Mon Bowring is icing a lemon drizzle cake as she chats via phone from her home in the South Australian river port of Goolwa at the mouth of the Murray River. The cake is morning tea for the 'boys' who are helping to restore her 40-foot paddlewheeler, Miralie, an ongoing project which was a dying wish of her husband, Rob, who passed away from bowel cancer three years ago.
“We all need a challenge in life and Rob surely left me one,”, which had once belonged to the Ansett family. We bought on a trip to Mildura. The name means 'little black duck' in the local Indigenous language. She was built in 2000 and was quite dilapidated, but Rob was insistent that she had lots of potential. She was a 50th wedding anniversary gift to me and we brought her downriver — all 700 kilometres and 11 locks — with us all on board and our daughter, Jane, playing the ukelele. Three weeks later Rob died, and we've been working on her ever since.”
