Hiatus 3: Working in Morgan

 "I wonder who'll be the first person to be buried here?" mused Harvey, a Royal Navy Surveyor helping out with the creation of the Morgan Cemetery back in 1889.  Little did he know that the very next day he would drown in the river and the dubious honour of being the first inhabitant of the Morgan Cemetery would belong to him.

The cemetery was tucked away discreetly on the edge of town, but not so the morgue.  Victims of accidents on the river were dropped off in Morgan via steamer, and a little morgue was built right at the ferry terminus, a receiving house as it were for those en route to the cemetery.  The morgue was still there, but thankfully the only corpses in there now belong to spiders and flies.

Morgue details.

I took the scenic walk around Morgan, dutifully reading all the information in my pamphlet, and now I share it with you whether you want it or not.

Morgan is in the traditional lands of the Ngaiawang people. Nganguruku people moved to the Morgan area when they lost access to their traditional lands further south, and that was the last mention of the area's original inhabitants.

The first Europeans to visit were Charles Sturt and his gang, who passed by in a rowboat in 1830. The first Europeans to visit overland, in March 1838, were the expedition of Hill, Oakden, Willis, and Wood.

There are a ridiculous number of Sturt monuments along the Murray: I haven't shown you the half of them.  Hill, Oakden, etc don't get a look in.

The town was proclaimed in 1878, the year the railway line from Adelaide was opened. A large wharf was built, and Morgan became one of the busiest ports on the Murray. It handled nearly all the goods that were being imported and exported (particularly wool) to and from a vast region upstream from Morgan along the Murray and Darling rivers. At its peak, it was the second busiest port in South Australia with six trains a day carrying freight from the Murray to the sea at Port Adelaide.  Then along came road transport and the last train out of Morgan ran in 1969.  The paddle steamers, no longer needed, sank one by one at their moorings.

I've been hanging around engineers too long: old gutters, or whatever their fancy road engineering name is.

Looking down on the wharf and the PS Canally from the lookout which originally held the water tanks for resupply of the steamers

Morgan was full of old stone buildings built in the town's heyday and repurposed, over and over, as needs changed.  There weren't a lot of new buildings in town due to the decline in Morgan's fortunes after the railway left.  The available buildings in Morgan had since then proved perfectly adequate to absorb the number of souls living there.

The same couldn't be said of the shacks though.  Infrequent but cleansing floods had forced rebuilding over the years, and appearances were that many of the shacks had morphed from quirky river dwellings to weekend mansions.

Jealous me? Never!

Work vanquished, I wandered along the river on the edges of the day.  There were lots of birds, most of them too fast or too far away for my ridiculously inadequate camera to catch.  Two juvenile kookaburras, however, were so busy fighting over grubs that they allowed me to get within (camera) shooting range.

They spent half their time beating each other up while the grubs crawled away.

I think that's enough about Morgan now.  Tomorrow I'm back on the bike.  The river takes a hard right here so I'll be heading east and fingers crossed the weather is cooler.

Onward!