To understand why a riverboat became a battleground, you have to understand what the river meant. In the late nineteenth century the Darling was a working highway, and broad, shallow-draft paddle steamers like the Rodney were its trucks, hauling wool out from the sheep stations and carrying supplies back in. The Rodney was among the largest and best regarded of them, 106 feet long, framed in angle iron and planked in durable river red gum, towing a barge of goods for the stations along its route. Whoever controlled the river controlled the flow of wool, and in a dispute over the wool clip, that made the steamers strategic ground worth fighting over.

The 1894 shearers' strike was the second great clash between Australian shearers and the wealthy pastoralists, or graziers, who owned the sheep. The 1890s were years of falling wool prices, new machinery threatening jobs, and a country sliding toward economic depression, all of it sharpening a rising sense of working-class solidarity and national identity. The earlier 1891 strike at Barcaldine in Queensland had helped send the first labour representative into parliament and is remembered as a seed of the Australian Labor Party. The 1894 strike was shorter, but it produced the most dramatic single act of the whole era. When graziers used vessels like the Rodney to move non-union workers, often called free labourers, past the picket lines, the union men resolved to stop them.

Late in August 1894 the Rodney, under Captain Dickson, was steaming up the Darling with around forty-five non-union labourers bound for the woolsheds at Tolarno Station. On the night of 28 August the steamer pulled in at a riverside woodpile two miles above Moorara Station, and up to 150 striking shearers were waiting. They commandeered the boat. First they put the passengers and crew safely ashore on the riverbank; then they tore open the bags of chaff in the holds, soaked them in kerosene, and set them alight. The Rodney caught quickly and was cast loose to drift downriver in flames until it burned almost to the waterline. The colonial press thundered that it was the worst outrage shearers had yet committed. A reward was posted for the culprits. No one was ever convicted.

Both sides of that bitter conflict now claim the wreck. The Rodney was broken up where it lay and its boiler salvaged, said to have ended its days powering machinery at a freezing works in Echuca; what became of the engine no one knows. But the river preserved what fire and salvage left behind. The lower hull, planked in red gum, survived remarkably intact in the permanently wet timber below the waterline, while the iron frames corroded above. In 1994, more than seven hundred people gathered at this remote spot to mark the centenary of the burning, unionists and station families standing together at the same riverbank, the old enmity softened into shared history. Listed on the New South Wales State Heritage Register in 2007, the Rodney remains a tangible marker of how fiercely, and how violently, the modern Australian labour movement was born.