QI Tour - Back O Bourke Centre & The Jandra (Day 22)

Our first day in Bourke was a slow tour of the Back 'O Bourke Museum/Information Centre, which we had seen previously. A series of buildings starts with a animated, twenty minute film outlining the Aboriginal history of the area, including its dreaming creatures and how the arrival of white settlers affected their lives. Nice positive spin imagining the future, working in unison etc. The museum proceeds to highlight people who came from or to Bourke, especially Henry Lawson and his support for the striking shearers. Other notables included Edward Dickens, the favoured son of Charles; Fred Hollows (who is buried here); Nancy Bird, Breaker Morant, Will Ogilvie, Charles Bean, Sidney Kidman and a cast of thousands. There is notable focus on indigenous people who where prominent in the area following white settlement. Jimmy Barker, a self-educated son of a German pastoralist who left when he was 5 and Margaret Ellis, a Murawari women. He fought all his life against racism and was influential, along with Bill Ferguson and Pearl Gibbs in forming the Aboriginal Progressive Association. Ferguson was the first to highlight Australia Day as a day of mourning. Then there was Percy Hobson, a keen your high jumper who set all sorts of records and won Gold at the Perth Commonwealth Games ... this after being told not to let people know he was Aboriginal because it would hold him back and for a long time leaving Bourke on the Friday train, competing in Sydney over the weekend and returning Sunday night! Good museum but take advantage of the two day pass as there is a lot to see and read and listen to and watch!

The importance of the Darling as a channel for trade and prosperity was detailed in the story of the paddle steamers. By 1882, up to forty flat-bottomed, steam driven boats were operating out of Bourke, taking wool to Echuca and bring supplies back to Bourke. Dependent upon the height of the river, drought could sometimes stop the flow of boats and whilst floods provided the chance to cut miles off the trip, boats were often caught on receding waters and left stranded there until the next flood.

The story of the magnificent North Bourke Bridge - the first bridge in NSW to have a centrally raised platform to allow the passage of boats, which the keeper would crank up by hand winch - is also fascinating. Bought up in sections along the Darling, its steel frames were constructed in England. It opened in 1883, as the West Bourke Bridge, because its construction started on the west of the river but reverted to its current name because of it location north of the main town. It had a curve added to the northern end in 1901, because the bullock and camel trains couldn't make a sharp turn onto the bridge without jackknifing. 

As well as the stunning opening animated video, there are a number of others - a version of Henry Lawson's story "A Rough Shed" and another highlighting what Charles Bean wrote about the importance of the river trade to Bourke. Bean was famous as Australia's official war correspondent in WWII. All of the animated videos are produced by a Sydney production company, Ample. 

After lunch, we took a one hour cruise on the Darling, Australia's longest river and one that travels three times the distance that a straight line between start and finish would, because of its overtly bendy nature. We cruised on the PV Jandra, an electric/diesel recreation of the original which was steam powered and transported wool along the Darling in the late 1800's. 

Nice cruise with a difficult start when another couple spoke disparagingly of the Back 'O Bourke Centre owing to their disgust at the stolen generation being highlighted in the opening video. This, they said "made the entire experience a waste of time". The stolen generation never happened apparently and he should know because his dad was a policemen. What the? Aboriginal children were abandoned by their mothers and history re-written. Hmmm. We politely but firmly and very clearly disagreed but chose to avoid further discussion, because he quite clearly was up for an argument. After we were all social acceptable to each other, we found somewhere else to sit for a pleasant outing along the river. 

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today's photos

Not a great variety of birds but there were lots of cormorants and swallows and a darter, all working the river. The cormorants would constantly dive and resurface in front of the boat, leading us to think they were using the boat to help nab disturbed fish.