No 7 Blanchetown

Blanchetown is a place which has never grown up. As the ages of towns go in this country, it is hoary with antiquity— the oldest and the smallest settlement on the Murray. In its young days it had visions of greatness. All roads converged on Blanchetown. It was a shipping and a trading centre. Morgan did not exist. Renmark was still to be born. Now Morgan itself is in its old age, and Renmark is a large, modern, and progressive town. But Blanchetown is where it was sixty or seventy years ago. Save for an odd house or so, it is the same today as when the coaches of Cobb & Co. rattled up to the quaint, old-fashioned hostelery in the sixties, the seventies, and the eighties, and an "immense" crowd of fifty or sixty persons watched the changing of the horses, and the distribution of the mail.

Fate played Blanchetown a nasty trick. In the late seventies, when they were talking about the railway to Melbourne, Blanchetown was to have been the site of Murray Bridge. But towns as well as people are subject to the whims of fickle Fortune. Had the idea been carried out, Blanchetown would today have been one of our largest towns. Now it is one of our smallest.

The first thing which strikes the visitor to Blanchetown is not its old world atmosphere or the sparseness of its houses. It is its hills. Blanchetown is built on a hill, or rather a succession of hills. Everything is on a hill, except the little institute. That nestles at the foot of a hill. The post-office is on one hill, the store on another, a service station on a third, the police station on a fourth. Most of the houses have their own little hill. The hotel is on the highest hill of all. It is like those pictures one sees of mid-European countries, where the houses seem perpetually to be climbing higher and higher.

All this high ground overlooks the Murray. I am writing this in the sun on the hotel verandah, looking into the swirling waters of the great river, as it tumbles noisily over Lock No. 1, on which thousands of seagulls are settled. Less than 200 yards away from where I sit is a large, level plain, on which the town could have been built if the early settlers had not crowded down towards this massive stream. Everything here is quiet, and rural, and unspoilt. An atmosphere of dolce far niente enfolds the place. Best of all, I know that I am not looking at South Australia of 1932. I have stepped back eighty years. I am looking at the sort of town our grand fathers knew. Probably Blanchetown is the only living example left of the old towns of the pioneer days.

Yesterday I descended one hill and climbed another. I found myself in front of the old-fashioned police station. Mr. J. Best, the officer in charge, saw me and came out to investigate. A stranger in Blanchetown is always an object of interest, or, if there is anything suggestive of the derelict about him of suspicion. When Mr. Best discovered I was a prowling pressman he assisted me to prowl. He took me inside to show me the old-fashioned cell, now used as a lumber room— for your modern wrongdoer is a pampered person, and would turn up his nose at the old-time, iron barred, ill-furnished cubicle which served as a prison in the days of our grand-parents. Nowadays we must furnish our gaols on a scale approaching a first-class hotel, hold a court of enquiry when the bored inmate com plains that the plum pudding was a trifle underdone, put his picture in the papers, and make a hero of him by virtue of the cinema. If we didn't do that there would be a dearth of criminals. And that wouldn't do. Do not say I am exaggerating. You will find that plum pudding incident in a recent report on our prisons.

The old cell of which I am writing is situated in the police station itself. In those days they didn't build the cells away from the station, but kept them next to the office where they could see what the malefactors were up to. And in the office itself was an old-fashioned rifle rack. Today it is empty, but at the time of which I write it contained three very business like rifles capable of taking an effective part in an argument at an instant's notice.

Only quite recently, following the last Murray Flood, Mr. Best was called on to re-inter the bones of three men which had been washed from their old graves on the eastern side of the river. I cannot give you the story of those three skeletons, for nobody knows it. The only definite thing about them is that they were the remains of white men. In the office are some old records, some of them going back to the sixties. I glanced through them in the hope of discovering stories of such interesting people as bushrangers; for at the period Blanchetown was the only recognised crossing place for hundreds of miles.

