Flood painting
Flood captured in art
In 1888 a great flood swept through the Greenough Flats, devastating the properties of those families who’d settled the area. Flood waters stretched “three to five miles” over normally dry land, and poured over the bar and across the ballroom at the once-grand Golden Sheaf Hotel. Witnessing the devastation and the efforts to save the furniture was Englishman Thomas Rands who’d arrived at the colony in 1885 and started work for the pioneering Maley family of Greenough. Rands drew two sketches of the flood’s devastation - this one and another housed at the National Gallery of Australia. His drawings are the only pictorial record of the hotel, which was once described as “the second-best hotel in the colony”.
