Slow Slogging Over The Horizon And Beyond: Early Australian Transport

Bullocky stories

SPEAKER_10 0:00

G'day, I'm John Francis. Pull up a gumleaf. Welcome to the Red Dust Tapes Campfire, where we'll sit around listening to fascinating outback characters of the early 20th century recorded by me long ago.

SPEAKER_04 0:16

We have an awning of the pollen cakes, and the cars can quickly roll and then the boys and the girls come strolling. Have on the birds at the bulletin's pull.

SPEAKER_10 0:34

Slow slogging over the horizon and beyond. Early Australian transport.

SPEAKER_18 0:41

I started the first job with camels around 1910, and that's where I drove the best best camel that was ever in the bush bar nun. A big bullock near side leader called Smyler. He was intelligent, he was nearly human. And bloke.

SPEAKER_10 1:02

Nicholas Talleck was a bushman of wide experience and with a swag of stories for every one of them. Since this episode of Red Dust Tapes is all about bush transport, we'll hear more from Nicholas, my favourite yarn spinner, shortly, when he'll wax lyrical about camels and donkey teams. We'll hear from others as well, including Murray paddle steamer captains.

SPEAKER_11 1:28

I'm gonna give it to it, mate, to get her away from the bank.

SPEAKER_13 1:38

The engine sounds as if it's running very sweetly. Oh yeah, beautifully, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:42

Oh, it's a lovely little plant. Steam engines don't wear out.

SPEAKER_13 1:46

Well, if it was built in 1887, it's pretty obvious.

SPEAKER_10 1:48

But first, some bullocky stories.

SPEAKER_04 2:09

Oh, the shearing is all over and the wall is coming down. I mean to get a wife, boys, when I go up to town. Everything that has two legs represents itself in view. From the little patty melon to the buck and kangaroos. I'll take you up the country lump and show you the push. I'll be bound you wanna get such a chance another day. So come and take possession of me old grave.

SPEAKER_10 2:42

The romance of travel by bullock wagon, with a mob of mostly docile bullocks, two abreast, twenty-eight or thirty of them yoked up and plodding serenely along a dusty road, while you just lean back against the bales of wool piled high above you, content under the warm sun, taking the occasional sip from your canvas water bag. Yeah, right. Pull the other leg, mate. By the way, before we listen to the full song, a little explanation about some of the expressions in the song The Old Bullock Dre, thanks to the website, the Institute of Australian Culture. The Bullocky sings of calling at the depot to get an offsider. Female immigrants were housed at the depot on arrival, and many found husbands within a few hours of their landing. The minstrel therefore proposes to call it the depot to get himself a wife from among the immigrants. An offsider is a bullock driver's assistant, one who walks on the offside of the team and flogs the bullocks from that side. As the occasion arises, that word later came to mean an assistant of any kind.

SPEAKER_04 4:02

Now I've stood up a good check. I mean to buy a team. And when I get a wife, boys, I'll be all serene. For calling at the depot, they say there's no delay to get an obside up for the hole on the grave, so up your blankets, and let's make a push. I'll take you up the country, show you the push. I'll be bound you forget such a chance another day. So come and take possession of the hole on the grave. I'll live like making cops, but living on your man. You'll have leather jackets, Johnny cakes, and printers in the pan. Or if you'd like some fish, we'll catch you some spoon. Or the paramundies round the banks of the goons, so control up your blankets and let's make a push. I'll take you up the country, show you the bush. I'll be bound you won't get such a chance another day. So come and take possession of the old bullock dray.

SPEAKER_10 5:11

Good grief. The old bullock dray does make it sound like being a bullocky was an idyllic life. But there's another poem-turned song that paints a more realistic picture. It's nine miles from Gundagai. And since it's an angry song sung by a bullocky down on his luck, I may just as well recite it for you myself in my rough as guts kind of a way. But before I torment you, Gundagai in southern New South Wales is proud of its statue of the dog sitting on the tucker box, as in the popular version of the song. But that statue and that use of the word sitting is just a sanitization of the real story. It's quite obvious the Mungrel didn't sit on the box. He did something else that rhymes with sit and with sat, and he did it inside the box, and no doubt right square on top of the miserable bullocky's tucker or food. Anyway, here you go. I'm used to driving bullock teams across the hills and plains. I've teamed out back these forty years in blazin' droughts and rains. I've lived a heap of troubles through without a bloomin' lie, but I can't forget what happened me nine miles from Gundaguy. Twas getting dark, the team got bogged, the axles snapped in two. I lost me matches and me pipe. Now what was I to do? The rains came down, 'twas bitter cold, and hungry too was I. And the dog shat in the tucker box, nine miles from gundegy. Some blokes I know has all the luck, no matter how they fall. But there was I, Lord Lovaduck, no flamin' luck at all. I couldn't make a pot of tea nor keep me trousers dry. And the dog shat in the tucker box, nine miles from gundagy. I could forgive the blinking tea. I could forgive the rain. I could forgive the dark and cold and go through it all again. I could forgive me rotten luck, but hang me till I die. I won't forgive that bloody dog nine miles from Gundagai. Bullocks have been used until quite recent times, for instance, in hauling logs out of the forests in Tasmania. Filmmaker David Warrington captured this interview with Darcy Stinson, an all-round bushman who has a family history with bullocks.

SPEAKER_14 7:58

You could tell me about the, you know, why they don't use horses up in these mountains here to, you know, why the horse teams couldn't work.

