Qualla: PS Rodney

PS Rodney: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. On a winter night in 1894, the Darling River carried a burning ship downstream. The paddle steamer Rodney, one of the finest riverboats on the inland trade, had been set alight from end to end, and as it drifted away ablaze it lit the dark water and the red-gum banks like a funeral pyre. The men who torched it were shearers, and the men they had put safely ashore first were the non-union labourers the Rodney had been carrying upriver to break their strike. Today the hull lies low in the riverbed near Polia Station, about 40 kilometres north of the little river town of Pooncarie, the only vessel in Australian history ever destroyed in the course of an industrial dispute. To read its blackened timbers is to read one of the angriest chapters in the nation's story.

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Image: Tentotwo | CC BY-SA 3.0

PS Rodney: The Lifeline of the Wool Trade

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Виктор В, CC BY-SA 3.0. To understand why a riverboat became a battleground, you have to understand what the river meant. In the late nineteenth century the Darling was a working highway, and broad, shallow-draft paddle steamers like the Rodney were its trucks, hauling wool out from the sheep stations a...

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Image: Виктор В | CC BY-SA 3.0

PS Rodney: A Strike That Shaped a Nation

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. The 1894 shearers' strike was the second great clash between Australian shearers and the wealthy pastoralists, or graziers, who owned the sheep. The 1890s were years of falling wool prices, new machinery threatening jobs, and a country sliding toward economic depression, all of i...

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Image: Tentotwo | CC BY-SA 3.0

PS Rodney: The Burning

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. Late in August 1894 the Rodney, under Captain Dickson, was steaming up the Darling with around forty-five non-union labourers bound for the woolsheds at Tolarno Station. On the night of 28 August the steamer pulled in at a riverside woodpile two miles above Moorara Station, and u...

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Image: Tentotwo | CC BY-SA 3.0

PS Rodney: What the River Kept

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mattinbgn (talk · contribs), CC BY-SA 4.0. Both sides of that bitter conflict now claim the wreck. The Rodney was broken up where it lay and its boiler salvaged, said to have ended its days powering machinery at a freezing works in Echuca; what became of the engine no one knows. But the river preserved what fire and salva...

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Image: Mattinbgn (talk · contribs) | CC BY-SA 4.0