Where the rivers run
Claire Millar candidly confesses she thought she was moving to the sticks when she and her newly minted husband, Frank, arrived at Wharparilla station near the border town of Echuca on the Victorian side of the Murray River. The year was 1957 and though the century-old homestead proportions were grand, it lacked amenities Claire took for granted in her home town of Shepparton.
“It may have been only a few kilometres from Echuca, but it felt like 100 miles,” she recalls. “We had no mains power so we had kerosene fridges and a wood-fired slow-combustion stove. We had to fire up a donkey for hot water and
