The Crow Eaters Page 20
The Industry passes the limbs of long-dead gum trees submerged in the water, we pass houseboats moored on the banks and old fishing shacks concealed just up from the water’s edge. This is the river as I imagined it. ‘I wonder if she ever dreams, as I do, of the great days when she steamed nobly upstream with her cabins full of passengers and her decks piled high with wool, and a new adventure around every river bend,’ wrote former Riverland steamboat captain William Drage of the PS Marion in his 1976 book Riverboats and Rivermen.
I move up to the captain’s bridge to meet Frank Tucker, today’s captain, who has come in from Mildura for the trip. He has a thick white beard and a uniform that makes him look as much like an airline pilot as it does the captain of a paddle steamer. He’s a former schoolteacher and his hobby has led to him being highly sought after as a modern expert on the river.
Frank chats and casually steers the Industry, moving the wheel in small increments to ensure we stay straight and steady. I ask if he’s had any close calls and he says that the stately pace at which they travel and the relatively consistent water level because of the weirs means that things run pretty smoothly for the PS Industry. ‘I got stuck on a sandbar once and had to be winched across,’ he says. He also had to steer the PS Marion along the river during two days of intense wind last year. ‘It’s the only time I’ve had blisters on my hands from the boat,’ he adds. While the rest of the river, especially at dusk, is full of ski boats, jet skis and slick little crafts skipping across the water at speed, the steamers here are a reminder of the pace things used to run at along the Murray.
After telling me that it costs around $60 000 a year to run the Industry and that each engine bearing can cost up to $2000, Frank lets go of the wheel and ushers me up to the captain’s post. I don’t have the style of Frank, whose subtlety reveals his vast experience, though he trusts me to learn the currents and the feel of the Industry as I zig and zag and steer us back towards Renmark.
Once in town, Frank takes over again and he expertly spins the paddle steamer in a reverse parking motion and lets it come to rest against the dock. As we disembark, there are two young women waiting for Dave. They’re volunteers from a local outreach organisation and they want to come along to the next meeting of the paddle steamer to join the crew. I shake Dave’s hand as I leave, though they’re off again, cleaning the steamer and securing the wood they’ll need for a five-day trip they’re all planning together for next week along the river.
I spend the night on the Murray River Queen, watching the boats slice through the water in the pink evening light, while they send the ripples of their wakes across the river.
The next day I continue north, across the bridge at Paringa and further still to Murtho. Out on a bend in the river I meet Ruth Roberts in her canoe, and she kits me up so I can follow her through the winding paths of Plummers Creek, Horseshoe Lagoon and Woolenook Bend, all tributaries of the river.
Ruth and her husband, Jim, arrived on the Murray four years ago, though she has a unique connection to the Murray nonetheless. After retiring from her job in aged care Ruth decided she wanted ‘to do something bold’, so she revisited an idea she’d had as a 17-year-old. Ruth wanted to ride her horse from Adelaide to Melbourne once upon a time, before ‘life got in the way’; so when her kids were grown she decided that while the romanticism of the horse trip had waned – being that it would mostly be along highways now – she would kayak from the source to the sea along the length of the Murray River, solo, having never really paddled a kayak in her life. She wanted to get off the grid completely, though Jim wouldn’t have it, so when Ruth set out in 2006 he followed by road in a campervan so they could arrange a rendezvous each night and so he could have dinner waiting for her for each day of the five and a half weeks it took her for the first trip along the river (she finished the second part of the trip a few years later).
Of all the places along the 2508 kilometres of the river she paddled, the place that grabbed her the most was here – the Murray River around Renmark – for its wildness, the birds, the bush and the serenity. Eventually it’s the place they decided to call home.
Ruth and I paddle 12 kilometres through the tributaries of the Murray, past kangaroos on the bank, spots where emus jump in and swim across the creek, past a startled goanna scrambling up a tree; and all the while she paddles at a slow and stately pace, just like the Industry the day before. I bluster and thrash as I weave along from bank to bank, though Ruth’s steady stroke, learned from years on the river, drives her through the water without a wasted movement. ‘This has put ten years on our lives,’ she says of the regeneration the river has provided. We pass the remnants of a bridge which once connected to the Japanese internment camp here.
When the Second World War began, it found its way to an isolated bend on the Murray River. At Woolenook Bend near Murtho, Japanese people in Australia, many of them pearl divers from Broome in Western Australia, were sent to internment camps for the dura-tion of the war. Initially there were 30 people there who were employed to fell timber on the surrounding land for six shillings a ton, though by the end of the war there were 264 internees living in the corrugated-iron Nissen huts.
Further along we cut across the water through another narrow channel in the creek, paddling back out into the Murray, which feels at least 100 metres across. We pass an old houseboat moored on the edge of a dark patch of bush, with washing hanging off the balustrades and fishing rods stacked at the back. Ruth says that it’s owned by an old lady who found a spot on the river she liked and hasn’t moved for years.