SPEAKER_15 8:06

Well, they didn't work them here because they if a horse slipped, well, he wouldn't have another go. Whereas bullocks, well, they just fall over, they get up and have another go. There was no stopping. But horses were a bit different. Yeah. My dad was a bullocky and all my uncles were bullockies on both sides. Yeah. They were all after the red cedar. And then when the cedar cut out, well, they went on to the hoop pine. Well, then when it finished, well, they just went on the scrubwood and all that stuff then. Well, that's the trouble with them today. These fellas today, well, they don't know. I've been around bullocks, I followed a log ever since I was a four-year-old. I said to one fella one time, I said, tighten up them four or six back bullocks when you hook onto a log and then sing out to your leaders. But they know they start at the leaders, and they're always up at the lead. Four or six bullocks at the back where you drive, and let the leaders, you can see what they're doing, and just call them around or push them off you, whatever you want to do, and warin' and g and the bullocks wherever you had to. War means come to you. If you're pulling a log and they're coming up to a stump or something, well, you war your offside bullocks. And you g your near side bullocks. G over. Yeah.

SPEAKER_14 9:48

Where does that language come from?

SPEAKER_15 9:50

Oh, well, it must have been just bullock talk. Everybody done it. Everybody done it bar these fellas today. And they can't back a bullock today. They can't even get into the pole or the wagon or jink or nothing. Well, my dad in my day, they used to go to to the bush and fall for a week. And then they'd yoke up. They'd fall enough in a week to do about a fortnight, but they were snigging about three miles too. They're only doing one trip a day. They used to just go and fall them and cut the roads into the log and they'd take the bullocks in and go down in the bush there and never cleared much, only enough for the bullocks to go down and turn around and come back, and the bullocks would be coming back alongside while the others are going down. But today, when they go to hook onto a log, well, they turn the leaders around. Well, they're the full length of the team away from the log when the back bullocks turn. No, they've got a lot to learn today about bullocking. They're a bit like human. Some some was good 14, 16 year old, and others were buggered at 10 year old. And some bullocks had pull themselves blind too. What do you mean? Well, they'd go blind and pull them, strain. They'd go blind.

Camels, ships of the desert

SPEAKER_10 11:25

Bullockies had a reputation for being hard slogging, hard-headed whipcrackers and with a vocabulary chocker with profanities. But it's fair to say that by no means all of them were like that. Tony Wright, associate editor of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, writes with authority about colonial and early 20th century life in Victoria, often with personal connections. Tony's great-grandfather, Harry Wright, lived on a farm in the state's southwest, and with a bullock team he hauled fresh veggies and salted meat to the goldfields as far as Ararat. And his son, Tony's grandfather, also did a stint as a bullocky, at the tender age of thirteen. Here's how Tony, in an article on the Age in October 2015, describes this thoughtful and respectful young man. My father's father took a bullock team north to the Wimerah and Mallee when he was thirteen. He studied his school books by lamplight beneath the wagon each night. He painted his wagon as it trundled on the journey north, and spent two years carting wheat from farmsteads to railheads during the harvesting seasons and resting his animals, and fixing his gear and picking up odd teamstering jobs when the wheat was done. He wasn't lonely, he always claimed. He had his bullocks, sixteen of them. He knew each one of them by name, didn't need to lay his long whip on their hides, he'd hold that whip in different ways, above his head, to the left or right, and the team would wheel in that direction, back over his shoulder, and that stop, point it forward, the fall of it whistling through the air, and that set off. He'd speak to the leaders in Bullocky's language, heing and hawing. He never boasted about being capable, at thirteen, of lifting those heavy wooden yokes and fixing them to each pair, or what a dreadful labour it was to ford a boggy creek. He returned, aged fifteen, in nineteen hundred and two, with a wad of cash for his mother. In the early days of European settlement in Australia, bullock teams were indispensable. They could haul large and heavy loads. There could be as many as 36, that's 18 pairs, yoked into a giant team. They'd travel no more than five kilometres an hour, and allowing for broken axles, bullocks keeling over dead, and being bogged in mud or sand for days, it worked best for relatively short distances and closer to the coast, where water and feed could be found. Even so, trips could take weeks to months, many months. But there were also stories of them traversing far greater distances. The first east-west crossing with Bullock teams in 1893, from Gympie and the coast of Queensland, to the Western Australian goldfields, by road these days, that's 3,900 kilometres. But over the route of this Odyssey, which included desert crossings and the horror of battling huge kilometers-wide floods, there would have been few roads. The journey took 31 months. Yes, folks, just over two and a half years. No doubt that length of time was partly due to Thomas Whitmore, the bullocky, having no geographical knowledge, not even a map. He just knew which direction was west, and sometimes he'd even have to ask for directions. On that Odyssey, Thomas and his son Tom, known as Dick, had to swim their animals across the flooded Cooper Creek, which spread at that time over nine kilometers across a series of channels. They and their bullock teams crossed deserts and interminable sandhills, some he said as steep as the roofs of houses, and traversed regions dangerously short of water. And bullocks need a lot of water and feed. Across the seemingly endless Nullabor Plain, for instance, they had to lug huge amounts of water. As Thomas writes, we came to a sheep station at the commencement of the Great Australia Bite. On the road I had provided myself with one 400-gallon and two 200-gallon tanks, as I was told that after this we should have a stage of 120 miles without water. We could only get salt, brackish water, and so loaded up our tanks with four tons of this from the government well, and bidding goodbye and possibly to the world, we tackled the 120-mile dry stage. At one point, Son Dick's horse got away. He tracked it for 200 kilometers, eventually walking it back again six weeks later. It wasn't too long into the colonial days before the colonialists started to import the so-called ships of the desert, the camels. And along with them came the cameleas, who were mainly from India, the parts that today are called Pakistan and Afghanistan. In Australia they were collectively known as Afghans. Now the camel was a creature just made for traversing long, hot, sandy country and capable of carrying a good deal on its back. Back in 1968, I was in the mid-north of South Australia, along with an ABC sound man, Dave Quarrington, recording radio documentary material. In Maori, David secured this interview with two of the last of the cameliers, the Carne brothers.

