Captain Pearl WallacePrint Page

The artwork commemorates Captain Pearl Wallace (1911 - 2005), Australia`s first female riverboat captain. 

The daughter and sister of well-known shipwrights and captains, Pearl Collins spent her early years on the steamer Alpha with her family trading along the Darling. She married Neil Wallace, a Renmark lock engineer, in 1931 and went on to earn her River Master's Certificate in 1947. In 1948, her father gave her the PS Kookaburra, which she operated with her husband.

During the 1950s it's understood Captain Wallace met and inspired author Nancy Cato to write All The Rivers Run, which became a popular television mini-series filmed at Echuca. She hung up her captain's hat in 1977 with a final journey helming the PS Canberra in Echuca. A book on her life, Pearl Wallace : A River Woman, was published in 2001 and she died in 2005 aged 94.

For the past 12 years, a statue of Australia's first female riverboat skipper has accidentally worn a beard. In a mysterious case of mistaken gender identity, a timber bollard commemorating the achievements of Captain Pearl Wallace was repainted as a scruffy seaman with a bushy brown beard after being damaged by flooding.

The bollards stand along the banks of the Murray River, with Captain Wallace's likeness a feature in the tiny town of Nyah, north of Swan Hill. They were restored after copping a beating at the hands of the Swan Hill floods during the summer of 2011. That was when Captain Wallace gained the rather obvious, and incorrect, facial hair.

"Captain Pearl holds historical significance and is a great icon to depict on one of our river bollards," Swan Hill Rural City Council director of development and planning, Helen Green, said. "She was the first woman in Australia to become a certified skipper in 1947 and has a connection to the well-known historic boat, the Kookaburra, which sank directly in front of where her bollard now stands."

Council's acting director of community and cultural services, Camille Cullinan, said the gender mix-up was only recently brought to the council's attention by Captain Wallace's grandson. "He was lovely about [the mistake], and actually provided some more information about her so that we can hopefully get some signage to put there as well," Ms Cullinan told Jonathon Kendall on ABC Victoria Statewide Mornings. After consulting Captain Wallace's descendants on how the image should look, the council appointed artist Rhonda Avery to correct the overly hirsute appearance. 

"Just the fact that a beard was painted on this replica indicates that there's definitely not enough focus on the strong women in our community," Ms Cullinan said. "I actually read [Pearl's] book, that she wrote about her life, and the things she had to go through were probably three times as much as what any male would have had to go through to do the same thing."
ABC Mildura-Swan Hill, 20 September 2023. 

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