One of Ruth and Jim’s initiatives is the refurbishment of their own paddle steamer, the tiny PS Julie Fay, which they’ve decked out as accommodation on the water’s edge. I spend the night on the water again, watching the birds – pelicans, corellas, kestrels, thornbills and swamphens – fill the air and surround the banks in the evening, as the water hardens to glass and the rose-coloured smear of the sunset sinks below the trees of the opposite bank. Once the stars come out across the sky and I have the river seemingly to myself from the deck of my own little steamer, it reminds me of Huckleberry Finn again: ‘Everything was dead quiet, and it looked late, and smelt late. You know what I mean – I don’t know the words to put it in.’
I think that maybe river life here isn’t as changed as I thought, as I watch the stars and feel the slight sway of the boat on the water late into the night.
After my night on the PS Julie Fay I feel the pull of the river more keenly, the stillness and the presence of the water once people disappear from it. I’ve only spent a night on my own mini-steamer, and I want to meet someone who has made the river their home permanently.
I travel south of Renmark early the next morning, past the vines, fruit trees and almond plantations which fill up the plains around town. The 24-hour ferry takes me across the river at Lyrup, a tiny town which was started as a settler village by the South Australian Government in 1894 as a solution to growing unemployment. The 243 men, women and children were taken by train and then paddle steamer to this isolated stretch of the river where the supplies to start their own community were brought in. There were 12 such settlements established and the success of Lyrup in particular was seen as remarkable at the time:
The sight of pumping machinery and steam sawmills hard at work and of a large area of land under intense cultivation producing root arops [sic] and splendid growths of maize and sorghum would give one the idea that the settlement had been in existence for some years. It is literally astonishing to think that so muoh [sic] has been done in one year.
Wrote one journalist in the Adelaide Observer after a visit in 1895.
I follow the road further: just beyond Lyrup and down a dirt track to the edge of the water where a two-storey paddle steamer is moored on the banks of the Murray. As I arrive, I’m met by an excitable German shepherd ‘TK’ and the owners of the boat, Mary Mills and Bill Ryan, who live on the PS Mallee Maverick. We sit in their kitchen/captain’s mess, whe
re the sight of a fridge and microwave is offset by the gigantic steering wheel and navigational equipment set up by the large windows opening out to the river beyond. Mary and Bill were wine makers in Naracoorte and they both remember the exact moment they decided to do something different with their lives, which ultimately led them here.
It was the middle of winter and they were up at 3 am in the bitter cold, pumping wine tanks. They looked at each other and Mary said to Bill, ‘I don’t want to be here.’ ‘I don’t want to be here either,’ he replied, and they set out to discover their next challenge, which ended up being the Maverick on the river. This is an even more curious choice considering that Mary hates the water generally and she can’t swim, though the moment she saw the steamer and the river, she knew it was for them. It was meant to be a weekender, though it quickly became their home and now they live full-time on the river. The Maverick is a rear quarter-wheeler paddle steamer and, despite all the homely trimmings – bedrooms, fridges, bathrooms, Netflix, televisions and washing machines – this is still an operational paddle steamer. They’re moored on the edge of 32 acres (13 hectares) of bushland and their boat is mostly made of recycled materials. Bill walks me through their home, past his guitar amp and homebrew set-up and out to their tomato plants in pots on the deck – it reminds me of the decks of the boats in the post-apocalyptic film Waterworld.
Because of the grand appearance of the steamer they sometimes get people in boats pulling in to have a look, just as Bill and Mary are having their breakfast, though if anyone feels a little light fingered when they’re out, Bill tells me that the ‘security system is our 49 kilogram German shepherd’, who bounds into the water at every opportunity. There is another boat a few hundred metres up river, though beyond that they’re isolated for five kilometres. ‘Rodney, the mayor of the “street”, keeps an eye on things,’ Mary says of their closest neighbour. They travel to Berri every few months in their home and they’d been to Mildura in the paddle steamer for a school reunion recently.
Bill tells me about the floods of 2016 here as we drink coffee on the deck: ‘It was like living on an island. We had three planks for getting down off the boat; we’d have to take a dinghy down to the ferry and we were water-bound for a month,’ he says.
‘We would have been happy if that was the status quo,’ he says of their marooned period on the river and the abundant birdlife it provoked.
‘When the river receded after the floods, the carp had gone up into the estuaries and it was like a black mat across the river; there were millions and millions of them. It was horrible.’
In winter Mary says that the water on their stretch is covered with floating pelicans and shags drifting on the misty river. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she says.
It’s not as isolated as I would have imagined either; they’ve got friends on other boats and some up river who often pull in to the Maverick in a dinghy for a cuppa; they’ll have a ‘happy hour’ with their neighbours on the river often, travelling between boats on their unique river highway. Travelling like this along their own isolated patch of the river is special, and Bill and Mary both agree now that this will be the place they’ll grow old together.
Back in Renmark, I’m directed to the house of one of the elder statesmen of the river, Clarence ‘Clacker’ John. We sit at his kitchen bench and chat about life on the river through the decades. He’s 92 years old and was the former pharmacist of the town. In all his years, he’s seen the river’s changes more than most. He left to study pharmacy in Adelaide from 1945 to 1948, though aside from that he’s never been away from the river since.
