Social History in Southern NSW

This section of the website contains a few of the stories written while I was a journalist on an Eastern Riverina Observer, based in Henty but also covering the towns of Lockhart, Culcairn, Walla Walla, Urana, Boree Creek, Yerong Creek, and other hamlets in between. Mostly, I've picked pieces that record interesting women's lives.

Amy remembers grand old ladies

Amy Kleeman of Henty still remembers with perfect clarity the years when she would introduce herself as "little Amy Collins of the Alpha" and thinks growing up on Australian paddle-steamers during the early 1900s were the best years of her life.

For much of her childhood her father, Captain William Grimwade Collins, and mother Emmy Louise, operated the "Alpha" as a trading boat, visiting stations and small settlements along the banks of the Murray and Darling Rivers.

"The store sold everything you could think of. Flannels were all the go then. Most men used to wear long johns summer and winter. I know dad did."

Mrs Kleeman remembers her father was a scrupulously honest trader. "He would bever sell a bag of potatoes without checking it through first. He would throw any rotten ones overboard.

The Alpha as a family-run boat. "We used to get an engineer occasionally, but they would get drunk when we pulled into ports, and we would never see them again."

This meant Mrs Collins ended up with the job. "She was running all of the time quickly to the brakes, up and down to the stokehole.

"The engine had to be surveyed each year for safety. The inspectors used to beg mum to get her engineer's ticket. They said no one could have done a better job than her.

"When we pulled into stations mum would get all cleaned up to work in the shop. She always wore a silk blouse and long black skirt."

Mrs Kleeman said the Alpha never had a fence around the top, so as young children they were tied up when her mother was working in the shop.

"My brother Norman used to love being tied up to the treadle sewing machine. He would get on the pedal and push it up and down like mad."

Mrs Kleeman said as the children got older they were given jobs. "Because I was the oldest I was given lots of them.

"I would use a light sapling pole to leap from the boat to the bank to tie the boat up. Sometimes it would stick and I would slike down the pole into the mud.

"If we got stuck on sand I would have to row the dinghy while dad paid out a wire to attach to the bank. By the time I finished my little hands would be bleeding from blisters."

Mrs Kleeman said possibly her worst job was calling soundings when the river was low. "I would sit on the bow for hours and hours, singing out the depth.

"We could all drive the engine and steer the boat. My sister Pearl was the only woman to genuinely get a skipper's ticket, and throughout the 1940s was the owner and master of her own boat, the Kookaburra."

Mrs Kleeman said from age nine or ten her brothers could steer the boat, standing on a box so they could see over the wheel. "Many a barge they brought out of the Darling, and they never hit a bank or sank a boat."

According to Mrs Kleeman in the many years on the river her father never sank a boat, and of her family her brother Morris was the only to have a boat sink under him.

"My brother Bill, who was a fine shopwright, was replacing some rotten planks in the Alpha, but could not get the job finished before the river rose. The boat had to be carefully steered to avoid bumping those planks.

"Morris was only 20 or so when he and some covers took the boat out. He pulled in to get wood and the next thing water was pouring in, as a submerged root pierced a rotten plank. Morris steered her, sinking, across the river, and managed to get her on a sandbar."

Mrs Kleeman still has a memorial of this event, her mother's prized piano, which was on board the Alpha. "The boys went down as she got on the sandbar and lifted that lovely old piano on to a table. The water was lapping the top of the table, but it didn't touch the piano."

Mrs Kleeman said after the boat was repaired, sge, Morris and his new wife took the Alpha to Euston Weir, a major undertaking.

"I did all of the steering, while Morris did the firing. His new wife knew nothing at all about boats.

"I thought I would take a shortcut, as father often did, but I didn't know the route and we ended up trapped in the middle of a billabong, with trees all around us. A big storm came up and I was never more frightened in all my time on the river than on that night.

"We couldn't turn around, so the next morning Morris had to steer the boat out, stern first, whil I acted as engineer."

Mrs Kleeman said the trip took so long the small party ran out of food. "We caught a couple of rabbits isolated on little islands because the river was high, and a friendly man gave us some flour. It was full of weevils, but we were too hungry to care.

"Morris was so scared of holing the boat again that he wouldn't go close to the bank. I had to swim in with the painter, checking there were no submerged snags. I swam like a fish, but I didn't like swimming in strange sections of the river."

Mrs Kleeman said the river offered active children plenty of opportunities for mischief. "One year Bill, Norman and I dug out a dinghy, which had been stuck on the mud of the bank for at least a year, swam across the river and tied it behind the Alpha.

"We all had to be involved so we wouldn't tell on one another. We thought dad wouldn't notice it, but he saw it all right, and we were in big trouble. He reckoned it was stealing."

Mrs Kleeman said the Alpha regularly carried casks from the Angove distillery at Renmark. "We children found a little boring tool which would make a tiny hole in the casks.

"I would drink wine and the boys would drink true-proof, a very powerful alcohol used in making spirits. We would drink the alcohol as it squirted from the casks, or collect it in muds. When we had enough we would put a match in the hole. I would soak up the fluid and swell, sealing the hole.

"Dad never found out about that. He would have killed us if he had known."

Even actions with good intentions sometimes went wrong. "On one occasion down at Renmark, when the boys were ten or so, a snake got down the hold.

"Bill got a gun and shot it, but put a hole in the boat in the process. Water started squirting in and the boys were so scared they sat over the hole to stop the water. They were debating what to do when dad came on the scene."

The Alpha was not a spacious boat, even though the Cllins family extended it during their ownership. "There were only two cabins. The funnel ran through our parents' and the whistle pipe ran through ours. "Poor Morris, one morning when he was not very awake he leant back against it and got a nasty burn on his buttocks.

"But they came in handy during the influenze epidemic. Mum painted them with tar to help ward off infection. She would also peel great big onions and put half under each bed to soak up the infection. None of us were seriously ill, although hundreds of people were dying."

Mrs Kleeman said her family had survived on the river remarkably well. "We loved to climb, we'd climb every tree we could find. We should have broken our legs, or our necks."

Mrs Kleeman follows the fate of the remaining paddle-steamers with great interest. "My brother Morris sold the Alpha when he went to Echuca. He had no right to do it. I have been mad all of my life over that. The man who bought it said to get it back I'd have to marry him, but I wouldn't do that.

"Now she is lying just above the Mildura bridge, on the NSW side. You can only see her when the river is low. She's just a hull, with the boiler still in her. "I ache over that."

One of Mrs Kleeman's most treasured possessions is a small padlock off a safety valve off the Alpha. It is all she has left of her old family home."

(Note for non-Australian readers: "station" means a large farm.)

From the Southern Weekly Magazine (I haven't saved the date but it would have been 1988 or 1989.)