Yes I can laugh now. Our GM-Holden's Dealership is just out of frame of the Phone box, diagonally 50 meters across the street to the left.
Water was waist high in the new car show room. My desk was submerged.
'Dad (in pic below) felt uneasy about the amount of rain we had had during the day and stayed up to monitor the Broken River that divides Benalla in two. At 12:30am he called action stations and soon we had dozen or more family and staff ferrying (pardon the pun) about 50 new and used cars to high ground. The floods hit the town around 2am. We moved all the cars just in time, but everything else went under.
We sold the business last year after 110 years
In the story below for the local rag, my Dad relates an anecdote about the '93 flood I had never heard until reading the story myself... desperate times call for desperate measures!
Read on here:-
End of a motoring era Established in 1903 as a
wheelwright business. Wheelwrights and Blacksmith businesses evolved into the first Motorcar Dealerships.
And here:-
Post script: Memories of Arnotts Garage, Benalla, 1952 Check out the wooden wheel lower rhs of picture. We can fix it!
