Day Five - Swan Hill

Started the day with a walk along the Marraboor River and soon discovered that it was rather fresh to be wandering around outside. We had planned to go on a paddle steamer, and one departs from the Swan Hill Pioneer Settlement at 2:30pm daily so we decided we might as well make a day of it, get the two for one ticket, and spend the day checking out the settlement so we could be indoors.

The Pioneer Settlement is basically a mini Sovereign Hill, based around life on the river in the 1800's. Most of the buildings are authentic from the era and were relocated from various places around the district to the settlement for preservation.
We checked out the barber shop, bank and the music shop where a lady played the pianola for us.
We perused the library, where we partook in the wonders of the Stereoscopic Theatre, visited the post office and had a walk around on the PS Gem, a paddle steamer that was built in 1876 and is the largest one ever used on the Murray.

We stopped at the café for scones with lashings of cream and jam, before continuing our explorations of the homesteads and old farm machinery. It rained for most of the day, but we still managed to see every building and go on a horse and cart ride. At 2:30pm we boarded the PS Pyap, a paddle steamer built in 1896, for an hour long cruise upstream on the river. A fact I was unaware of is that the Murray River is actually part of New South Wales, the boarder technically runs along the southern bank of the river so if you stand with one foot in the water and one on the southern bank you are in two different states at the same time. The cruise took us past the old River Red Gums to Murray Downs homestead, which is a grand homestead built in 1866.

At the moment the river is flowing at about one kilometre per hour and heading back downstream we travelled at a blinding nine kilometres per hour.

Back on dry land (well sort of, the rain still persisted) we headed out of the Pioneer Settlement to check out the Regional Art Gallery. They currently have an exhibition on about print and drawing. We wandered around admiring all the works and voted in the people’s choice for our favourite pieces.

As the day was still cold and wet we finished up by checking out a few shops along the main street.

Heading south again tomorrow.

Big Sis

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