SPEAKER_17 17:40

Our father used to be at an orca. We used to have uh flour, tea, sugar, groceries, even cool drinks we used to take on the camels. And we used to go around up all around Queensland there. Sometimes it'd take us round about 12 months for the trip. Well, we used to get up around about um just to break a day in the morning and get up and boil the belly, have a drink of tea, then off after the camels. And when we brought them back, we'd uh catch them and put the nose line on and layer them down by the saddles and put the saddles on, and then we'd uh have our breakfast. Mostly the Afghan people ate curry. Curry in such high temperature. Yes. Always curry. What would the temperature have been? Oh, the temperature it'd get it around up to a hundred anything up to 180 to 120. And you still let your curry? Still had our curry, yes. So we're very fond of curry.

SPEAKER_16 18:46

And we start loading then. We load up, might take us two hours, two and a half, all depends. And we load up and tie them all in the string, then we go along. Travel to about midnight that night. Till midnight, all that time, without a break. Without a break, no dinner, no nothing.

SPEAKER_17 19:03

And what would you do at midnight? Have a meal or peg out?

SPEAKER_16 19:06

At night we'll lay the camels all down, take the load off, unhook the girth and the crapper, and just leave the camels cool off just with the packs on for about an hour. Then we make a fire, have a drink of tea, put our tea on, wait till it cooks, give the camel an hour's rest, then take the packs and hobble them and take the nose lines and let them go and have a feed. Then we'll have tea and go to bed.

SPEAKER_10 19:33

Bushman Nicholas Tallock, born late 19th century, also spent time working with camels.

Donkey teams

The mosquito fleet: South Australian coastal ketches

SPEAKER_18 19:39

I started the first job with camels around 1910. And that's where I where I sell the and hand drove the best best camel that was ever in the bush bar nun. A big bullock near side leader called Smiler. He was intelligent, he was nearly human. And broke. And every day when we were on the track with him at midday, 12 o'clock, he could set your watch to it. Smiler would look around and give a moo. He had a low mooing sort of moaning sort of a call they've got. And he'd you you'd bet on your life then that was dinner time, whether you had a watch or not. He was a beauty. I don't think there was everything, I don't care where you dig them up, whether it was a horse, mule, donkey, or bullet, you wouldn't get a better, more intelligent near side leader than Smiler. You had to be careful. I've had a few belts for them. In fact, one of my mates, he got a couple of ribs broken from one kick. And now I've uh had a narrow escape from one bull, and he took a piece out of my coat as it happened. They used to pad the shoulders well in those days, and he took a bit of that away and left my shoulder there. I was thankful for that. Well, of course, the camel, it was the makings of the back country. There's no one can get away from that. It would have never developed some of that country if it hadn't been for the camel for the durability, toughness to handle anything, especially the up and down those sand hills. If you ever anyone that knows much about some of that country, you'd know that it that it's pretty tough going. You couldn't go across with horses rending like that. But uh, we've had them that had to go out to tie them down two nights running. That's four nights without water. Well, what and no other animal could do it, not in the in the hot weather like it was. But uh you hear a lot of this uh about camels storing water. In the hunter. Don't believe it. The next best in the animal in the bush was the teams, and that was the donkey. Very hardy little fellows. A lot of people laugh about them. They're supposed to be well and go unless you give them carrots and all this sort of muck, but don't believe it. They're a very intelligent little animal. If you treat them right, of course you get some, but they're uh they well, the fact I they were next to the camel for hardiness. They get a good drink of water every day, and they didn't want much feed when the feed was scarce.

SPEAKER_10 22:42

Now earlier I referred to camels as being the ships of the desert. Real ships had very few options for penetrating the interior. The Murray-Darling River system was the grand exception. But the vast coast of Australia, of course, was the watery road that the colonies and later the new nation relied on heavily. It would take weeks to sail even partway round the coast, and then once you reached your destination, it might be many more weeks or more to then travel inland. A coastal network also served the more regional areas. South Australia, for instance, had its mosquito fleet, a raggedy bunch of vessels that plied the waters of St. Vincent and Spencer Gulfs down to Kangaroo Island and west to Port Lincoln. Some of these vessels started life as Murray River steamers or barges before swapping fresh water for salt. Collectively, they were called catchers, although not all in the latter years were sailing vessels. In Port Adelaide in the late 1960s, I was super fortunate to be involved with the very last remaining catchers. As a wharf labourer and general hand, I'd hump sacks of wheat up springy gangplanks from the innards of vessels like the One and All, the Annie Wat, the Eulonga, and the Nelsabe, and I had the thrill of feeling the kick of the wheel as I took my turn to steer another of these vessels, the Coomanderry, as we rolled our way south to Kangaroo Island, with a full load below and cattle on our deck. This was in 1966, and this was a little corner of Adelaide's port river where full mechanization, and certainly no containerization, had reached. It was a case of stripping to the waist and grunting under the sun.

SPEAKER_02 24:35

So I was wandering down the wharf and old Rocco Irvin, who was skipper and owner of the Heckler, I spoke to him there on the wharf and he said, You want a job, lad? And I said, Yeah, he said, Well, the job in the Heckler.

SPEAKER_10 24:46

Someone far luckier than me was Noel Smith, who scored a full-time job on the Catch Heckler. This interview is taken from the highly valuable DVD, The Trading Catches of South Australia, by Gary Kerr. Now to Noel Smith.

