Australia: 'My marriage survived the Murray River'

She was the master mariner, he was the galley slave. Tim Heald takes his wife on a cruise along Australia's biggest waterway

The mighty Murray is the great Australian river. For more than 1,500 miles it meanders across the continent until it belly-flops into Lake Alexandrina, which in turn debouches across treacherous sandspits into the Great Southern Ocean south-east of Adelaide. For the final quarter of its length it waters South Australia. The state's people drink from it and many of its vines, crops and cattle are nourished by it. In the past century it was also a great highway, patrolled by Mississippi-style paddle steamers, but today it is no longer a trade route and the principal travellers in and on its stately current are people and pelicans, carp and cod.

In 1853 William Randell, the son of a pioneer pasturalist, launched the first of the Murray paddle steamers, the Mary Ann, at Noa-no Landing, about 50 miles north of Wellington, the last town before the Murray enters Lake Alexandrina. All that remains of the Mary Ann is her square boiler, preserved in the Museum of River History at Mannum, the port which Randell made his headquarters, but she was the pioneer of a river trade which took in stations all the way up the Murray, Murrumbidgee and Darling rivers as far as the goldfields of Victoria.

Mannum, about an hour and a half's drive along pretty winding roads from Adelaide (further but faster if you take the dual carriageway to Murray Bridge) was once the hub of the commercial river system. In a manner of speaking she still is – the present town makes two claims to fame: "Birthplace of the paddle steamer" and "Houseboat capital of South Australia".

As far as I am concerned, however, Mannum is about houseboats, one of which my wife and I hired for a brief voyage. Originally we planned a group outing with friends, but one by one they dropped out, leaving just the two of us. We were warned that this could be a recipe for disaster since man and wife on boat is an even more lethal combination than man and wife in car.

The danger was compounded by the fact that my wife has a master mariner's certificate from Hong Kong and is a former head prefect whereas I am one of nature's dry bobs and a constitutional disrespecter of nature's school prefects. I was happy to let her take the helm and to aspire to nothing grander than deckhand and galley-slave. On the other hand while I accepted that she might be qualified to drive a junk round Kowloon harbour I didn't see that this had much to do with taking a houseboat down the Murray and I was, simply from force of habit and natural inclination, unlikely to obey orders.

The Murray river houseboat is not the sort you find on the Thames. Ours are more boat than house. Theirs are more house than boat. The vessel we hired, the Lil' Breeze, was, in effect, a penthouse on a pontoon. She was wonderfully well appointed, with a barbecue aft, a canoe and paddle at the other end, a shower, loo, fridge, video and TV, bags of space for sitting in and out and a canopied sun deck on the roof. The controls, in the living area, seemed elementary: a wheel for left and right (oh, all right, port and starboard), a lever for forward, reverse and neutral, and a button for the powerful Mr Toad-style hooter. The friendly owners lent us a bird book and binoculars and we arrived with wine, steak, fruit and CDs of Mozart and Dolly Parton. Bliss.

We spent the first night moored in Mannum and woke to mist and two dozen pelicans circling on a languorous but predatory dawn patrol. A quick driving lesson from Chris, the proprietor, with emphasis on how to reverse off mudbanks, and we were chugging southwards at a steady four or five miles an hour. I left the wife to play Captain Bligh and wandered around with the bins and the bird book. Such are the human demands on this great river that it is alleged to be under threat. Maybe so, but all around us fish kept jumping out of the water while swallows which had nested on board scurried to and fro. All along the bank cormorant or shag hung their wings out to dry on stumps of eucalyptus or boughs of weeping willow. Occasionally a bird of prey spiralled above us. Some sort of eagle, I thought, but a friendly expert later told me they were almost certainly whistling kites. From time to time the ubiquitous pelican barrelled overhead like some Second World War flying boat and wispy ibis stalked fish in the shallows. The swans were black, the ducks were just like British ducks, wag-tails wagged their tails and when we tied up that night a family of spoonbills batted their way round a reedy pond as the kookaburra pierced the air with that raucous Antipodean shout while magpies warbled liked demented garglers.

"Australian birds are so much noisier than the British," I remarked to my Australian captain after a mild contretemps involving ropes, half-hitches and mooring posts. "Rather like Australian people." Bad remark.

We didn't travel very far and we saw very few other people. This didn't matter in the least. Once a restored Victorian paddle steamer came pounding round the bend unexpectedly, carrying a handful of tourists, and on another occasion a fisherman in an open boat went past too fast. A handful of other houseboaters waved a nervous greeting and, at occasional settlements of "shacks" as various and eccentric as the riverine dwellings of the Thames valley, owners were painting weatherworn woodwork. Beyond the fringe of gum and willow, one caught occasional glimpses of Murray Grey and Hereford cattle.

There was almost a mutiny as we finally docked and the captain gave some inane order about leaping ashore and making the leeward stern line fast to something or other. She seemed upset when I wanted to know why. Once we regained dry land she did say something about what hard work the voyage had been. That hadn't been my view but this time I had the sense to keep quiet.