TheBanyanTree: travels with a purpose 4

[Peter Macinnis]

The Murray River is not what it used to be, because it has been dammed 
and controlled, so that the ecosystems down the river that depend on 
spring thaws and autumn/winter droughts are robbed of the variability 
that keeps them going.  We have tamed a river, to make paradise on earth 
for a few farmers, and lost a true paradise.

Now there are no summer lows.  The flow is kept more or less constant 
throughout the year, so the gum trees and birds that rely on regular 
flooding are dying.  The boating industry, however, is thriving, and 
Snake Island turned out to be a launching place, with room for cars and 
trailers to park, and a natural slope down into the river.  Here, the 
flow was quite noticeable, but I kicked off my sandals and waded 
carefully in, finding myself on a bed of firm sand that sloped gently 
down, covered with a silky layer of fine mud.  Now I know that I can 
have people scrambling ashore at places where there is an easy way out, 
where they don't get trapped in mud or roots or rushes like the ones I 
could see on the opposite bank.  All along the banks, there were fallen 
trees and tree trunks.

The sediment was interesting.  As the sun shone down, I began to notice 
glints that might have been taken for gold, if you were unfamiliar with 
the effect of mica flakes.  A wave of the foot, and they swirled and 
disappeared, something no self-respecting gold flake would do.  I 
retreated to the car and drove on. A few kilometres downstream, the 
banks rose, and I found high muddy cliffs, towering over the water. 
This was the sort of place where you would prefer to land on the other 
side, or drift down a bit further.

Peewees, crows, corellas and cockatoos abound here.  there may have been 
other birds as well, but these cacophonous avians prevented any test of 
this.  Then I began to notice dead trees.  The river had spread out, and 
I suspected that I was seeing an artificial lake, created by a dam.  A 
few kilometres down the road, I began to see signs referring to Lake 
Mulwala.  I stopped and noted that here, along with the birds mentioned 
before, there were waterbirds, thrashing away in the rushes.

We were still 10 kilometres from the town of Mulwala, but now signs of 
encroachment began to appear.  There is a certain style of Australian 
architecture that tells you that you are among anglers.  Gardens and 
lawns are laid out to make maintenance easy, there is a carport to store 
the trailer and the boat, surfaces are all low-maintenance.  These 
weekenders, which become retirement homes, string out in a ribbon-like 
way, because everybody wants to be close to the water.

The dead trees tell us that while river redgums like to be flooded from 
time to time, you can have too much of a good thing, but for now, they 
provide safe roosts for waterbirds and when they rot and fall, they will 
provide safe refuges for fish, until the anglers come.  I will come back 
to the redgums later, because in the late 19th century, redgum was the 
main industry around Echuca.

Mulwala is twinned with Yarrawonga on the Victorian side, and I called 
in there for tourist information, maps of access points to the Murray 
and a few other odds and ends, then I ploughed on again.  There is a 
song that goes " . . . in Yarrawonga, I'll linger longer", but whoever 
wrote that wasn't driving west in the afternoon.  I wanted to be safely 
installed before the sun got too low in the sky, though I was now far 
enough west that the sun would set twenty minutes later than at home.

The roads are all two reasonable lanes of tar, and nobody seems to go 
faster or slower than 100 km/hr – it seems everybody is happy to hand a 
hundred or more metres behind the car in front, and just cruise over the 
flat plains.  Roads off to the right bore signs that either proclaimed 
"River Access" or "No River Access", but by the time I decided to follow 
one of them down, the river had veered away, and access was no longer 
possible, so I got to Echuca earlier than I needed.

One of my prized possessions is an unbound volume of Baron Ferdinand von 
Mueller's "Succinct Survey of the Plants of Victoria".  It was given to 
me by somebody who was selling old furniture in 1969, just before Chris 
and I were married.  They had set it aside to throw away, even though it 
bore the writer's inscription, and offered it to us when they heard we 
were both botanists.  The Baron passed through here in 1854, gathering 
data that went into that volume, and a few years earlier, several other 
people had passed through the area.