Origins of sea shanty, 'South Australia'

SPEAKER_02 25:05

So I took the job in the Heckler. Well, I got two pound a trip. And that was big money because sometimes in those little trips across the Gulf, we would make two trips a week. And uh the boy worked pretty hard. Now it's pretty understand, but hard to understand for modern people. But we'd sail from the port and the skipper would be on deck until we got out of the harbour and the sails were set and everything else, and then he'd go to bed. And he'd leave the fourteen-year-old boy on the wheel, and I wasn't the only one by a long way. There was nothing exceptional about my activities at all. It was a normal situation, on the very small ones, that carried only a skipper and a boy. And he'd go to bed and he'd say, Now, round about such and such a time you'll see this or that, he said, and give me a yell then. But of course, if there was any change in the weather, he would wake up immediately, he'd be on deck. You're supposed to call him, but he was usually there before you did. He'd pick it up. They had pretty good sort of instincts, those flagues. I think the worst trip I can ever remember in the Heckla, we'd uh agreed to bring a lady and her daughter across from the other side of the Gulf. I don't know if it was Port Vincent or Stanfree or which one of those, one of those places to the Adelaide Show, and we really copped it. And uh this poor lady, the daughter was alright, she wasn't that old, and she was la quite happy with it, but we've taken a bit of stuff aboard of her and she's bouncing around a bit, but I wasn't frightened, but I never had enough sense to be frightened when it should have been. But uh the lady was on deck by the mizzen rigging and we had a bit of rope round her, so she couldn't get washed over the side, and uh anyhow when Big C came over the side and give her a wallop, and an old Rocco said, Next one will be gone, lady, and she said, I wish it had bloody ballow up. And so anyhow, they didn't come back with us, they said they'd walk home rather than come back. Rocco Irvin, Skipper of the Heckler. Yeah, he he'd come from a catch family from way back. I think as he landed with his father, he'd been in an old catch called the Sailor Prince, because he often spoke of her. Well, he kept the Heckler pretty smart. She was really painted up all the time, very clean and tidy. And like most of the catch skippers, he was a good bloke as far as I'm concerned. And he used to uh dress up in a a dark coloured blue suit and uh a black hat, and quite often go ashore dress uh like that with no boots on. And so, but uh there's not much to say about him other than he was a hell of a good bloke and worked like hell. He was uh pretty near blind and he had thick goggles, so he always had to have a boy that could see something and and knew a little bit about something. But uh no, Rocco was a wonderful bloke, and he used to take it take me ashore with him when he went down to the office, Fricker's office for uh instructions or whatever his orders were, and Percy Fricker, the king of the castle in that place, was quite deaf. And he got a very early version of a hearing aid, which was a box that sat on his desk, and he had earphone things. And of course, Rocco had quite a good voice, and he was always used to shouting at Percy. And we went into the office and he started hollering, and Percy said, Now, now, Captain, he said, quieten down, he said, I've got that box there, he said, and or that machine, he says, and that amplifies things, you see. All good, says Rocco, and he picked up the box and yelled into that, and flaming here blast old Percy's ed or and then of course there was old Wally Peterson, he was master and of the Y Manor, she was a fair lump of a three-masted schooner, and uh he used to lecture everybody on communism. He was a devout commo, I was Wally, and and I mean you wasn't so communistic when you were working for him. The uh the conditions on the the smaller catches weren't conducive to cleanliness and all that sort of thing, although most of us tried to keep as clean as we could. You you got a wash out of the water tank in a basin, a bit of a bowl, or a cut down kerosene tin, or whatever you could, and sometimes you could rig up a hose off the wharf and have a shower under that if you felt that way. On the Birkenhead Wharf there was a horse trough, and it differed from most of the others because it had a plug in the bottom. And we scrubbed that out and let the water out and have a bath in there and put the plug back after and fill it up for the horses because the kids of those days were considerate in that respect. These days I don't think they'd care much about that, but uh, and that was quite a treat to get in there and have a scrub in the horse trough. I remember there was a fellow called Alf. Uh he was very simple and it was very cruel, I suppose, but it was little bubbles used to come out of the mud. And Alf queried this, he said, What's making those bubbles? And a fellow called Dick, who was a bit of a smart aleck, he said, uh, he said, them's caused by crabs farting, mate. And Alf was looking, he said, you know they're worth money, Dick told him. He said, they are, he said, yeah, yeah, yeah. He said the globe timber mills will give you through and sa bubble, because they put them in spirit levels, and you can't get anything better than a crab's fart for a spirit level. So they had poor old Alf in a dinghy with a teaspoon and a bottle, trying to catch all these bubbles to sell to the globe timber mills. And he woke up in the end and damn near a blue over it because he was a big bloke. But uh, yeah, but all those sort of things used to happen in the catches.

SPEAKER_07 30:41

South Australia is my land. Leave away, heave away, mountains rich in quartz and sand, and we're bound for South Australia. Leave away, heave away, oh heave away, you ruler king, we're bound for South Australia.

