PS 'Alawein', Murray River, Australia

[Roderick Smith]

I am collating information following up a thread started in the site for Historic Commercial Vehicle Club [Australia].
Parson's, in 'Ships of the inland rivers' is very brief.  That is because he was quoting a photo and caption from State Library of SA.
Here are the originals.
Could those with river knowledge please come up with your best identification of the locations and the years?

www.hcvc.com.au/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1309585346
There's the only two photos I know of here.
trove.nla.gov.au/work/10799065?q=Alawein&x=38&y=11&c=picture.
Also a PDF file of Tim Honeys journey down the river with a picture of the bones of the wreck near tooleybuck.
www.meocache.com/.
Now my historian friend tells me he thinks he knows of some old bloke who swears by a picture of the boat near or under the bridge at Mungindi.
It`s been a long time since my one and only trip out to Mungindi in a KW 125 with a lusty tipper behind and I don`t even know if there's a bridge there but imagine there would be as the road crosses the border and the Barwon River.
Alewein is spelled in a couple of ways as well, just to confuse.

My river chart shows the wreck of Alewein or Aliwena at 1328 km (ie 8 river km upstream of Tooleybuc).  I didn't see it, but such wrecks can be quite elusive today (very little remains, and that is often under mud).  I did that stretch on very high water, in Dec.10.
Parsons: 'Alawen/Alawein. The Godson papers mention an unregistered vessel of this name, said to be owned by C Felshaw'.
The accompanying photo in the book is Godson U6, which may well be trackable online via the SA library.  It purports to show the boat about to tow the punt at Mildura, with a bridge in the background which I don't think is Mildura.  I will raise this mystery with riverboat friends.
In the two supplied links: the first photo shows well.  My guess is the main Murray, anywhere from Robinvale to Renmark; below Renmark, the cliffs tend to have a different character.
I couldn't get anything out of the other link, except the name 'GoDaddy', which is one of the regular supports of spam which I receive.  If you have got the pdf, could you please email it to rodsmith @ werple.net.au.
The photo in Parsons and the photo in the link are consistent, but there were lots of small vessels of this style (many were used as fishing vessels).
Navigation as far up as Mungindi was quite rare, not even annual, only during major floods.  There was a weir with a lock at Bourke.  IIRC Brewarrina had a lifting-span bridge, indicating regular navigation, but there was no lifting-span bridge any further upstream.

Mungindi bridge dates from 1914: navigation hitherto was unimpeded.
I have every suspicion that the photo is older than 1914, and not as far upstream as Mungindi.
www.rta.nsw.gov.au/cgi-bin/index.cgi?action=heritage.show&id=4300159

http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/10799065?q=Alawein&x=38&y=11&c=picture
links to
http://images.slsa.sa.gov.au/godson/1/00250/PRG1258_1_44.htm
Those cliffs hint at the main Murray, and I guess anywhire from below Robinvale to around Renmark, then the character of the cliffs changes.

http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/11506066?q=Alawein&x=38&y=11&c=picture
links to
http://images.slsa.sa.gov.au/godson/1/00250/PRG1258_1_43.htm

I have now added a comment.  My belief is that the photo was taken at Echuca, and that the punt is the Barmah one being transferred before or after slipway work.

Roderick B Smith
Rail News Victoria Editor

[Excelsior]

I'm attaching a pic of a boat that I believe is the same one in the very first link.  I'm unsure of which boat it is, but I'd be relatively confident that it's not the Alawein.  She's a bit too short & doesn't have the same lines as the boat which has commonly been identified as the Alawein.  I'd be very interested to know what vessel it is.

I should say at this point, that I am unsure of the origin of this picture, so if there are any concerns please let me know if I should be removing it from the forum.

[Excelsior]

Also, the date on the picture (if acurate) rules out the possibility of it being the Alawein.  I'm a little slow this evening, sorry.

[Roderick Smith]

Thanks for the extra insights.  I am unlikely to make much more progress for 2 weeks.
Parson relied on the library, and the library captioning is often wrong.
I encounter this in the railway hobby.  There are two responses:
* We are an archive, and our mandate is to hold material in the form in which it was provided, errors and all.
* We are a library, and are happy to correct errors, but we lack the resources.
The modern approach is based on Wikipedia: anybody can make editable corrections, but not to the original citation, only to the footnotes.  I have done that with a whole railway set, but it was very time consuming for me.

When the pdf files arrived, they were totally of a kakak voyage from Albury to Wellington mouth: beautiful photographs, and probably the best set which I have seen for covering the varying moods of the river and its surroundings and history.  However, the Mungindi photo is not in it.  At the moment we have only an assertion by an old man (friend of a friend) that he remembers seeing such a photo.  That is the worst evidence in any field of research.

There are so many boats of this size and style, and so much variation on the name, and the boat was unregistered: it could be a complete work of fiction; it could be a confusion of perhaps three vessels.
How far would a small vessel roam if it changed owner?  We can compare the lives of Ranger, Daisy, Struggler, Roy, Viola: they could provide insight into the style of life Aliwein may have had, but with no hint re location.
The only established location is Echuca.  An issue by issue search of Riverine Herald may yield something (plus a year of side tracks), but it is not online, and historian Frank Tucker may have done that already.  He is with the Canally transfer, and not available for 2 weeks.

Roderick B Smith
Rail News Victoria Editor