He remembers the good old days, of course, though he also recognises how things have changed for the better now. ‘We used to have a tradition – if you didn’t want something – old bikes, furniture – you’d just throw it in the river. It was a bit of a rubbish dump,’ he says, not too proud of the way things used to be here. ‘I’m very pleased now that things are getting back to how they should be,’ he says of the care that is now taken of the river. Like many people since, Clacker’s father was drawn to the river. He doesn’t know why, though in 1911, his father, a blacksmith, was drawn to move to Renmark and to create a life on the river for his family. ‘It’s changed now of course. We used to drive up and down the street in a horse and cart. There were horse troughs through town and pepper trees for shade.’
Clacker tells me of the PS Marion he’d see on weekends and the Eulonga, a wood-carting vessel from up at Woolenook Bend. I ask him if he ever saw the internment camp and he nods, trawling back a memory from more than 70 years ago. ‘I was a teenager when the internment camp was here. The Japanese were there … a war going on far away found its way to a bend in the river. I played cricket for the high school you see. They also had a social services cricket team and on a Sunday we’d play the guards at the camp up the river. There’s still a cricket pitch there if you get out and look on the island. You can still see it.’ Clacker doesn’t really recall the interned, or he doesn’t talk about it at least. ‘The best thing about the match was the canteen out there. We were on rations in town during the war, though the social services had beer, lollies, chocolate for the guards.’
Our conversation turns to the weather and how things are different from an environmental point of view. ‘When I was a kid you could catch fish whenever you wanted to. The last cod I caught was five years ago now. Fish and rabbits, they were people’s staple diets,’ he says.
‘We don’t get the floods we used to,’ Clacker says, flipping out his little notebook where he’s recorded all the significant weather activity on the river for as long as he can remember. ‘I’m a climate change sceptic. But things have definitely changed on the river,’ he says of his life here in Renmark.
It’s obvious that things have changed on the river, from the era of steamers and simplicity, to the everpresent threat of the drought, and the continual controversy and impact of the Murray Darling Basin Plan. Despite this, the river still gives so many people along it a significant sense of meaning; it defines their histories, their families and homes and its beauty and importance are not understated.
I finish my time on the river out at Customs House, 30 minutes or so from town. Big river red gums shade the flotilla of houseboats on the bank and the road abruptly stops once it reaches the site of the old Customs building, which existed to check and tax vessels travelling between the states. It’s hot and deserted now. I ask at the houseboat business which operates from the spot and they tell me that Victoria is about 500 metres downstream on the other bank and New South Wales only a few hundred metres beyond that. It all looks the same – the big river, the trees, the swirls of the current and the birds above; the delineation between states, South Australia and the rest is nothing more than an arbitrary and invisible line. I knew this before I arrived, though it’s something I wanted to see for myself before I continued exploring in between the other lines that separate South Australia.
CHAPTER 13
THE QUEEN'S TOWN
At the Australian town planners’ conferences in 1917 and 1918, the vision of a renewed Anglo-Saxon race was touted to the delegates. They spoke of plans for a peaceful postwar city that would endure through the uncertainties of the era. It needed to embrace commercial and industrial supremacy, and it needed to do this with a manicured spread of garden villages linking the community together. They were planning to build this suburban utopia north of Adelaide.
With the British ideal of the future in their minds, architects, town planners, surveyors, builders and engineers eventually set to work constructing a model of Australia’s ‘new’ town of the future in the 1950s. It would be named after Queen Elizabeth. During the Playford era (referring to the 26-year reign of Thomas Playford as the state’s premier from 1938 to 1965), the plan for ‘Elizabeth’ became one that saw the future as a public responsibility and one that strived to be more than just a ‘pale imitation of other places’.
The construction of Australia’s new urba
n landscape was seen as greatly important in the post–Second World War years as a way of looking towards a brighter future which embraced migrants and people looking for new opportunities. It was meant to embody the progress South Australia was capable of demonstrating. As Mark Peel writes, it was to be a place where the middle class could create a new, visionary style of civic life; a garden city ‘which utilised open spaces and moved away from the winding alleys and tight allotments of “slums” in England’.
In 1954, the South Australian Housing Trust began to build its new city. Queen Elizabeth visited Adelaide that same year and she was given an Andamooka opal necklace and earring set worth $250 000. The satellite city was named in her honour. ‘Elizabeth’ was built to provide homes for the workers; the South Australian Housing Trust constructed houses for those who could afford them and by ‘using the profits to supply spartan rental homes at low cost’, they would supposedly create ‘balanced and happy social groups’, according to economic planner Alexander Ramsay, in this new and self-contained ‘instant town’. Peel writes in his essay ‘A Place to Grow’, ‘A job in Elizabeth meant you qualified to rent one of the semi-detached “double units” built by the Housing Trust.’
There was plenty of manufacturing work and regular wages in the early days and Elizabeth became a workers’ city. During the 1960s it was the largest and most concentrated migrant settlement in Australia. This concentration on workers, though, exposed the cracks in the model as early as the 1970s, when economic downturn revealed the fragility of the Elizabeth model. While Elizabeth was touted as a new sort of urban utopia, how this British ideal would function in the paddocks of South Australia was markedly different from the model community they had hoped for.