SPEAKER_10 31:02

Now, this must be the most famous sea shanty that references Australia. Funnily enough, its origins, which go back to at least the 1880s, are with deep watermen who may or may not ever have actually sailed to Australia. But hey, we South Aussies own it now. A shanty is a work song, in this case sung to give rhythm and to lift spirits through camaraderie, to take one's mind off the backbreaking effort of working the capstan. The capstan, a form of winch, sat on the foredeck of the ship, and several men, straining into wooden or metal bars, would walk around it to raise sails or the anchor or other tasks. And like all traditional folk songs, the words could depend on who was singing it. Someone might add a verse, maybe making it up on the spot at the time of working the capstan, throwing words into the air to amuse and urge on the toiling sailors, and fairly frequently they were pretty lewd words, and geographic accuracy needn't be a priority. Hence the sailors sing South Australia round Cape Horn, when in fact, since the sailing vessels followed the roaring southern trade winds, they would round the notorious Cape Horn at the bottom of South America after they had left South Australia and had battled across the Southern Ocean and were about to turn north into the Atlantic, setting a course for England. But hey, whether it was wheat from South Australia or wool and other produce from other Australian ports, before the sewers and Panama canals, it was generally at least a 100-day rolling, heaving, wet and freezing battle from the New World to the markets of the old. Well worth singing about. In this case, by Sydney-based Acapella Group 40 Degrees South. The version they sing was collected by Frederick Peace Harlow in Melbourne in 1876. The term She Oak refers to Bush Beer. The Sandridge Railway Pier is now the Port Melbourne Pier.

SPEAKER_07 33:16

There's a packet lying off the pier. Hey, roll wide, hey go wide, and a bar ashore with foaming beer. And we're down for south thus, dry out. Hey, roll wagon, hey go bag, oh, hey go hideo roll the cloud. We're bound for stuff, thus, drive and out. I see Julia standing on the clean. Hey, go by me. Happy to go by me with the golfing and the golf on the bound, first outs drive it out. At the head of standard railroad, big bow. And welcome to Tiny Land from Farember Pown. In the arms of God's World Dance and Ting. Here we go back.

SPEAKER_10 35:27

So much for the sea. What about the inland waterways? Australia's only really significant one is the Murray Darling system, but it's definitely significant. According to Geoscience Australia, when you include its major tributaries, at 2,740 kilometres flowing south from just over the Queensland border, the Darling is Australia's longest river. When the Darling joins the Murrumbidgee, which flows in from the east, and they both connect to the mighty Murray that starts up in the snowy mountains, you have a combined giant 5,538-kilometre waterway that meanders on down to Lake Alexandrina in South Australia. Prior to the railways and road improvements, the Murray Darling was a major passenger and freight route taking supplies to remote sheep and cattle stations and bales of wool and timber to the markets. That whole length, however, was heavily dependent on the time of the year and the quality of the season. In dry times, this watery road, especially in its extremities, would dry to nothing more than a series of mosquito-infested water holes.

SPEAKER_12 36:45

Ah, this is the best part of the day when the sun's going down. Smell that river. And look at the cliffs. They're a deep orange colour. They look a bit like huge red-hot coals reflecting in the water. Yeah, and they're gonna burn us up. Ah, shut up.

Climb aboard the old paddle steamer Enterprise

SPEAKER_10 37:08

That was a brief excerpt from an ABC schools radio broadcast I wrote in 1967, and you'll be relieved to know that's all I'm playing. It's all about two kids going on a Huckleberry Finn style voyage down a stretch of the River Murray. And it was all inspired by two adventures my mate and I had down a hundred or so kilometres of the Murray a couple of years earlier than that. My mate Paul Ragless was a mechanical genius. Paul used a car gearbox and diff and bolted paddles onto the wheel rims. The thing was powered by a little one-cylinder marine engine. And I can't remember if it was on our first unpowered raft or this makeshift paddle wheeler, but on one of them we carried a real old-time wind-up gramophone. And so, as we drifted or popped-popped past the Murray's towering cliffs, glowing red like hot coals in the setting sun, we'd wind this thing up and lean back in lazy splendor to the tune of our only record, the seventy-eight RPM by the Sleepy Lagoon by Harry James. Enterprise is one of the oldest working paddle steamers in the world. She was launched in 1878 in Ichuka in Victoria. She's known as a shallow drafter. She only draws 75 centimetres of water, making her highly valuable on riverways like the Murray Darling, where at times of low river flow in the upper reaches of the system, many other vessels just couldn't run. In 1974, at the celebrations for the launching of a new paddle wheeler, a number of the river's past captains and crew took the then 96-year-old PS Enterprise for a steam, and I was on board.

SPEAKER_13 39:34

Captain Reed, when did you first start sailing paddle steamers? 1921. How does it feel to be at the wheel of one again? Wonderful. Are there very many steam paddle wheelers still left on the Moraine?

SPEAKER_11 39:48

There's a couple at the top end, but this will be the oldest one on the river.

SPEAKER_13 39:53

What sort of thoughts come to mind then as you're at the wheel of this very, very old steamer?

SPEAKER_11 39:58

The thoughts come to mind of what wonderful days I had when I was young.

SPEAKER_13 40:03

Is it really a romantic? Was it really romantic to work on the river in the early days of the paddle wheelers?

SPEAKER_11 40:10

My word is, when I first came on here, I came from England and started out here on the river. And the boy said to me, You'll be sorry. Once you join the Murray, you're there for seven years. Well I've been here for 57 years.

SPEAKER_13 40:25

I suppose you've worked on both the um motor vessels as well as the steam vessels. Which do you prefer?

SPEAKER_11 40:32

The only motor vessel I ever worked on was the Colonel Wara. I stayed at hand with Colonel Wara for 12 months for Captain White. But apart from that, I've never been on any boat only steamers.

SPEAKER_13 40:44

What do you see as being the advantage of a steam vessel?

SPEAKER_11 40:48

Steamers have got a diverse power, a wonderful power. They're different altogether to the uh uh a diesel job or a motor job. I I reckon that steam power is really not uh never used to its full extent.

SPEAKER_13 41:05

I noticed that uh they're firing the boiler with uh with wood logs of wood just as you did in the early days. But uh I'm wondering um what was it like? Was it ever very difficult to find wood to get you to navigate the river?

