TheBanyanTree: travels with a purpose 6

[Peter Macinnis]

Henry Lawson wrote a story once, where a man's sense of being 
Australian, his nostalgia for his homeland, was aroused by the smell of 
gum wood burning.  Wood smoke is distinctive enough, but if you have 
lived in Australia, you will also know the smell of smoke from a 
Eucalyptus fire.  That was what I could smell as I walked along the 
upper deck, because I was now well above the smoke stacks of the two 
steamers that were getting ready below.

We forget, in these modern days, that it took time to raise steam.  An 
hour before the first cruise, the boiler fires were alight and being 
stoked.  I looked down for the towing posts used to haul barges: these 
were high on the boats to allow the boat and its crew to move about 
freely under the tow line, but the posts were absent on the two boats 
there.  Down the wharf, there was a barge with outriggers and several 
logs attached, but I realised it was just there for show.

There were timber bollards on the boat, and looking up the wharf from 
the deck, I could see bollards at various levels, designed to cater for 
varying water levels.  Around the side of the deck, iron posts held four 
strands of chain to keep the passengers on board, and some more 
interesting chains that operated the rudder.  One end of the chain was 
attached to the deck, from which it ran over a pulley on a stout timber 
attached to the rudder, then back to the deck and into a channel.

I followed the trail, along the deck, past the engine, around a pulley, 
and up to the wheelhouse where it passed around a shaft attached to the 
wheel, and on down the other side.  The shaft also attached to what I 
found out later was a reduction gear from a 1930s car's windscreen 
wiper: this operated as a tell-tale to indicate the rudder's position. 
When a small needle was straight up and down, the rudder was amidships.

The skipper will know which spoke of his wheel should be at the top for 
straight ahead, but a single revolution either way would be enough to 
carry the boat off-course.  In reality, the skipper watches a distant 
object, and corrects instantly for any divergence, but at low speeds and 
in tight positions, the tell-tale offers some extra insurance.

The bank at the wharf is remarkably high, and since the last flood, rain 
has been at play.  In the mud, series of parallel ridges have been 
scored, where rain has dripped between the deck slabs and splashed soil 
away.  Not all the slabs go the same way, so until you realise the 
cause, there is a curious variation in direction that makes no sense.

Redgum, the timber of preference on the river, is tough, but even when 
boats are made of redgum, the snags in the river are made of the same 
stuff, and rocks are almost as solid, so steel plating was often used, 
but only above the waterline, which puzzles me a little.  Maybe they 
needed access to those timbers to caulk them?  More research is needed, 
but so far, it has offered no answers.

The side of the hull is protected by a rubbing strake, a strip of 
timber, easily replaced, and intended to take most of the wear and tear 
of being around boats, logs and other inanimate things.

The crew consisted of a skipper, mate, engineer, cook, and deckhands. 
If barges were involved, each of those needed at least one person to 
handle them.

The hulls were massive, and our craft, 'Pevensey', is 111 feet and 120 
tons (these old craft operate in old units, it seems), with holds fore 
and aft, dropping down 6 to 8 feet, but some cargo would sometimes be on 
deck if it was about to be dropped off.  Even fully laden, few of the 
vessels drew more than four feet, but what cargoes they carried!  At 
least once, an elephant was transported on a steamer, but more common 
cargoes included riveted iron boxes, filled with breakables or 
valuables, and sealed to make pilfering obvious.  China, fabric, pottery 
and tea would be carried in these boxes, which also served to protect 
the cargo from water damage.

Wool is incredibly bulky stuff to move, so hydraulic presses were used 
to cram as much as possible into bales that were then sewn shut, using 
needles the size of marlin spikes.  In the days before bulk handling, 
wheat was poured into bags that were sewn shut with similar needles. 
You can still buy them, though I have used one more in cleaning up 
fossil fish at Canowindra: they make excellent probes for cleaning away 
any matrix from the slabs of Devonian fish that are seen there.

The wool bales and what bags were heavy and bulky, but wool bales could 
withstand rain, so they could be arranged on a barge, five or six tiers 
high, always leaning in, and allowing access to the hull in case of 
need.  The wool barges were a hazard on windy stretches, because even 
with some compression, they were still 20 feet or more high, giant 
sails, catching the wind that whistled across the plain.  The wind would 
keep one direction, but as the river meandered, a headwind could become 
a sidewind, could become a tailwind.

Today, we fail to appreciate how steam power revolutionised the world. 
Australia was rich – at one time, gold and farming gave Australia the 
world's highest per capita income, and that made getting workers a 
challenge, so people sent to England for labour-saving steam engines 
that could pull out stumps, plough fields, winch cargoes, turn 
paddle-wheels, power sawmills and shearing sheds, drive mills, smooth 
roads and pump water.

Right now, my interest is mainly with the paddle wheels.  Most of the 
vessels were side-wheelers, because this allowed the engine to be placed 
amidships with a shaft that connected to both paddle wheels.  There were 
no clutches that could be used to disengage one wheel to assist in 
steering, no gear boxes to reverse the thrust on one wheel, though a 
special fitting, the "Stephenson link" was always fitted to engines when 
they were placed in boats, to allow the direction to be reversed.  On 
shore, these engines usually used a belt drive that could be used to 
reverse the direction just by twisting the belt, but not on the water.

The barges were another reason for not using stern-wheelers, as a barge 
with a tailwind would probably not damage the massive rudder and 
sternpost, but a paddle wheel was always light and vulnerable.  With the 
stern wheel offering a flat target, any surging barge would almost 
certainly inflict damage on the paddles.

The skipper uses bells in the wheelhouse, first a bell for attention, 
then two for astern, or one for forward.  Turning the boat around, 
heading downstream is easy.  The bow is poked gently into the mud at an 
angle, then we wait while the current carries the stern around, then we 
go gently astern, out into the current in midstream, then ahead once 
again, straightening up as we go.

The paddles beat on the water about seven times a second, and the engine 
seems to be on about a 2-second cycle.  Now I will need to analyse my 
photos and see if there were, as I surmise, around 14 paddles on the 
wheel.  By now, we were back at the wharf, and I wandered up High Street 
to the bakery, and ate a meat pie with a cup of coffee, looking out over 
the Campaspe River.  It was time to hit the library, and devour their 
local history collection, but you have already had the benefit of that.

Then it was off to Oscar W's (http://www.oscarws.com.au/) for dinner 
before settling my bill and taking an early night, ready for a drive of 
800 km, 500 miles, back home.  Somehow, I had committed to being home to 
drive 170 km on the Saturday to see a concert in the vineyards north of 
Sydney.  A pity, as I would have preferred to stay and drink more of 
Fred Pizzini's Sangiovese, but the forecast was for 37 degrees, body 
temperature of live bodies, and I wanted to remain as one of those.

But I made some notes for the return trip to Echuca and Oscar W's . . .

peter

-- 

   _--|\    Peter Macinnis, Manly, the birthplace of Australian surfing
  /     \   feral word herder, also herbal remedies, bespoke fish
  \.--._*<--hooks, umbrellas mended and budgerigar requisites
       v    http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/index.htm