|
THE BLACK FRIDAY OF WAGGA WAGGA
Friday the 13th at The Thirsty Crow
Long before Wagga Wagga had a name on any settler’s map, the Wiradjuri spoke of a bend in the Murrumbidgee as troubled ground. Generations back, a terrible drought had driven a woman to live apart from her people there, gathering black crow feathers and burning them every Friday, trying to call down rain that never came. One year, during a ferocious flood, she vanished entirely, and the story that survived her was that she’d gone on a Friday the 13th, the worst of all days, when the world tips a little off balance.
From then on, the old stories agreed that whenever the 13th fell on a Friday near that bend, the place would wake up. Mist rolled in the wrong direction, dogs wouldn’t cross the ford, crows would gather thick along the banks, and on the rare years when it happened twice (once in autumn, once in high summer) the whole district braced itself. Shearers downed tools early, publicans bolted their doors by dusk, mothers kept the kids well clear of the river. Folk said you could see her fire burning on the far bank both nights, crows circling above it, as if she were making sure nobody ever forgot her.
Centuries later, when the squatters built their woolsheds near that same bend, they inherited the unease without really knowing why. Strange luck dogged the place: sheep gone missing, fires catching without cause, and it always seemed worse on a Friday. By the time the wool trade was booming, locals had taken to calling an unlucky Friday “Black Friday,” plain and simple, a day thick enough with dread that you didn’t hang out washing, didn’t go near the Exchange, and certainly didn’t look a black sheep in the eye.
Eventually, the wool brokers started lighting a bonfire every year on the Friday after the Royal Show, burning a straw effigy in her memory, half out of respect and half to keep her fire, and her crows, from crossing the river for good. And that’s how, so the story goes, a little stretch of the Murrumbidgee gave Wagga Wagga its very own Black Friday.
( Believe it or not )
· · ·
Black crows at the Murrumbidgee bend
Come and join us for a drink or some lunch…
When: Friday 13 November 2026
Time: 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Where: The Thirsty Crow, 153 Fitzmaurice St, Wagga Wagga
There is parking nearby.
Mind the crows on your way in.
|