SPEAKER_11 41:19

I know we had wood piles from one end of the river to the other. Anybody would cut wood for the boats at one time. You had no trouble to get in the wood cutters, and they used to sell it to us, but some of the boats used to burn a ton of wood, and now you can just imagine how much wood they'd burn.

SPEAKER_13 41:35

Did you prefer working on passenger boats or on the cargo boats?

SPEAKER_11 41:39

Oh well, I was for years on the cargo boat, many years. But we worked on I worked on the passenger boat because I was asked to take her over. And I had some my boat at that time.

SPEAKER_13 41:53

What boat did you have?

SPEAKER_11 41:54

I had the Yulonga, she's a catch now in Port Adelaide.

SPEAKER_13 41:58

Was it very tough to work on these cargo vessels?

SPEAKER_11 42:01

Oh yes, it was very hard in that in the old days. You did 12 hours a day, but there was something about the Murray that you just couldn't move it. You were six uh six days, uh seven days a week, but you you just couldn't get out of it. You had to stay there. The Murray had a calling for it. And that's right. People that work on the Murray, they they come along and they think it's a glorious place, the River Murray. They think it's a glorious uh trip to come up and down the Murray.

SPEAKER_13 42:32

What sort of things did you used to like about the Murray?

SPEAKER_11 42:35

Oh, well, the uh the best part was the viewing of the lovely river itself.

SPEAKER_13 42:41

How how beautiful can it be?

SPEAKER_11 42:43

The Murray can be one of the most beautiful spots in the world. If you get on the Murray on a bright moonlight night on a passenger boat, you can even see the reflections of the roots of the gum trees in in that river. It's the most wonderful reflections you'd ever see.

SPEAKER_13 42:59

What about the wildlife?

SPEAKER_11 43:02

Oh well. Most young fellows they live a bit of a wildlife on the river. As far as I was concerned, I never drank them in my life. But that's not to say that's the only voice I haven't got it. Not to say I wasn't wild.

SPEAKER_13 43:15

Actually, when I said wildlife, I was really referring to the birds and the animals.

SPEAKER_11 43:18

Oh, oh, I'm awfully sorry, that's wonderful. Although the the birds are not so uh prevalent here now as they used to be. They used to be wonderful one time. It's just not sitting down on the grate.

SPEAKER_03 43:33

Lost me bed of cold, that's the trouble.

SPEAKER_13 43:44

How hard does the stoker have to work on these vessels? Bigger bun. How hard is it how hard a job would it have been to have been a stoker on these vessels?

SPEAKER_03 43:50

Uh some the these smaller ones were easy ones that are all to handle. Some of the bigger ones have burnt a ton to a ton and a quarter an hour, they kept you busy.

SPEAKER_13 44:00

Well you're resting for a little while now. How much of a rest will you be able to have before you have to put more wood in?

SPEAKER_03 44:05

Uh I'll wait for a while. See, I'm losing steam now actually because the wood was cut too long and you can't make a nice, even fire in there, you get too much air through the fire. So it's quite a sight in a hurry now. If I was if I was uh underway and was going somewhere, but I can't have too big a fire in there because when we stop, it's wasted. She'll just blow off steam everywhere.

SPEAKER_01 44:36

I landed in Australia on the 6th of October 1919 and went straight to Morgan. I'd just come from England in a from an English summer and went into an Australian one. The first 15 days the temperature was never below 115, and I nearly died.

SPEAKER_10 44:55

Yes, well, 46 degrees centigrade would make a warm welcome for a girl fresh from England. Mrs. Carr was married to a first mate on Murray steamboats. About 50 years ago, she read to me from her reminiscences.

The steamed-up rivalry of Randell vs Cadell

SPEAKER_01 45:10

I'd never seen kerosene tins in my life, but I had to do my washing in two kerosene tins and boil the washing up on the stove. There were no such things as refrigerators, and to keep the butter hard or well as hard as you could get it, you put it in a basin and put a cloth over the top and then stood that basin on a brick in a dish of cold water, leaving the ends of the cloth in the water so that it was damp all the time. However, I got used to all that. One funny incident happened while I was doing the chef's work. The skipper asked if I would like some young chickens, and we'd pulled into one of the wood piles while going upstream, and the wood man that owned the wood pile said that he had some. So I told the skipper yes. Well I didn't know how big they were, but I took it for granted there would be about a dozen decent sized chickens when we came downstream on our return trip. We arrived back at 3 AM, so I didn't see the chickens until I came on duty when I came on duty at 6 AM. Then I only inquired if they'd been delivered. I nearly fainted when the fireman said yes, they're in bags in the hold and they're alive. Well I waited until the skipper came down and I said he said and he said they'll be all right, I'll I'll get a deck hand to kill and clean them after lunch. After lunch it was I that got the couple of deck hands to fed to bring them up and told them what to do. Kill them and clean them. Ye gods. They tipped the chickens out onto the lower deck, and before you could wink, there were white lagorn chickens scattering all over the lower deck and engine room of the Marion. Two dozen of them, half grown, and the deck hands, my two galley boys and the firemen having hijinks trying to catch them, and frightened to hold them. I really got mad. Those boys knew nothing about killing or cleaning fowls. That meant I had to do the job myself. So I got the axe and a log of wood from up forward, and as they did catch the chickens and bring them to me, I put their heads on the log and chopped them off. Oh yes, I can laugh when I remember that chicken chase.

