August 2015 – Edition 124

This article continues the story of the early paddle steamers on the westerly rivers of New South Wales and Victoria.

The specific relevance to readers (including the descendants of Big Bill and Nicoll the Tailor) is that their forbears came from Melbourne and Bendigo, which had a direct rail link to Echuca, the main river port on the Murray River. It is quite likely that some of the forbears visited Echuca and travelled on a paddle steamer.

The crews worked hard. Although the major ports had multi-level docks to cater for differing river levels and cranes to lift cargo, the pick-up or drop-off points for cargo at the properties along the rivers rarely had loading facilities. The cargo had to be manhandled up or down the river banks and onto the paddle steamers using planks. Loading wood for fuel was also hard work.

Low rivers were also the bane of paddle steamer crews. When paddle steamers or their barges were stranded on sandbars it may have been necessary to partially unload them so that they could float clear. With the huge loads the vessels could carry this would have been an onerous task, although it would only have been necessary to unload them enough for them to be winched clear, bearing in mind that they could slide on their flat bottoms.

Captains also showed ingenuity by using the barge (held by ropes tied to trees) to block the channel and thereby raise the water level so that the paddle steamer would float.

Similarly to the Mississippi River, the flows in the Murray and Murrumbidgee Rivers (which originated in the Great Dividing Range to the east) were comparatively reliable all year round, however the flows in the Darling varied greatly.

In large floods the Murray and Murrumbidgee Rivers were closed to paddle steamers due to the fast flows. However in the case of the Darling River the gentle flood flows were actually very helpful for the paddle steamers.
Darling River flood flows

From a water supply perspective the Darling relied on rainfall in Queensland (typically in the monsoon season) which was sufficient to send floods down the Darling. Significant floods were needed to travel the 2000 miles to the Murray after spreading out across thousands of square miles of the Upper Darling floodplains and filling all the downstream billabongs and anabranches en route.

In addition, contributions from Darling River’s NSW tributaries could result in short-term “freshes” in the river.

The floodwaters along the Darling River moved slowly, taking several months to reach the Murray, allowing the steamers, which could travel at twelve km to easily travel upstream against the current. Similarly the floodwaters receded slowly, allowing paddle steamers to follow them downstream, possibly more than once.

When the floods spread out from the Darling River some of the river boats set out on amazingly adventurous journeys. In the 1870 floods one skipper navigated up the Paroo River (a tributary of the Darling) right up to the Queensland border (see map). On several occasions in later floods in the 1890s boats reached Mungindi, also on the Queensland border, 400 miles upstream of Bourke.

Riding the floodwaters on the Darling also had the advantage that on the floodplains a paddle steamer (which only drew about a metre of water) could head cross country, cutting out the winding sections of the river. The downside was that if the river was falling the boat could be stranded.

Captain Randell had experienced stranding when one of his paddle steamers was stranded for 15 months. The record of three years was held by the ‘Jane Eliza’ which set off from Morgan on the lower Murray River in May1883 and did not reach Bourke until June 1886!

This slow rate of progress was due to the boat being stranded.

There is a story that this paddle steamer was carrying a prefabricated hotel for Bourke. This included a load of bricks because there are no rocks at Bourke. The story goes that the pub owner was hoping to build the pub before the railway reached the town so that he could capitalise quickly on the surge of business when the railway arrived but the steamer ran out of river flow and the materials for a new pub was brought in by railway instead.

This story is quite credible because a big paddle steamer could itself carry up to 100 tons of cargo and its barge could hold 250 tons. Some steamers towed two barges.

When a boat was stranded it was common for the captain set up camp on the bank and used the paddle steamer’s circular saw to cut timber for local sheep stations for fencing, yards, and shearing sheds. Meanwhile the crew went home (until the next flood arrived) by a nearby road, possibly a coach road which often ran parallel to the river.

Bushmen could tell when a flood was coming because the water birds (who sensed this) started returning, or started raising their nests in the billabongs to keep them above high water level.

Within a few years of the coming of the paddle steamers in the 1860s upwards of 100 sheep stations were taken up along the Darling, and soon as many paddle steamers were plying the rivers. Some of the stations had an area of a million acres and carried 100,000 sheep. Sometimes the clip was worth 30,000 pounds.

The paddle steamers were ideally placed to carry the immense number of bales. For instance the barge Kulmine (towed by the famous paddle steamer “Pevensey”) could carry 1900 bales.

On return journeys on the Darling the paddle steamers carried s stores, machinery and equipment.

In the 1880s the charge per ton was 20 shillings.

Sir Samuel McCaughey’s Dunlop Station at Louth (downstream of Bourke) on the Darling was a very good customer of the paddle steamers. It had an area of almost two million acres and carried almost 200,000 sheep.

The large timbers used in its huge forty stand shearing shed were brought up from the Murray by paddle steamer. The station supported a small village comprising a store, blacksmith’s shop, offices, mens’ quarters and saddlery. At shearing time it would have employed 200 men, all of whom had to be fed.

The fleeces were washed in the river to remove the yellow lanolin, which had no commercial use in such quantities and added considerable weight to the wool. It is said that downstream paddle steamer crews could tell when Dunlop was washing its wool because the river turned yellow.

Upstream of Dunlop was Toorale Station, also owned by McCaughey.The old shearing shed was built in 1873 and in 1894 about 265,000 sheep were shorn there. In 1892 the poet Henry Lawson worked as a rouseabout in the Toorale woolshed.

The rivers, lakes and billabongs were very important sources of food for the aboriginals, including fish, freshwater mussels, water birds, aquatic plants and animals.

It is very likely that aboriginals have been building bark canoes in the area for many thousands of years, as evidenced by the numerous “scar trees”. These trees have had long sheets of bark removed from them, the size of the sheet depending on the desired size of the canoe. Bark for small canoes could be removed by people at ground level using sharpened stones to strip back the bark (see photo of smaller scar), however long canoes would have required some form of climbing pole (see photo of large scar).

It can be seen from the amount of regrowth of the bark that the scars date back many years.

The bark canoes were intended for local foraging rather than travelling a distance so they did not need to be big.

Conclusion
I hope you have enjoyed my two articles about paddle steamers. Perhaps your forbears travelled on them at some stage. Who knows?