The Crow Eaters Read online

  On my final night at Innamincka it’s the night before the local races. Sean and Geoff both tell me to expect anything. It can get pretty rough and rowdy when all the station workers converge on the hotel they say, though even when they’re blind drunk, ‘they still say please and thank you’, adds Sean with a smile.

  As Gav Chandler, the pub singer they’ve brought in from Whyalla, begins his set, a stream of young men enters the front bar. They’re tanned, strong looking, clean shaven and wearing outback gear which consists of loose shirts with the collars popped up, blue jeans held up by belts with big belt buckles, and scuffed and stained akubras. Without fail they order rums across the bar as more young men and women – wranglers, cooks, governesses and workers from another station – arrive. As Gav pushes through his repertoire of Cold Chisel, John Williamson and The Pogues, Jo explains the complex world of hat etiquette in the pub. As the races are on tomorrow, there are lots of young men and women around from different stations and it’s inevitable that some posturing and showing off takes place to establish the pecking order. Jo tells me that on the stations out here the ‘bosses’ are the only ones allowed to wear light-coloured akubras and the juniors only wear dark-coloured hats. As if to confirm this, I see a young man approach the bar wearing a crisp new black akubra. With his skinny arms and legs and checked shirt I think he looks a little like Woody the cartoon cowboy from Toy Story, though it’s an opinion I keep to myself. Later, a man with a red face approaches the bar, wearing his curled and worn tan-coloured akubra. I look around and he’s the only one inside wearing a hat now. Jo tells me that it’s a deliberate act. With so much testosterone and competition around, he’s subtly letting everyone know who he is.

  A dust storm kicks up outside and the front bar is suddenly full of the few remaining tourists, an Aboriginal family finishing their dinner from the Outamincka, the station hands, workers from Moomba and hotel staff on their precious night off. As Sean told me, ‘expect anything’. Then, as Gav begins with Dire Straits’ ‘Twisting by the Pool’, the hotel’s manager Nichelle Hodgson begins doing just that, sans pool. Suddenly one of the tourists joins her, rum in hand and then the ‘boss’ in the hat begins dancing across the floor of the pub as Gav belts out his best Mark Knopfler impersonation. Before long the entire pub is up on their feet. It is raw, impromptu and joyful. The staff are dancing behind the bar as they mix the rum-and-cokes for the patrons and Geoff leans over to me and shouts above the music, ‘This is unusual. Enjoy it!’

  The hangover the next morning, unfortunately, is not unusual. In the cold light of day we pile into the 4WD before sunrise. The clouds move quickly across the pale sky. I wonder if it’s rain, though Kym confirms it’s not before I can ask the question. The tents on the banks of the Cooper are still and I watch a flock of corellas drift over the creek as we leave. If this is a place of boom and bust, last night was definitely the former – mingling locals, a packed bar, a weekend off work and a sense of hope. After seeing the cycles of life here, of Burke and Wills, flood, drought, survival and death in the desert, I know that the only constant in a place like Innamincka is change.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE RIVER

  Captain Frank Tucker stands back as I heave the wheel of the PS Industry paddle steamer to port. A bend in the Murray River approaches and he pulls the horn twice, the sound reverberating across the brown expanse of the river as I strain to correct our course so we don’t run up the bank. I can tell he’s the sort of teacher who likes his pupils to learn by doing. I’m watching the slap of the spinning paddle wheels on the side, the puff of the steam rushing from the boiler and I can feel the tilt of the shallow-bottomed boat as I spin it away from a stand of trees without his help, letting a long stretch of the rushing river open up before us.

  With so much made of the desert and the dryness of South Australia, I had forgotten how integral the Murray River is to the state’s identity. The Murray is 2508 kilometres long in total, and the third longest navigable river in the world, behind only the Amazon and the Nile. It is the final length, from the border above Paringa in the north, down to Goolwa and the Murray mouth in the south I am interested in. I have travelled to some of the southern river towns, so I drive northwards now to explore the river and how people live with it, on it, and in spite of it.

