Melbourne: Sun Books, 1965 (First published Rigby, 1961)
White Australia is a very young country, but already so much of it's pioneering history is being forgotten. A case in point is the story of how the riverboat trade opened up Australia's interior. Riverboats - a minor classic in it's own way - tells some of that story in an entertaining and readable fashion.
Ian Mudie is perhaps best known, along with Rex Ingamells, for being a founder of the Jindyworobak literary group, and he was self-consciously Australian in outlook, as testified by much of his poetic output. He was also a great story-teller and, as this book shows, a great listener to other people's stories. Mudie's father was close friends with W. R. Randall, a pioneer riverman, and Mudie used that connexion to gather material for this book.
Riverboats firstly gives the reader a brief history of the opening of the rivers by steamer, with the second half of the book being a collection of anecdotes that Mudie collected about the boats, and the men that owned and crewed them.
What Mudie makes clear in this book is how vital the riverboat trade was in opening up the pastoral country along the Murray, Darling and Murrumbidgee Rivers. Before the pioneering journey of Randall in the Mary Ann and Cadell in the Lady Augusta in 1853, the settlers in these districts were reliant on supplies coming from the coast via bullock dray, a long and expensive supply route. The arrival of the first steamers instantly reduced the cost of staples like flour, tin and alcohol, and enabled the first towns to develop along the rivers.
The steamers also allowed people to travel quickly and comfortably from the coast inland, which as Mudie writes, meant that many women came to the interior for the first time, changing society for the better. The struggle for the boat owners was to make enough money to stay viable, and they did this in various ways. Some tried to monopolize a certain section of the river, some opened stores that their steamers then serviced, and most ran up the river with stock on spec, to see what they could sell. Quite often they made good profits, but sometimes they didn't do so well. The story of the riverboats is also a story of consolidation, with fewer and fewer companies involved in the trade as time went on. Mudie tells the story of the longest river voyage, by the Jane, which took 37 months to deliver the timber for a new hotel to be built in Bourke. Continually low water in 1886 meant that the Jane, with her heavy load, had to wait and wait before she had enough draught to get through the shallow sections of the Darling. By the time she arrived in Bourke, the railway had made it to the town and the hotel had already been built!
Mudie is scathing in his book about the way that the railways subsidised freight to undercut the river steamers. In the end, the expansion of the railroads, and the increase in motor transport, sounded the death-knell for the river trade. The remaining steamers today are purely a tourist attraction. Mudie's stories about the rivermen show what a hard life it was to work on the river, with constant damage to boats from snags and overhanging trees, and the ever present threat of fire hanging over the boats as well, mostly from their own boilers, but, in the case of the Rodney, from a gang determined to make the owner pay for transporting non-union labour during the Shearer's strike of '94.
The Sun Books copy that I read had some useful maps and wonderful (if small) photographs, and was a wonderful way to while away several hours. Thoroughly recommended.
Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell
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