This week, we were blessed to receive a sermon from a true raconteur, who also happens to be an academic, an author, a pastor, a beef and sheep farm worker, all the while being an emigrant from Edinburgh, Scotland, so we were doubly blessed by his traces of brogue.
Jim opened by explaining that whilst the fate of the Murray Darling has been hotly debated in recent years, so has it been almost since Captain Cook planted a flag and staff in the ground on Possession Island in 1770, claiming the East Coast of Australia for Britain.
We learned all the rivers east of the Blue Mountains flowed into the Pacific, (Roger probably knew) but on the other side, the mountain streams grew huge (in good seasons) and then muddled into a big swamp - the Murray Darling Basin as discovered after several failed attempts by Oxley, Blaxland and Wentworth. They cleverly names rivers after governors- Lachlan and Macquarie (they weren’t stupid). In 1817, John Oxley saw noble rivers, but the area was parched by the time Sturt and Darling followed in his path.
In the early days, Sydney’s poor soil could hardly sustain its 1100 British settlers, but convicts had to see the taboo of escape attempts, so there were frightening stories about the risk of absconding over the Blue Mountains - ferocious aborigines, lack of fresh water and no food- most of them true.
Once settlers came with beef and sheep, it was much easier to trek the fleeces and animals to Melbourne and Adelaide to send “home” rather than struggle back across the mountains to Sydney. Even then they were often away from home for four months, returning with supplies from the south, waiting up to eighteen months for payment once the goods had been sold in England. Aborigines defended their flora and fauna resources being destroyed by new landholders with awful consequences. Queensland prices skyrocketed, as tropical rains powered the Darling and the Snowy mountain snow melted to fill the Murrumbidgee. Sydney was not happy they were missing out on the profits diverted to other states, South Australia mastered the paddle steamers towing barges more efficiently down the river more effectively than carts, and were then superseded by the railway, which Victoria developed much faster than NSW. Water has always been jealously guarded, some farmers destroying dams upstream to reclaim their supply, and so it is fought over today, where people without land can buy water rights.
Jim spoke without even a note or a slide, but created such word visions, I was there with George Evans when he first viewed the lush western plains, or bumped along on a bullock dray over the shallow part of the Murrumbidgee River that soon housed the town of Gundagai, or lost my stock on the hard cracked dry beds that should have been the Lachlan River.
Thank you so much for an illuminating story, Jim, and I look forward to reading your books that we purchased.
.jpg){kind=logo}