Modern Australia began as a single colony at Sydney, and fifteen years 
later, a small settlement was formed on the separate island of Van 
Diemen's Land (later altered to Tasmania, because VDL was a hell-hole 
for convicts.  In 1836, Adelaide was founded, supposedly free of 
convicts, in South Australia (in fact, quite a lot of old lags, former 
convicts, made their way there in the hope of rich pickings), while a 
colony on the Swan River was established in 1829 and crammed full of 
convicts.  Outraged at other people getting lots of land, a bunch of 
scruffs, ruffians old lags and other cream of Vandemonian gentry headed 
for the lower right-hand corner of Oz, and settled at Port Phillip, 
creating Melbourne and presenting the colonial government with a fait 
accompli.

In 1838, overlanders passed through, and interior routes opened up 
between Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, but these were only opened for 
the transfer of stock to the newer colonies.  One of these was Charles 
Sturt, one of the best and most sympathetic of English explorers, a man 
who always got on well with the Aboriginal tribes.  He reported that the 
numbers of Aborigines that he saw were far below the numbers he had seen 
ten years earlier, and he reported signs of smallpox in the survivors, 
but part of the problem was that more Europeans were pushing into the 
area, forcing Aborigines out of their hunting grounds.

Land that was manifestly empty for eleven months of the year was as good 
as vacant, so the whites took it, oblivious to the needs of the owners 
in the one month of the year when it alone provided food.  More whites 
also meant more diseases, and measles and other minor diseases of 
Europeans carved swathes through the Aborigines, making it easier to 
move in, take the land, and prosper.  The devastated tribes had no 
strength to fight back, and in an oral culture, traditions began to be 
lost.  The survivors switched to living on the edge of white settlement, 
trading fish and other services for tobacco and other pleasures.

Then in the 1850s, about the time gold was discovered, the colonies were 
split and given their own governors.  Now began a period of intense 
competition for trade and taxes.  The wily South Australians noted that 
agricultural produce from inland Australia had to go over mountain 
ranges, while it could float down the river to Goolwa, and be carried by 
horse-drawn tram over a flat route to a port, safely in South Australian 
territory, providing South Australians with employment, and the 
government with taxes.  In 1853, the first paddle steamer entered the 
Murray system.

Whether it was roofing iron, fencing wire, tools, crockery, brandy, rum, 
cement, pianos, steam engines or something else that could not be 
locally made, the steam boats and the barges they towed provided gentle 
sturdy carriage upstream, while they carried loads of timber, wool, 
wheat and even stock downstream.

The colonial government of South Australia were delighted at this 
windfall.  The colonial governments of Victoria and New South Wales were 
less enchanted, because "their" produce was being siphoned off, and 
their rightful trade with the inland districts was being filched by 
crow-eaters.  The Victorians struck back, using their massive gold 
revenues to build a rail line to Echuca that opened in 1864, so goods 
could be taken to and from the river by rail, and carried triumphantly 
and profitably to Melbourne.

Soon a private railway was running up into New South Wales, drawing 
produce from as far away as Deniliquin, and inspiring New South Wales to 
extend its rail system.  Even areas that lacked rail access could now 
ship their goods by bullock cart to Echuca for forwarding by more modern 
methods, powered by steam.

The port of Echuca stretched for half a mile or more along the banks of 
the Murray, but it was aport that had to be on multiple levels.  Tides 
in the ocean may vary by as much as six metres, twenty feet, but usually 
it is less.  At Echuca, there were floods and droughts, so mighty gum 
trees were felled, and a series of dock levels were constructed of 
roughly-dressed hardwood.  Steam cranes and winches hauled goods from 
the boats and barges, or lowered them onto them.

High Street in Echuca, running between the Murray and the Campaspe, 
slightly higher than the top deck of the port's wharves, is broad enough 
for a camel train to turn around.  Echuca, however, was probably laid 
out with the convenience of drovers bringing stock in, accompanied by 
dogs, spare horses, carts and more, or the drivers of bullock carts, 
laden high with goods and needing large clear spaces to turn.  Animal 
teams are hard to back, and they demand large turning circles.

