Shipwrecks are synonymous with tumultuous tempests, fierce battles, mutinies and piracy, but the sinking of the Paddle-Steamer (PS) Rodney would go down in history as the first to be sunk in a fiery conflict by striking shearers.
It was the early hours of August 27, 1894. Under the cover of darkness, the PS Rodney was boarded by a group of 150 masked striking shearers hell-bent on the vessel’s demise.
Saturday marked the 128th anniversary of the PS Rodney’s sinking in a quiet lagoon on the Darling River near Pooncarie in NSW.
It marks a significant moment in our country’s history, bringing an end to one of Australia’s most violent and destructive union conflicts.
The shearers’ strike began in the early 1890s on the eve of a crippling depression and amid a scorching drought, when the country’s wool growers attempted to introduce anti-union contracts to reduce shearers’ pay rates and lessen the impact of plummeting wool prices.
Unionised shearers and wool workers already enduring poor working conditions retaliated at this breach of trust, triggering the start of the massive 1891 shearers’ strike.
The events over the three years that followed resulted in camps of striking shearers burning woolsheds that employed strikebreakers or scab workers.
The bloody clashes that started in Queensland and spread to NSW and Victoria are remembered as the earliest and most violent industrial disputes in Australia’s history.
Dot Hammond, retired president of the Echuca Historical Society, grew up on a sheep station and remembers some tough times, including droughts, and understands the difficulties the wool growers would have faced at the time.
Her research uncovering how the shearers’ strike affected the Murray, Darling and Murrumbidgee River trade shows that many graziers were also struggling due to the low wool prices and were forced to employ non-union shearers.
“Tolarno Station was one of several sheep stations that chose to hire strikebreakers, or non-union shearers, in an attempt to get their sheep shorn,” Ms Hammond says.
Due to the looming depression and high unemployment, pastoralists had no difficulty finding men desperate for work and willing to take up work as scab labourers.
“Strikebreakers were transported to Echuca by rail under police protection, before boarding several paddle-steamers, with 45 boarding the PS Rodney destined for Tolarno Station,” Ms Hammond says.
“Unionist shearers were in hot pursuit with the aim of stopping the scab workers from getting to Tolarno.
“The PS Rodney departed Echuca Wharf with only minutes to spare, before over 100 unionist shearers raided the wharf and resorted to throwing stones at the paddle-steamer.”
The unionist shearers didn’t give up the fight and went in pursuit, gaining support along the hunt for the vessel, their large camps becoming a force to be reckoned with along the Murray, Darling and Murrumbidgee rivers.
Shearers take control of Murray-Darling trade
By 1894, the unionist strike camps were far more organised with more than 300 armed shearers taking control of the movement of riverboats and trade along the Murray and Darling Rivers.
Rod Taylor is a 30-year shearing veteran who is passionate about the shearing history of the stations along the Murray and Darling River regions.
He understands the fury that sparked the burning of the PS Rodney and the shearers’ plight, having experienced harsh working conditions himself over his three decades as a shearer.
“Sheep stations were very much owned by the privileged — the ‘Squattocracy’ I called it. They considered the workers second-class citizens, and it was virtually a class war that became very bitter,” Mr Taylor says.
By the winter of 1894, the striking shearers were gaining support and numbers along the Murray and Darling Rivers preventing the transport of essential goods and scab-shorn wool, sometimes by the use of extreme measures that seriously threatened the $5 million river trade.
The PS Rodney’s final hours
After failing to stop the strikebreakers at Echuca, the shearers pursuing the vessel attempted to block its path on the Darling River with barges and fencing wire strung across the river. This unsuccessful attempt made them more ferocious in their violent endeavour to stop the vessel.
The PS Rodney’s Captain, Jimmy Dickson, moored the boat in a remote lagoon 37 kilometres from Pooncarie, where he thought they would be protected by the surrounding swamp.
“Under the cover of darkness, with all on board asleep, the PS Rodney was boarded by around 150 masked shearers. They threw the scabs overboard, set the barges of goods adrift, and set the vessel alight as the horrified Captain Jimmy Dickson looked helplessly on,” Mr Taylor says.
The resulting fire burnt the 32-metre-long timber paddle-steamer to the water line. Its skeletal remains are still visible more than 100 years later, during low river flows and drought as a reminder of that tumultuous moment in Australia’s history.
What’s left of the Rodney is now heritage-protected and, despite a reward offered at the time, no-one was ever convicted over the fire.