  The first sighting I have of the wide slick of the river is when the Adelaide Hills descend to the flat, farming plateau around the town of Murray Bridge. It is a grey and gloomy morning, and the town is quiet; normally I would continue on without stopping, though today I drive down to the water’s edge, to the worn white and blue building of the Murray Bridge Rowing Club. It looks like nothing much now, though the story that came out of these rowing sheds in the early 20th century captivated the entire country.

  The Murray Cods was a group of young men, all from Murray Bridge, who took to rowing on the flat, straight stretches of the river adjacent to the town. It was very rare for an entire state crew to come from the same place, though after The Cods blitzed their way through the South Australian competition, the frayed collars of the ‘raggedy country rowers’ as they were known in the press – who held day jobs as labourers, firemen and engine drivers – beat the upper-class clubs from Adelaide convincingly. Then, The Cods won the National ‘eights’ title in 1913 on the Port River above Adelaide, the greatest prize in Australian rowing. They were full of promise and momentum for what was to come, though they couldn’t have imagined what the future would hold. Later the next year the First World War began. The war had lasting consequences for many of The Cods from Murray Bridge: 16-year-old Robert Woodhead fought at Gallipoli, losing an eye and a thumb in the process and never rowing again. Hedley Joyce fought at the Somme and, after recovering from being shot in the chest, he later died in a battle in 1917 in France; his brother Tom was also tragically killed in the war. The towering rower Arthur Scott enlisted in 1915 and became a gunner. He was injured in France and later court-martialled after going on strike when he was not allowed to travel to see his injured brother. Wally Pfeiffer refused to fight after conscription was introduced, saying conflict was not in his nature, and he became a conscientious objector. Ted Thomas and Bub Jarvis enlisted towards the end of the war. Another of their oarsmen, Fred Atkinson, who was too old to serve, died of appendicitis during the same time, and the era of The Cods, and the hope it had given Murray Bridge, seemed finished.

  The pull of the river brought The Cods back together once the war had finished though, with others from the town filling the gaps torn out by the conflict. The Cods went on to win the Kings Cup again in 1920, 1922 and 1923 as undisputed Australian ‘eights’ champions.

  Eventually the rowers from Murray Bridge were selected to go to the 1924 Paris Olympics. Their trials did not stop there, though, with misplaced boats, unreliable transport and a budget of one shilling a day to live on as they trained for the race in Argenteuil outside Paris. Their final challenge was just getting to the race in time, as they had to row down into Paris from one side of the city to the other over an entire day just before their event. The Cods had come all the way from a small town in South Australia, and although they didn’t win on the world stage, their journey from the Murray to the Seine was, and still is, an inspiration for the town.

  I travel further up the Murray, across the dry, flat fields and past tiny hamlets until I stop in at the general store of Nildottie, a place so small it would be easy to miss. Meeting me here is Indigenous guide Sam Stewart – he is taking me to the Ngaut Ngaut Conservation Park on the banks of the river. It is the smallest National Park in South Australia and this co-managed stretch of the Nganguraku people was also the first rock shelter deposit to be excavated in Australia.

  From the base of the red cliffs on the edge of the river, Sam takes me up along the boardwalk and we climb to the top. He points out native beehives wedged in the rocks as he tells the Nganguraku story. Along the top, the hot red sand is dotted with small saplings and karkalla, or pigface plants, introdu
ced to stabilise the sandy soil. Sam tells me about the strategic spot he’s brought me to on the top of the cliffs. From here we can see back across to Nildottie, along a bend in the river to the south, and across the Murray to the plains below, which stretch out to the horizon.

  Before white settlement, the visiting Ngarkat tribe would come here from the inland desert to trade and to gain access to water during big dry spells. They would camp and light a fire around where Nildottie is now, alerting the Nganguraku to their presence through smoke signals. I ask Sam what happened if no fire was lit as a warning. ‘They’d spear them,’ he says.

