Moorara Station on the Lower Darling, August 1896. It’s a moonless night. A dozen men, clothes turned inside out, faces and arms daubed with mud, oars muffled, row steadily across the river. Once on the opposite bank they wade silently towards the dark outline of a large riverboat moored in swampland.
 
At about 4 a.m in the morning, the boarders swiftly overwhelm the watchman. Someone reported that the forty scab shearers aboard “fell on their knees and begged for mercy.” An indignant Captain Dickson, plus the non-union labourers are hustled ashore into the hands of a waiting crowd of striking shearers.
 
On the spur of the moment, some of the exuberant boarding party pour kerosene on bags of chaff found in the hold and within minutes, flames are licking around the wheel house. Soon the 133-ton P.S Rodney - pride of Permewan Wright Company’s riverboat fleet, has burned to the waterline, drifts drunkenly, lurches and sinks with a hiss of steam.
 
And so, a rare casualty of inland piracy came to rest as a hulk on the bottom of the Darling River. The wreck came to encapsulate a tumultuous moment in the history of working class Australia. The central figure in this forgotten drama was a man of rare calibre – Scots immigrant William Guthrie Spence.

The humble backyard shed is usually where we park stuff and often , it's a case of 'out of sight, out of mind'. The Story Shed is the opposite - It's purposed to make our Australian faith stories both visible and accessible.  Over the past few years, it's been a work space that has steadily produced a flow of great yarns and they're all true! I've taken time to craft them carefully so you can just lift them off the shelf and set them to work at your place.  Why don't you open this blog and check out  the list of stories on my Outback Historian website and become a real live storyteller yourself?

Don't let them just gather dust.