Paddle Steamers on the Darling

The Darling River is a big river. Hundreds of kilometres longer than the Colorado in the United States and longer than the Zambezi (by a whole 3 kilometres) it is in anybodies language a big river.


It traipses through some of the most remote country in the world, where populations are measured in the tens of people, not thousands of people.

This is a river which has captured the imagination of explorers and poets, adventurers and farmers alike. Its also a river that for much of the last 100 years has rarely existed.

For the first time in years, 2008 sees the Darling River in flood. Not, admittedly a flood of biblical proportions, yet a flood nonetheless. Where only six months ago a baron water course lay - the despair of hardened men and women - today there flows a river: and its not just water that is running. Its opportunity. For the first time in years water can be drawn from the river and carefully dolled out to the orchids and cotton crops which intermittently line its banks.

Well over a hundred years ago the Darling River was also used as a thoroughfare. Paddle steamers wended their way up from the Murray and Darling River confluence to Bourke, captained by enterprising men who saw a ready dollar for any person able to transport the agricultural bounty found in the inland ports of Bourke, Louth and Tilpa.

Today however, the very thought of taking a boat of any size is anathema. Even in their hey day, taking a paddle steamer was a journey fraught with risk. Several steamers sank and others became stranded - sometimes for years. The quikest trip recorded from Bourke to the mouth of the Murray - Goolwa, is three weeks. The same boat which took three weeks to get to Goolwa took three years from Goolwa to Bourke, which gives an idea of the enormous variations on the river.

Henry Lawson spent some time on the Darling River and likened it to either a muddy gutter or a second Mississippi. He wrote about its winding ways and of how a swagman could walk the same pace (or quicker) than a boat and could at the close of each day ask for a feed from the same boat, week in, week out.