee Irrigation, to the NSW Government under the PIIOP Round II funding to upgrade the Wah Wah scheme from above ground irrigation, where loses were extreme due to evaporation, to a totally automated below ground pipeline (almost totally elimating losses). The submission was successful and in 2017 construction of the pipeline commenced.
Gunbar Private Water Supply Board was gazetted by the NSW Governer, , as a Private Irrigation District on .
The NEW Pipeline was offically opened in December 2018.