SPEAKER_10 47:20

The chronicles of life on the Murray River paddle steamers are full of tales tall but true, including about hard-nosed and eccentric captains. Let's start with the very first two, who in 1853 were rivals for the prize for being the first Murray River boat. Captain Charles Cadell first surveyed the waters by voyaging all the way downstream from Swan Hill in a makeshift craft made of an old tent and a few planks. And as he set off with four gold diggers as his crew, he took out a revolver from his pocket and said, Now, boys, I'm boss. After charting the river, former Royal Navy man Cadill then had a very fine, riverworthy vessel built with two twenty horsepower engines, the 125-foot Lady Augusta. Meanwhile, his rival had absolutely no knowledge of navigation or of boats. In fact, he confessed he'd never even seen a paddle steamer, which is not surprising since back in 1853 there were none to observe on the Murray, nor probably anywhere else in Australia. Ian Doyle, along with Paul Williams, was producer of the impressive documentary on the Murray-Darling steamers, Source to Sea. When speaking with him, he made it clear to me that our first paddle steamer pioneers really were working in the dark, but they could see the need.

SPEAKER_00 48:56

Well, of course, William Randall decided that he wanted to build this boat in 1853 because his father was a uh flour miller at Gamaraka. And he worked out, given the uh importance of the goldfields in Ballarat Bendigo, they were opening up in the 1850s, that if he could get his father's flour to this to these gold fields qu more quickly than the overland stuff that was coming out of Melbourne, because by the time the flour and various other produce turned up, it was you know, there was a fair bit of protein in it called weevils. And he worked out if he could actually crack that, then the imp you know, the sort of value adding, I suppose, from his father's flamel to the goldfields of Victoria. So to come up with a concept, he had never seen a boat before.

SPEAKER_10 49:46

When his dad caught wind of his plans to build this river boat, he thought his son was, well, as the saying goes, a few kangaroos short in the top paddock. Captain William Randall's Marianne was small and built by a blacksmith and two house carpenters. The tiny seven-horsepower engine was partly designed by the youthful Randell.

SPEAKER_00 50:11

When he built the boiler for this thing, it was a six-sided flat boiler. Six sides, all flat. Uh, and when his brother Elliot fired it up the first time, uh, he was uh keenly interested in getting as far away from it as possible because he didn't know what was going to happen to this thing until he heard the pistons going when he came back. They had to, in the first six or eight months of the vessel being used and prototypes and you know practices and stuff, they had to wrap chains around it just as it because it was like a concertina, it was just opening and closing. It was just frightening to think about it. But he'd never seen a cylindrical boiler before. It took him 12 months, he then replaced it because they, you know, they would have ended up blowing themselves up for sure and for certain. That boiler is still today uh at Mannham on the foreshore. It's actually in the Visitor Information Centre, which is a fantastic storytelling part of the River Murray, as each of the places along the river that have got these vessels are capable of doing stuff.

SPEAKER_10 51:15

An initial commercial voyage upriver in the Marianne showed up a number of shortcomings. So with the little bit of experience that he'd now gained, Randall modified it. And surprisingly, the vessel proved to be relatively fast. Although its journey was no doubt slowed somewhat because one of Randall's crew members was a parson who took the opportunity to preach whenever one or more were gathered. Neither Cadell nor Randall knew that the other was on the river, and that each was after a share of the four thousand pounds being offered by the South Australian government. They found out one night, when Randall, who'd been leisurely steaming up the river in his little Mary Ann, was startled to hear the whistle of the Lady Augusta. Randall and his little Mary Ann became thoroughly steamed up, and for the next two days people along the river banks were entertained with the smoke, whoop, and thudding of an all-out race. The makeshift Mary Ann was first to reach the major junctions of the Murray and the Darling, and again further upstream with the Murrumbidgee. But unfortunately, the Mary Ann didn't measure up for race specifications, so Cadell was declared the winner. Nevertheless, grateful river people raised money to reward Randall. And despite his father's original misgivings, Captain William Randell went on to become a very successful riverboat businessman and later politician. Meanwhile, Captain Cadell, who, with others, was to form the Murray River Steamship Company, had an altogether different and opportunistic temperament. One of his later pursuits was as a blackbirder, enslaving and selling Aboriginal and Malay people to work in Australia's north. Meanwhile, the Murray-Darling River trade was soon flourishing with hundreds of steamers, both stern and sidewheeler.

Fast running, to stranded in mud: the Murray-Darling river system

SPEAKER_00 53:17

It must have been a hell of a time to have been involved in what was a fledgling business of attempting to deliver and carry materials along the inland river system. And these river boats and their barges, and people keep forgetting about the barges, but the barges that these riverboats pulled really assisted in opening up inland Australia. And without them, without the development of the river boat system, and they it's it's specifically Australian, what the boats they were using were side wheelers, not stern wheelers. But the idea, you know, from 1853, and and you know, we're recording this in 2025, so it'll be uh 172 years on the 15th of uh of August in 2025, it'll be 172 years since the first boat went into the water, which is the uh William Randall boat, the P.S. Marianne uh at Mano on that day. That started a revolution in Australia. That caused things to happen more quickly. The the uh the the development of the steam engine was important and the uh the use of it in these vessels, which people were practicing with. I mean, the river boats or the boats that were powered by steam that came out of the Seine, you know, uh 50 years before, very few people had seen them in Australia. But they worked out that once they once Randall and Cadell had managed to do that race up the river in 1853 to get to Swan Reach, because uh the South Australian government put up a£2,000 reward for doing it, and that wonderful race that occurred uh in 1853, I in learning about it and reflecting on it just thought nobody had been on that river other than the Aboriginals, of whom they would have known it really well. But the but I just, you know, reflect on the early start of the river trade in this country and the massive influence it had on what happened to South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales, and even all the way up into Queensland. Uh it's worth thinking about that they made an enormous contribution, which I don't think is recognised sufficiently within Australian history today.

