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,” Mon says. “He came from Mildura so had an affinity with the river. We always had river cruisers and had just finished restoring the river launch Falcon, which had once belonged to the Ansett family. We bought Miralie 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.”
With restoration on the superstructure complete, Mon says there’s now an issue with the gearbox. “But the boys are working on it,” she says. “Hopefully cake helps. They say BOAT means Bring Out Another Thousand, and I know from long experience that this is true.” The Miralie is moored at Coorong Quays on Hindmarsh Island, a short drive from Mon’s home, a two-storey weatherboard cottage on the river, with views to the barrages that regulate the water level and flows of the Murray River.
Mon and Rob spent most of their married life on a sheep and wheat property between Palmer and Mannum further up the Murray River. For many years Mon ran a leather giftware business from a stone cottage on the property and the trade shows she attended encouraged her to open a homewares store in the Adelaide Hills. “It was called Balhannah by Design, and it became a beacon in the Adelaide Hills,” Mon explains. “I think half of Adelaide was dressed from there.”
Prompted by the success of that store, Mon went on to open Coast by Design in Port Elliot in 2012 and, around the same time, bought the Goolwa house as “a kind of midway point and weekender between the farm and the stores”. She decorated the house in a blend of country and coastal styles, with treasures from her many travels giving it her signature stamp. Son Tim was living and working as a banker in London and together he and Mon would head to Paris on buying trips.
This in turn led to Mon bringing back containers of “found objects” and running a pop-up store in the local hall. She also led shopping tours of the markets of France and took more buying expeditions to China and Indonesia with Tim. He was therefore well qualified to take over the businesses when Mon retired around the time of Rob’s death. Tim now runs five stores under the banner of Living by Design, with new shop fronts in the Barossa, the Adelaide suburb of Norwood and Victor Harbor as well as a large online presence.
Mon may have retired from business, but her days are no less busy. A share farmer looks after the remaining 1000 acres (405 hectares) of the property, and she has a full schedule of travel on her plate. She bought Pearl her motorhome and, with her precious poodle/Maltese cross companion Posie in tow, has undertaken road trips to Airlie Beach in northern Queensland and across the Nullarbor to Western Australia where she drove north to the Coral Coast. This year, Mon has a passage on the Spirit of Tasmania booked for a six-week trip around the island state, plus travels to Alaska and Canada on the agenda.
“I’ve just found an engineer to make a rack to sit my electric trike on the back of Pearl,” Mon says. “It has a basket for Posie, so she can come along for the ride when I want to take short trips without the motorhome. I believe you have to make the most of every phase in life.”
As Mon puts the finishing touches to the lemon cake, her thoughts return to the Miralie’s eventual restoration. “I hope to take her back upriver to Wentworth [near Mildura, where the Murray and Darling Rivers meet],” she says. “I’m not sure I will handle it on my own, so hopefully I will be able to convince Rob’s best mate to come with me. It should be a fitting conclusion to Rob’s — and my — big challenge.”
