 Riley’s most widely-known piece – and the only published one to which he attached his name – was “The Gundagai Calamity,” a lament for the destruction of the town of Gundagai in the Murrumbidgee River flood of the night of 24 June 1852.It was written at Francis Rawdon Hume’s home Castlesteads, at Boorowa, only a few weeks after the events described.The poem would reappear regularly in NSW newspapers over the next eighty years.