Echuca-Moama's feuding founders

By CHRISTINE CHUDLEY

The paddlewheels churn, the whistle shrills . . . and it's full steam ahead down the mighty Murray River! This is Echuca-Moama, home of paddleboats. Echuca, once the largest inland port in Australia, wit h her twin sister, Moama, is today a thriving tourist centre. Visitors travel from around the world to enjoy the sight, sound and experience of steam driven paddlewheelers plying their way up and down the river, between banks dense with towering redg ums. Some of the boats are originals which late last century and in the early 1900s carried essentials to homesteads along the river system and returned heavy with bales of wool, and harvests of wheat. Many of the paddlesteamers towed barges, lying l ow in the water beneath loads of redgum timber, cut from surrounding forests and transported to Echuca sawmills.

.The coming of the railway tolled a death knell for the riverboat trade, but today visitors and locals relive the past in the historic Port of Echuca, with her fleet of tourist paddlewheelers. Echuca is the larger of two towns and situated in the state of Victoria, on the southern side of the Murray which forms the border between Victoria and New South Wales. But Moama, on the northern bank, in NSW, was the first to be established, in the 1840s by an ex-convict called James Maiden. Ma iden made his fortune supplying meat to the Bendigo goldfields during the goldrush of the 1850s.

Maiden's arch enemy was Henry Hopwood, founder of Echuca, who was sentenced to transportation in the same court in Lancaster, England, on the same day as Maiden in 1834. Hopwood's rise to power and fame was partly due to establishing a punt across the river and building a hotel nearby. When the punt was closed, travellers had no option but to put up for the night until it re-opened - and as Hopwood's Hotel was the obvious place to find accommodation, the owner had every chance of prospering. And prosper he did, with the whole of Echuca sharing his good fortune. Moama - the n ame comes from an Aboriginal word meaning dead - lived in the shadow of its southern sister for more than a century, when it began at last to flourish, with clubs, sporting facilities, tourist accommodation and residential developments.

Read about The Riverine Herald newspaper, established in 1863.

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