I found none. It was scarcely to be expected that I would, for bushrangers never used recognised crossing places. If Blanchetown can produce no record of the doings of the bad old days —and of that I have my doubts — it can recall the recent hectic days when they were building No. 1 lock. That enormously costly work is not 200 yards away from the one hotel, and looking down on it from the verandah, it seems to be lying almost at one's feet. Where you have several hundred navvies working on a job like this, and, living in camps, things are bound to happen. And they did. I shouldn't have cared to be the policeman in charge in those days. Someone told me that the enterprising publican who secured the hotel when he heard that the lock was likely to be constructed, retired after seven years with a tidy little fortune of £10,000. I would not be surprised if that were true.

I have been cogitating a good deal over this Murray locking scheme, wondering what return the country is going to get for the millions it has poured into the river. I am no engineer, and probably my opinion is not worth having. But my own view is that the taxpayers are being bled white for something that will prove of no great value. In years to come it might justify itself, when there is a big population to carry it, but even of that I am not optimistic. I have talked to many river settlers about it. None of them seemed enthusiastic; most of them were cautious, and some few of them were hostile.

The scheme has two objects. One is to impound water for shipping. The other is to impound it for irrigation. But there is no shipping, or practically none. The Government killed the shipping industry by a deliberate means of competitive tariffs to help the railways. Having virtually wiped out the industry, they made provision for it by constructing, at the cost of many millions, this series of gigantic locks. To me this is like sending for the doctor after you have buried the corpse. That, however, is the way of governments.

There is, of course, the other side of the question— irrigation. To a certain degree the scheme has been successful from that point of view. But you want to grow a deuce of a lot of oranges to return the ten or twelve millions spent on this big river scheme, and you want to irrigate more country than you are doing at present. Irrigation has made Waikerie and Renmark, and possibly it may make other towns. I admit that the scheme is only in its infancy. It may justify itself in a hundred years or so. But we of today have to carry the burden — and a heavy one it is. Even the settlers on the irrigated blocks say the locking, from an irrigation point of view, is not an unqualified success. Salt water still comes up from the sea when the river is low. They say the weirs need raising to twenty feet. Perhaps they do. But who is going to pay? Posterity can wrestle with that problem.

Old-Fashioned Hotel

There you are. When I started this series of articles I determined to keep off politics. But if you go about the country with your eyes open you can't do it — and I am not the sort of writer who describes everything in the garden as lovely when I know it's not. My mission is to describe things as I see them — and that's what I'm going to do. For nearly two days I have been watching the water pouring over the weir — hundreds of tons of it every hour, like a miniature Niagara. And it is all going to waste. There is enough electrical energy there to supply all the near river towns. Yet there is no electric light in Blanchetown, the people crawl about the roads at night with lanterns, and you go to bed by the light of two inches of tallow candle. Of course it is all very apropos. Electric light and hot and cold water in the bedrooms would destroy the illusion one receives here of living in the dim ages of the past.

Ordinarily I do not write of the hotels I encounter in my wanderings. One is very much like another. But the sole hostelry of the town is so different quaint and old-fashioned like the town itself, and so in keeping with its surroundings — that I propose to make an exception. As soon as I set eyes on it as I came up the hill from the punt I knew just what I was going to encounter — tiny bedrooms, with low, sloping ceilings, walls three feet thick, rambling buildings, cooking that reminds one of home, a great big open fireplace in the kitchen large enough to roast a bullock, and, best of all, a motherly old lady who would treat me as a wandering son. I was specially sure, somehow, of that motherly welcome.

So it came to pass. I had not been there an hour before the place ceased to be an hotel. It was a home. They brought me old-fashioned soup of barley and brains, a sort my grandmother used to make from the heads of sheep, beef that had never known the yoke, and, of course, jam tart with heaps of cream. You walked to the dining-room down a stone-flagged passage, with the kitchen on one side and the bar on the other. Spotless cleanliness was everywhere. She was of the real old school, mine hostess — and I am quite certain that if I had misbehaved myself I'd have got the strap.

