IT WAS while we were around the Wentworth-NSW area on the Murray River, when I heard about the Rufus River drive. Wentworth itself is chockers with history, dating back to 1830 when explorer Charles Sturt and his crew rowed down the Murray River and reached the junction of the Darling River, where he wrote in his log, “a new and beautiful stream apparently coming from the north.”
Sturt was the first white man to encounter the local Barkindji people along the river, and they did not welcome the new arrivals. It was just six years later when explorer Thomas Mitchell travelled down the Darling to the junction of the two rivers. This opened the door to an influx of European overlanders who moved sheep and cattle along the rivers to find better pastoral lands.
Houses were built from early 1851, but Wentworth wasn’t proclaimed until 1859. Over the next few years it boomed from the river traffic, with police quarters built and a solid town emerging – it’s