  Sam then shows me the black stones everywhere on the ground around us, a detail I didn’t notice until he points out what is beneath my feet – these are the stains of hot fat from cooking emu and kangaroo as the Ngarkat would do when they visited and waited for the Nganguraku. Sam walks over to the base of a shrub and shows me the shimmering shards of river mussel shells scattered on the red sand, part of an ancient midden. From this vista, the tribes could also watch for the Permangk people from the Adelaide Hills. It was common that the Permangk would travel up the river to steal the Nganguraku women, he tells me. One of the major trade items the Ngarkat and others would bring was stone for tools. The cliffs here are soft sandstone, so hard stone was highly sought after. We uncover a small deposit sitting above the sand where the remnants of stone tools have been discovered, some traced back to Mungo National Park in New South Wales and the Glasshouse Mountains in Queensland.

  Sam looks out over the long brown river. ‘It used to be so clear when I was a kid that you could see the big fish from up here on the cliff,’ he says. We walk back to the edge, past saltbush and clumps of native cranberries. As we walk, I ask what Ngaut Ngaut means and he says that it signifies ‘fire demon’ and goes back to the stories children used to be told about the power of fire, about respecting it, and ‘about an old lady who would grab you if you strayed away from its warmth and safety at night’, he adds.

  At the base of the cliff Sam shows me the outlines of oyster shells and sea urchins frozen in the stone of the cliff above us, some date back six million years, when this was part of the ocean. Sam runs his hands along the face of the chalky cliff and he starts to show me the stories of the Nganguraku drawn by their medicine men thousands of years ago. On one section there are the engravings of a variety of birds’ feet from the area embossed on the cliff face. It resembles an aerial view of the earth with all the various prints scattered across it, though Sam says this also had a highly practical application. When they would catch birds, they wouldn’t kill them straight away; the Nganguraku hunters would bring them over to this bird chart on the rock to find a matching print, from this they could discover which birds were the best to eat, and if not they’d let them go. As if to highlight the next stage of their bird catching, Sam shows me the black smoke stains running up the cliff, where a hearth would have sat under the lip for warmth and cooking. We walk past a pit from when Herbert Hale and Norman Tindale began their excavation work here in 1929 to discover the stories in the layers of rock on the cliffs.

  Hale and Tindale dug down 7 metres to a level that was dated back more than 8000 years where deposits of mussel shells, quandong stones, crayfish claws, tortoise remains, stone tools and bone points were found. They also discovered the remains of Tasmanian devils, Tasmanian tigers and those of the Nganguraku people.

  Further along the cliff Sam shows the maps of the Nganguraku. There is the Marne River represented by the forked lines of the tributary and a symbol for three full moons next to it. There is then a series of dots – each representing a day – of their travel inland to the valleys and sacred sites where they would meet, hunt and trade with other tribes. I take another few steps backwards and see the scale of the stories here, there are hundreds of dots representing the narratives of Nganguraku life – engravings of ladders the women used to get honey, like from the hive above us, estuarine dolphins, boomerangs, spears, eels, turtles, crayfish and stick figures of the people hunting. It is spectacular; everything here relates to the food chain. ‘This is our menu,’ Sam says of the enormous engravings on the wall – everything here could be caught to supplement their diets and ensure their survival.

  Sam says that a site such as this has attracted outside attention, and three big sections have been chiselled off the cliff over the years by vandals, including one engraving found in a man’s bag at Adelaide Airport. ‘He only got a $20 fine,’ Sam says as we walk back to the locked gate they now implement to maintain the Nganguraku stories here. This is the beginning of the living culture on the river. I continue onwards to see how life has continued for those further north.

  Part of my desire to explore the land around the river came from the romantic idea I had of it in the past – of paddle steamers and river folk, of the idea of a river determining the ebb and flow of communities and being more than just a body of water. As I wrote earlier, I have always liked Mark Twain and he gave me two connections to the river: his impressions of the Murray being like his beloved Mississippi when he visited South Australia in the late 19th century; and the way he wrote about the river for his most famous character, Huckleberry Finn – with the rushing water, the dark banks, the steamers and ferries on the river and the feeling one gets once the traffic ceases on the quiet corners and hidden bends.

