RIVER steamers, big and small, were once the lifeblood of the Hunter Valley.
They noisily chugged and puffed up and down a network of meandering rivers carrying an amazing variety of cargo. This ranged from hatpins to steel billets, furniture, wool (up to the 1860s), wheat, maize, machinery, barley, pigs, passengers, pit props, fresh Tomago water for sailing ships in Newcastle harbour, wine and tobacco crops.
All this in an age when there were no roads, just rutted, rough bullock tracks.
But today, looking out at the placid waters of Paterson, Hunter and Williams rivers, you'd probably never guess that the mammoth 19th century river trade ever existed.
These versatile steamships, which replaced sailing ships often under tow, came in all sizes and shapes.
Congestion was bad and collisions common on the narrow rivers amid the coal smoke as more that 100 of these crafts plied their trade.
"There's 116 vessels by my count, but there's really dozens more I believe, but I can't prove it. Nothing was written down for many, that's why no record exists today," Paterson author Wayne Patfield says.
"With early roads being pretty rough, it would take weeks for things to arrive. The logical thing was to use the rivers to carry cargoes," he says.
The enterprising historian has just published his second book on the busy river trade with the help of Paterson Historical Society, which will benefit from his efforts.
Called Steamshipson the Paterson River 1832-1950, the book covers almost 120 years of a unique trade, now almost forgotten.
And there were mishaps aplenty. Picnic excursions by river later became very popular, but the steam ferry SS Guthrey came to grief in December 1912 after running aground on a large unchartered rock at Woodville known as Nolan's Rock. The accident left about 400 ferry passengers stranded, but the heavily listing ferry managed to be salvaged days later.
"The Paterson and Hunter rivers were once very, very busy. Dense coal smoke from the steamers was so bad that one captain would only travel on late Friday afternoons when it was less dangerous - you could see ahead," Patfield says.
"Sydney's Haymarket district also got its name from the river trade. Hunter steamships would bring hay back from (Paterson) farms where they'd be offloaded into carts in Hay Street, the main drag, to await auction sales."
But Patfield, despite his long, painstaking research, once feared his new book wouldn't leave the slipway.
"My first book last year documenting sail vessels on the Paterson River from 1804 to 1912 took me 18 months to get written, and this one probably 15 months to write," he says,
"But both are based on 20 years of earlier collecting information about the river and its boats," the retired Port Waratah Coal Services production supervisor says.
"When I knocked off work, I had enough time to research properly. Then I discovered I'd opened a Pandora's Box. No wonder no one else had ever done anything."
The era of the steamship trade along the Paterson and Hunter rivers reached its peak around 1900. The deepwater port of Morpeth was once the terminus for coastal shipping. People and goods from Sydney were then offloaded into smaller river steamers to travel further inland.
These vessels ranged from 40 feet (12 metres) to 140 feet (42.6 metres) long, and sometimes, when heavily laden, some had less than a metre of water under their hull to navigate the Hunter tributaries.
Patfield's extraordinary saga of a bygone age also comes with insider knowledge, as many of his past relatives were either local ship captains or crew members.
Each page of his remarkably detailed 132-page book lists the fate of individual boats, most with photos. Also included is an extensive record of the rivers' dredges, punts and motor vessels. As a bonus, four rare old pictures (including the cover) come alive after being digitally coloured.
Cameron Archer, the president of Paterson Historical Society, said that without the book and its predecessor our understanding of life in the Hunter would have been incomplete.
Riverside farming communities totally relied on these "little (and not so little) puffers". The steam vessels were part of the very fabric of life, although individual business ventures often ended in failure due to misfortune or changing circumstances.
The river was silting up and steam vessels quickly faded away after the railway arrived in Paterson in 1911. And yet, the river trade continued in another form, with smaller vessels collecting milk and cream from dairies along the river until displaced by trucks.
So, what happened to this vast inland fleet of Hunter Valley steamers? Where did they all go?
Patfield says dozens of vessels, with their working life over, simply vanished, but not as you might expect in 'Rotten Row' with other wrecks up a small creek towards the eastern end of Kooragang Island.
"A lot were run ashore in the lower Hunter River, but north of the Stockton bridge instead. The area's all filled in now and you can't get to it. It's all mangroves. It became a (now unknown) ship graveyard," he says.
Ironically, some steamships helped to seal their own fate by bringing steel girders upriver to aid a future serious competitor, the North Coast Railway.
One such famous victim was a very unusual vessel, the Anna Maria from 1863. The huge wooden stern wheeler looked like a Mississippi paddle steamer.
But when the Paterson rail bridge was being built in 1909, a steel girder slipped from its crane sling and pierced the Anna Maria, sinking her.
"She was recovered and ended up working in Lake Macquarie (as a barge), before being blown ashore at the western end of Wangi Bay. She was cut up for the war effort in 1939," Patfield says.
"Before going to Wangi though, her steam engine and whistle were sold to Turton's Brickyard at East Maitland. I know of no photograph of her working in the lake, but a seat from her survives in Paterson Museum Courthouse."
Another unintended victim of the Paterson rail bridge was SS Marie, built in 1896 and used as a general and bulk cargo vessel plus as a drogher (log punt) and excursion vessel.
"She was burnt at Paterson government wharf beneath the rail bridge in May 1914. She was sunk, salvaged and rebuilt as a lighter (barge) at Callen's Shipyard, Stockton," Patfield says.
"A passing train steam engine overhead had dropped ash. Marie caught fire, so did her cargo and the wharf itself. She was towed a short way upstream and scuttled on a bend in the river to put the fire out," he says.
"In fact, the photo of me holding the book (pictured) is taken above that very same spot."
The vessel was sold and ignominiously ended her days as a lighter, taking Sydney's garbage out to sea to be dumped.
Patfield's book Steamships on the Paterson River 1832-1950 is for sale for $20 at McDonalds bookshop at High Street, Maitland, in Paterson itself, and at Vacy and Woodville general stores.
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