Mannum. Boats, birds and civil engineers

Mannum, South Australia

Birds, Boats and Civil Engineering

 Chooky, left, is our guardian of the garden. He stands (on just the one leg, you will note) ready to defend our home patch, pointing into the wind.  He is the creation of one Janet, our long-time friend and rural inventor of Riverton.  Before we headed off to have a small get-away, we looked at our own patch and decided it was time to see some water.  

PS Marion

Mannum is one of South Australia's oldest towns over the ranges. The mighty River Murray was always seen as our state's life-line, our only real water reserve supply should drought ever strike. I jest, of course. The earliest settlers had no idea that the rain might not arrive. They had no previous data, no records to compare. How the hell would they know what a drought, SA-style would be? They settled as far north as Blinman, in the northern Flinders, before Goyder had the numerical rainfal data to keep the gamblers off the land. Meanwhile, as Mr Randell showed, paddle steamers of quite a size could shuffle up and down our water-ways while there was sufficient water in them.  The very first steamer was made here: the Mary Ann. Before the locks and weirs ruined the river by turning it into a Resource,  converting it into a series of irrigation-supply ponds (they even call them Pools) the levels varied spectacularly and people were delighted and distraught on a regular basis.  Mannum still has evidence of that golden era, when fortunes waxed and waned with the floods and a steamer with an adventurous skipper might be found twenty miles from the main channel when the water went down. More in evidence is the long history of boat building, dry-docks and slipways; boat sheds and engineering works capable of building any vessel your purse might conjure up. The results of a hundred years of backyard invention are tied up along the river for miles.

Three Little Ducklings

 Today, from Mannum,  the visitor can travel the mighty river in the comfort, the glory of the past  in a modern-ish setting. The River Princess, left, travels the broadest stretches of the river north of Mannum, dinners to music, promenades on the deck, the colourful cliffs and spreading stretches of the billabongs and backwaters crowded with birds of every class. The passengers pop off for a day, hop back in their cars and bop off back to  the city.

The PS Marion (right) is a totally genuine sample of the marque, a steam powered beauty constructed and repaired and reworked and restored example of human endeavour. She is beloved by her admirers, most of whom work on her for love, and she today got up steam on red-gum leftovers and, with a melodious steam-whistle fanfare, took about fifty of the faithful briefly out on the water.  The rest of us had far more prosaic issues to deal with.

Elly May beneath a baby Reg-Gum

 Apparently, Mannum Caravan park is like the rest of the country in that it needs Reform. And what is needed elsewhere is being used here: FORCE. Yellow Daleks of various guise have been roaming the Caravan Park, roaring and belching diesel fumes, screaming their reversing sirens and scattering the peace to blazes. The Road Must Go Through!!  All 98 metres of it...three and a half days to scratch, smooth, break up concrete, digetty digetty dig.. and all the day, the roar and klaxon  rule.

So we took off for Walker's Flat via Purnong Ferry, along the banks of the National Drain. No speedboats or jet-skis today - that's the weekend you were thinking of - and we found a grey, drizzly day, the kites and swamp-harriers wheeling in the considerable breeze.  We crossed thr river at Purnong Landing ferry where the operator admitted having an extensive and varied library, from which he had to be roused by intercom.

The willows along the lower reaches were planted, sort of, to mark the main channel of the river, given that the level varied so much. But they grew into a wall of impenetrable exotic growth, blocking access and upsetting the environmental balance. Today the backhoe and barge ripped out a thirty metre stretch of tangled junk iin front of the van park. But why would they leave two scraggy looking samples there?

 This photo was taken north of Walkers Flat ferry.

The cliffs are imposing features of the river bank,  as home to dozens of species of birds, including the swallows and Fairy Martins that are such good examples for we humans to follow. They, too, love to ride on a houseboat for a change, getting a good feed of spiders and other domestic insects along the way and even spending a few days away from home.



We're heading home today, back to Ochre Ridge, after a beaut but brief stay here at Mannun.  Like the swallows, we came to swoop across the water, and after a good feed, back to our own colourful home at Ochre Ridge.