  While Charles Sturt first navigated the Murray in his whaleboat in 1829–30, it was first travelled by paddle steamer in 1853 by Francis Cadell and William Russell and it became a vital inland Australian high-way; the steamboats would transport and accommodate passengers; tow timber, wool and farming supplies; there were travelling ‘hawkers’ operating floating stores; and travelling mission boats such as the Etona which had a small chapel, altar and organ on board to provide religious services for those along the water. By the 20th century the need for steamers lessened and in the 1960s they had nearly disappeared completely. Cadell was paid £4000 for navigating up the Murray to the Darling River junction initially and he negotiated an additional £4000 for ‘further services’ as he built snagging boats – used to remove obstacles from the river – and steamers. He also formed the River Murray Navigation Co. and travelled around the waterways of Australia and New Zealand on various money-making schemes, from whaling to establishing pearling fleets and working on ‘steam-transport on the Waikato in the Maori wars’. Cadell met his end in Indonesia (the Dutch East Indies). Reports came through from Batavia that he was killed by the cook’s mate on his schooner, Gem. Apparently Cadell hadn’t paid the cook’s mate wages for five years and finally his crew murdered him and scuttled the boat on the Kei Islands with his body still aboard.

  I am not expecting the river to be central to life here anymore, as it was when paddle steamers plied the water, full of passengers, when kids made for the islands in little rowboats full of fishing rods and cricket bats, and barges transported goods along its length, when it was the highway that connected the Riverland to the rest of the world.

  As I arrive at Renmark on a steamy Wednesday, I realise quickly that I’m wrong. The river still defines the town, not in the way I had imagined, though people still gravitate towards it in the early morning, tracing their walking trails along its banks; the historic main hotel looks out across the water; and in the park, which sits along a straight stretch of the river in the centre of town, people sit under trees in the shade, gazing out across the bends of the Murray as fishing dinghies drift past and kayakers hug the shallow water at the edges. At either end of the park there is a paddle steamer, the multi-tiered Murray River Queen which has been repurposed into accommodation, a bar and a Thai restaurant, and down the other end the freshly painted and traditional former transport steamer, the PS Industry.

  As I approach, the Industry hisses and the paddlewheels spin, just as a hoon in a Commodore might spin the wheels of their car late at night. I wonder if this is the 19th century equivalent of a burn-out. The steamer is buzzing with activity: engineers in overalls
toss lengths of wood into the furnace, red-shirted volunteers check the moorings, others walk across the deck with flasks of oil to grease the bearings as they prepare the boat for their charter. Chairman of the ‘Friends of the PS Industry’ volunteer group, Dave Natrass, meets me on board. Dave has the requisite red shirt and he chats to me while roaming around the lower decks. He tinkers and adjusts levers which I couldn’t name – he’s a man of a different era from mine, and I can imagine him on his front lawn in Renmark pulling apart pushbikes, old Holdens and ancient, greasy engines just to understand how they work. His hands are big and stained, with the most intricate pattern of lines, creases and wrinkles – a narrative of the machines he’s worked on over the past 60 years. He has agreed to let me hitch a ride as they steam up river. Dave and his group of 50 volunteers maintain the steamer, chop the wood required to run it and steam along the Murray as often as they can. This has been a labour of love for Dave and others like him, restoring and maintaining the Industry, which was built in Goolwa in 1910 as a desnagging steam boat and used until it became obsolete in the 1960s. ‘It was sitting in a pond here from the 1970s onwards slowly rotting, and we decided to put it back in the water properly,’ Dave says.

  The steam whistles out from the boiler, billowing across the river; the wheels spin and we begin churning through the water upstream and away from Renmark. Phil and Frank, the two steam engineers – with thick English accents – open the boiler hatch and throw in lengths of wood to keep the fire going; they’re using old fence posts today and for our two-hour journey we’ll go through a third of a tonne of wood. Dave tinkers with the engine as we steam along. Sweat is pouring off him as he times his hands so they don’t get caught in the enormous pulleys and cranks. He sees me watching him and half turns, ‘There’s a noise!’ he shouts, trying to discover the source of the new clanking sound after recent maintenance. Age is one of the factors with the running of the boat as well: ‘Our biggest problem now is that most of the volunteers are over 60,’ Dave says. And despite the love I can see all the volunteers have for the river, the question of who will take over from them is a real concern.