Day 43: Swan Hill Pioneer Settlement and a Giant Murray Cod

Putting on our tourist hats today, we headed off to the Swan Hill Pioneer Settlement to have a look at another of those 'living museum' type villages. I think we are going to see a lot of these in the weeks ahead, which is OK because we quite enjoy them. It certainly is more interesting for the boys than your conventional museums.

On the way, Duncan just had to stop at the Giant Murray Cod to have a look and take some pictures.
The Settlement is very much worth the visit. It is a lovely little late 19th, early 20th century village, with a vast collection of tractors, wagons, motor vehicles and fire engines from this period. The shops/businesses are also full of interesting things to see. We all had some fun in the haberdasher's trying on all the hats. Andrew desperately wanted to buy a top hat, while Callum fell in love with a rather suave gentleman's hat and wanted to get that one. Bonnets aren't really my style, but worth a laugh.

The volunteer in the music shop was very enthusiastic about showing us the instruments. She gave the fair organ a good cranking until breaking out in a little sweat and coming to a dignified halt. She moved on to the pianola next and demonstrated how the thing works, giving that one a good pedaling too. We also had a listen to a really old gramophone; the quality of the sound was amazingly clear.

A little later on we had a ride in a horse-drawn wagon and in a very old, but newly renovated, Dodge motor vehicle. An hour long cruise on the Murray River in the PS Pyap (paddle steamer) was well-timed, as the rain came down just after we boarded, poured throughout the cruise, then abated as we disembarked.

A visit like this always inspires to emotions in me: whistfulness - at the slow pace of life that people of that time would have lived at, relative to ours; and thankfulness that I am a woman of the 20th/21st century. I do like my comforts.

The slideshow has a lot of our photos from today.


We now find ourselves in serious planning mode for the next few legs of our journey. We nearly got caught out with Canberra - the parks are filling up - and must now consider our route to Cairns and where we will be at Easter and throughout the school holidays (the different states overlap through most of April).