How much better this plain, no nonsense sort of dining than the ornate flummery of the big hotels, where they serve you food that has no flavor, and give it names they do not understand. I remember a few years ago attending a ceremonial dinner at Parliament House. The menu was in French. I can hear now the argument between two Ministers as to whether boeuf roti was a rare vegetable or a new kind of pudding, and I can see the "what-the-deuce-do- you-know-about-it" look they gave me when I suggested it was plain roast beef.

Blanchetown may be small and unprogressive— but it's a good spot.

Road To Truro

I was about to award the palm for the worst road in South Australia to the 40-mile stretch between Blanchetown and Truro. I hesitate merely because there are still a few thoroughfares I have to encounter. If, however, there are any other candidates for the dishonor I don't want to see them. I don't even want to hear about them. The road to Truro is bad enough for me. It was even bad enough for those motor-wrecking competitions they call reliability trials. They held one of these murderous affairs while I was at Blanchetown. All night long the air was torn by agonised shrieks of 250 cc's as their headlamps caught sight of the endless miles of destruction lying before them. Every one of those shrieks sent a shudder of anguish through me, because I knew that, on the morrow, I would take that very path, and perhaps encounter the huddled remains of what had once been sturdy, vigorous motor bikes lying by the roadside. I didn't see any. Probably they had been engulfed in the seas of mud, in which one could easily bury a fair sized house.

For days I had been hearing, "Wait till you come to the Truro road." Well, I had come to it — and I didn't like it. I would advise the speed cops to keep away from those parts. They would find business slack. I found ten miles an hour too pacey.

When I wasn't dodging limestone outcrops with destructive designs on my differential, I was pulling up and making bets with myself as to which mud puddle would be the safest in which to get bogged. Sometimes the track was 300 feet wide, and sometimes you couldn't see it at all. Sometimes you just had to clench your teeth and take what was coming to you knowing you couldn't dodge it. That road was all holes, and stones, and mud, and threatened disaster. And there were forty miles of it.

I don't like starting out on a tour of criticism unless I am able to offer suggestions for the betterment of the conditions I am criticising, it is very easy to bang the other fellow, but you have to ask yourself — what you would do if you were in his place. I am going to tell you right here that I don't think I could solve that Truro road problem. Why? Simply because you have forty miles of roadway running through practically deserted country, with scarcely a sign of habitation the whole length. Of course there is nothing to stop you running a bitumen road through a desert if you want to, and you are prepared to pay the price. But, as a harassed taxpayer who has been financially bled to death by a heartless Government, I for one am not prepared to pay my "whack."

"Cut up the land into small blocks," did you say? Well, you can if you want to. But personally I wouldn't give twopence for all the land I saw on that 40-mile piece of agony.

A Transport Farce

Now I am going to indulge in a piece of criticism which I consider to be well merited. It refers to an extraordinary legislative joke enacted by the Transport Board. There is one motor service, and one only, passing through Blanchetown. It goes to Mildura via Renmark. There is a fair traffic between these Murray towns and Renmark — or there was until the Transport Board took the matter in hand, and decreed that these motor services must not pick up passengers for South Australian towns. Now if you want to go to Renmark from Blanchetown this is your procedure. You sit on the hotel verandah, and watch the Mildura coach go by, knowing it would deliver you at Renmark in three hours. Then you get up before daylight next morning, and if you are lucky enough to own a motor car, you motor to Truro over that road about which I have been talking. If you don't own a motor car, you must walk, or get over the forty miles the best way you can. You get the train at Truro and go to Adelaide. Then next day you can get a train to Renmark. In the interval between the three hours it would have taken you to reach Renmark. and the two days' journey imposed on you by an idiotic law, you can anathematise the Transport Board to your heart's content. Why, in exceptional cases, is it not possible to get a permit from the local police officer to make the journey direct by the motor service?

NEXT WEEK— NURIOOTPA AND ANGASTON

Images:

• "That road was all holes, and stones, and mud, and threatened disaster. And there were forty miles of it."

• No. 1 Lock at Blanchetown, showing hundreds of tons of water an hour pouring over the weir — a vast amount of cheap energy going to waste.