Big Wheels Keep On Turning
Sun Herald
Sunday April 19, 1998
They may seem a blast from the past, but paddle-steamers are still a major attraction on the Murray River. Denis Gregory reports.
AS a small boy, Peter Burns felt sorry for an old paddle-steamer, marooned high and dry in a park at Echuca.
It was the logging boat Adelaide, and he remembers roses growing around it.
He wished that one day he could return and put the boat back in the water.
"It was a typical little kid's thing," Burns said. "Later, you never think any more about it.
"But 15 years later I went back. The Adelaide had been restored and I worked as its engineer and later became captain, so I got my wish."
Captain Burns is now skipper of the paddle-steamer Cumberoona, at Albury, and cruises the Murray - Australia's greatest river.
The wood-fired Cumberoona was built by Albury people as an Australian bicentenary project and is modelled on the original PS Cumberoona, which was based at Echuca and named after an upper Murray station.
Owned by Albury Council, the 25m Cumberoona makes regular weekend trips down the river.
Captain Burns began his working life as a motor mechanic but wanted a change.
While visiting his parents at Moama, just across the river from Echuca, he was invited to fire the boilers on the Pevensey, the paddle-steamer known as Philadelphia in the TV series All The Rivers Run.
Later on the same day he was sitting on the back deck having a beer when the paddle-steamer Emmylou pulled into the wharf after being away for two days.
"One of the blokes said Emmylou was looking for an engineer. I thought, that'll do me. That's the job I'm going to do," Captain Burns said.
"I applied for the job but the manager said he really wanted someone to start straight away, and I didn't have the qualifications, so I worked for six months as deckhand.
"In the meantime I sat for my engineer's exam, passed that and got the engineer's job.
"After doing my time, I became a captain and worked on the Emmylou, the Pride Of The Murray, the Pevensey, the Adelaide, and other Murray River boats."
WHEN the Cumberoona changed hands, Albury Council advertised for a new skipper and Captain Burns got the job.
"You could never tire of the splashing of the paddlewheels and the beautiful Murray River scenery," he said.
The Murray, beginning in the Australian highlands and joined by the Loddon, Goulburn, Murrumbidgee and Darling rivers, is the fourth longest river system in the world, behind the Nile, the Mississippi-Missouri and the Amazon.
Defining 1,000km of the border between NSW and Victoria, the Murray isn't quite on the scale of the Mississippi but it has one thing in common: paddle-steamers.
From 1850 until the turn of the century, the Murray was a water highway with more than 200 paddle-steamers bringing in supplies and taking out produce, wool and wheat from the farms, as well as timber.
Paddle-steamer numbers began to fall with the introduction of the railway, which knocked the river trade around, and then on-board fires and sinkings claimed all except a handful.
But the remaining paddle-steamers, such as the Cumberoona, Pevensey, Rothbury, Emmylou, Coonawarra, Alexander Arbuthnot, Adelaide and Melbourne, can still fire up excitement as they swish past the majestic red gums that hang over most of the Murray.
The steamers have been faithfully restored and many still have genuine, wood-fired engines.
They take passenger cruises on the river and several have sleeping accommodation.
The Emmylou, based at Echuca-Moama, has one and two-night cruises that go upriver as far as the natural wetlands of Barmah Forest and down to the pioneer homestead of Pericoota.
Smaller boats can go farther.
ECHUCA was once Australia's major inland port and is still one of the oldest river towns, known at one time as New Chicago.
Its red gum wharf, once 1.2km long, is still a busy place. Paddle-steamers can dock at three levels for variations in the river height.
Many of the century-old buildings near the wharf, such as the bond store and customs house, have been turned into shops and restaurants.
The Murray played a vital role in the early development of Albury-Wodonga, or the Crossing Place and Belvoir, as the settlements were originally known.
The first industry was established on the banks of the Murray by Robert Brown in 1838 when he built a punt and a guesthouse for travellers.
He set the present trend of the region having more visitors' accommodation than any other inland centre in Australia.
Captain Charles Sturt, who named the Murray, described it as a "great and noble river".
He was pretty right.
Half the Murray's flow is used for irrigation. It also supplies domestic water to more than one million households.
The lower regions are embraced by natural lakes and scores of wetlands that are home for birds and fish.
But the paddle-steamers are still king.
© 1998 Sun Herald