SPEAKER_10 55:42

But it was always a precarious business. When the rivers started to dry into a series of puddles, steamers could be stranded upriver for two or three seasons. There are stories of crews growing potatoes or cutting wood to take on board for extra sail opportunities when the rains came again. And on the Darling, when water was low, they say it was like navigating through a deep and featureless railway cutting, only one that was hundreds of kilometres long, and where at sheep stations along the way the crew had to clamber and scramble up metres high banks to load and unload sometimes unwieldy cargo such as machinery and bales of wool.

SPEAKER_00 56:28

So when the water came, they had to work 24 hours a day non-stop to try and get up, get to where the wool in particular was, uh, and or the wheat crops if they were going to places that had cereal crops and getting those uh that produce on board these boats. Now, when the river came up, it had come up sometimes very up to the point that it would be over the top of the fence lines between the river, the actual course of the river, and where the shearing shed was, for example. And there are quite a number of stories of of uh paddle steamers going overland across the top of the fences in high water to race to the wool shed to get the wool and get back within a 24-hour period. So because the river had come up and down fairly quickly. And of course, there were quite a number of them that didn't make it. One of them got stuck on the way back, and two things happened. One, they took the paddle wheel off one side and put a uh uh a saw on it and cut wood for a couple of years until the next high water came, when they then refloated and got it back to the river. Another was that it was because it was a you know reasonably large vessel, they uh put a racetrack around it and used it as the grandstand for the racetrack for a period of time until some of the water came back and they floated and away they went again. But you know, the opportunist nature of the of the skippers, they were in the business of making money.

SPEAKER_10 57:58

The old riverboat skipper and the engineer I interviewed on the paddle steamer industry spoke of the larger vessels burning a tonne to a ton and a quarter of wood per hour. If you multiply this out by the number of paddle steamers, large and small, that plied these waters, and there were hundreds, and all of them consuming our beautiful river red gums, it's hard to imagine how we have any left today. Naturally, there were plenty of stories concerning the wood.

SPEAKER_00 58:30

And doing the documentary source to see the story of the Murray River boats, one of the stories that came from a fellow of the name of Wiggly. Wiggly was a woodcutter, and he would uh cut the wood and put it in cords. It cords 128 cubic feet of timber, which is four feet by four feet by eight feet, in terms of the size of the cord. And the skippers would simply drift in on the tide, and as they came to Wiggly, the woodyard, uh they would blow their whistle. The whistle identified who the skipper was on the boat. So Wiggly knew who was turning up and here and so forth. Uh one character failed to actually do that and just slipped in on the tide in the quiet, you know, in the middle of the night, uh, loaded up a cord of wood, and um away he went. Knowing that these people were likely to come back and have another free shot at it, uh he stuck a stick of jelly knight in a hollow log in the cord of wood. And as the story goes, they came back for a second load and of course boom, put it in, loaded into the uh into the boiler and off she went, and blew the boat to Smitherin. No one as a result of that incident ever stole wood from Wiggly ever again.

SPEAKER_05 59:40

I sing of a captain, not unknown to fame, a naval commander, Bill Jinx was his name, whose child with the Murray's clear waters do flow. Till this fresh water shell back with his yellow heavy ho, with his yellow yellow, with his yellow, oh yellow heavy.

SPEAKER_10 1:00:06

Now here's a song that American folk singer Burl Ives made famous in the 50s. It was written by Keeley Goodchild, an editor of the Achuca advertiser. Although Ian Mudy, in his fabulous book Riverboats, reckons that Keeley most likely heard it on the riverboats or in the pubs of Achuca. Bill also thought that well-known Murray River captain Gus Pierce could have been the inspiration. This version is by Sydney-based aficionados of the Songs of the Water, 40 degrees south.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:39

To the port of Wagania, his vessel was bound when night came upon him and darkness around. Not a star on the water, its clear light did throw. But the vessel sped onwards with a yellow heaven, with a yellow, yellow heaven, with a yellow. Oh captain, oh captain, let's make full dish. For the seas I do ride in the winds I do roll. Nice to the captain, though the fizz winds may blow. With a yellow evil, with a yellow yellow evil, with a yellow, yellow evil. Oh captain, oh captain, the waves sweep the deck. Oh captain, oh captain, we'll soon be a wreck. To the river's deep bottom, it's a man will go. With his yellow hole.

SPEAKER_06 1:01:52

With his yellow hole, yellow evil hole.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:58

Farewell to the maiden, the gold I do. Farewell to my friends, I shall see them on ball. The crew street in terror, the captain his swallow, with a stuck on a standbag, till the man walked a shallow with a yellow bee, with a yellow, hold on, oh, with a yellow, yellow bee.

SPEAKER_10 1:02:35

Like the giant bulldust-filled potholes across the old unsealed Nullabor Road, there's some notable gaps in our journey through early Australian transport, not the least being rail. And that subject is coming up right after this bit of blurb. And of course, soon after the end of the First World War, the big breakthrough that before too many years had closed the isolation gap in the outback was the rapid development of aircraft. So hold on to your flying helmets because we've got four cracker pioneer airmen interviews coming up during the course of this audiobook. Sir Norman Breley in chapters eight and nine, Sir Hudson Fish in chapter 17, and Lester Brain in chapter 22. These were the flying optimists who opened up the Outback and took us all into the skies. Thanks to filmmakers David Warrington for the Bullocky interview, Gary Kerr for the Coastal Catchers interview, and Ian Doyle for adding to our riverboats story. And musicians Warren Fay for the old bullock dray, 40 degrees south for South Australia and a nautical yarn. And yes, journalist Tony Wright for his grandfather's bullocky adventures. Now, don't forget, make sure you check out my website, reddust tapes.au. This is John Francis, and Red Dust Tapes saying for now.