Many of the early towns were built with a main street that could 
accommodate flocks, herds or large teams of harnessed animals, but this 
street was probably set up mainly as a stock route.  Just at the port of 
Echuca, a tributary river approaches close to the Murray before veering 
away again, so there are two bodies of water, the Murray and the 
Campaspe, 100 metres apart, and beyond, where the rivers diverge again 
before finally meeting, there is a large knob of land.  It carried trees 
and grass.

It is parkland now, but once, a simple fence just a little way from the 
narrow point made it a perfect place to hold mobs of sheep and cattle 
before they were taken away by train or steamer, or driven to the nearby 
goldfields to be slaughtered.  Mining is hungry work, and successful 
miners wanted their steaks – and were prepared to pay for the pleasure.

The handy stockyard wasn't the reason people settled here, though.  They 
stopped here because there were places where the river banks sloped 
gently, allowing cattle to cross.  Once the crossings were established 
and a few buildings had been thrown up, it was deemed appropriate to 
install punts to carry stock over the river, and then bridges were 
built, and the little town grew.  Horse traders set up here, and young 
blades began running impromptu horse races up and down High Street.

It was surveyed in 1854, High Street and other streets were pegged, 
people bought land in the new township, and Echuca was born, but it is 
worth looking back to a curious coincidence.  The two men who created 
Echuca on the Victorian bank and Moama, two miles upstream on the New 
South Wales side, were both sentenced on the same day in the same court, 
the Lent Assizes at Lancaster.

James Maiden, later of Moama, was sentenced to death for burglary on 
March 8, 1834 – he and another man stole silver to the value of nine 
shillings and candles worth a penny.  This was later commuted to seven 
years' transportation.  On that day, Henry Hopwood, later of Echuca, was 
sentenced to 14 years for being in possession of stolen silk.

The length of the sentence did not necessarily match how long you were 
banged up: by 1840, Maiden was married and in Victoria, travelling to 
the Echuca area with cattle.  The local Aborigines were becoming hostile 
at this time, so Mrs Maiden, formerly of Dublin and also transported, 
dressed as a man, supposedly to make the Aborigines think there was 
another man present.  It may also be that Mrs Maiden had no intention of 
riding side-saddle, and took to breeches, explaining later that it was 
the natives.

By 1850, they were in Melbourne, where five children were baptised as a 
job lot, and by then, Maiden had a successful punt and an inn, and 
described himself as a squatter, a person engaged in farming.  By 1856, 
Thomas Elder, later to be a famous camel breeder, arrived by steamer. 
He reported that Maiden had paid 19,000 pounds for a property and its 
fences.  A year or so later, he had lost the lot in a crash that brought 
down the prices of cattle, and he was working effectively as an odd-job 
man for another ex-convict cattle baron.

Maiden was illiterate, as evidenced by his making his mark on his 
marriage papers in 1840, but Hopwood was literate, and something of a 
troublesome character, in and out of trouble in Van Diemen's Land, so 
that he only gained a limited freedom in 1846 and appeared on the Murray 
in about 1849, when he set out to establish a rival punt, but he was 
considered undesirable, because he always did so on some squatter's 
land, leading to herds and flocks travelling through, eating all the 
feed and mixing with the station stock.

In the end, Hopwood was driven over the river by repeated legal actions, 
and once he managed to buy land on the Victorian side, he set out to 
outdo Moama and Maiden, but in the end, it was cattle prices that 
destroyed Maiden and left Echuca to become the inland port of Australia, 
free of competition from a colonial rival.




-- 
   _--|\    Peter Macinnis        petermacinnis at ozemail.com.au
  /     \   Low priest of Apostate, the Goddess of Something
  \.--._*   Entirely Different From Whatever It Was Last Week
       v    http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/index.htm