Down by the river

A magical riverside setting inspired Echuca-born Dean Oberin to set up an exceptional regional restaurant.

Story By Genevieve Barlow

For starters at Dean and Renee Oberin's charcoal grill and bar it's best to sit out on the deck high above the mighty murky Murray River. Invariably, cockatoos and corellas will come calling in the evening at the Echuca restaurant on the southern bank of the Victorian/New South Wales border. It's an operatic view next to the great wharf where steamers and barges brimming with wool and wood once stopped to load and unload. Paddle-steamers still shoosh up and down stream, but their cargo is tourists now. They pass below, a caravan of questing romantics, as the day's dying light caresses the red gums on the bank opposite.
Echuca's founder, convict Henry Hopwood, set up a pub a cooee from here, less for the view, perhaps, than the fact the track south to Melbourne ran here, a fine stopping point for his punt, which brought him fine sums indeed. About 130 years later, Dean Oberin spent his boyhood here, chiacking at nearby Naked Beach, known colloquially as 'Brown Eye Bend'. His mother Corale and father Don, a dairy farmer from nearby Gunbower, ran a hotel and motel in Echuca. Perhaps it was inevitable that their son, grown up and graduated in commerce with a stint in merchant banking completed, would return.
Dean's restaurant, Oscar W's Wharfside Redgum Grill and Deck Bar, sits in the heart of the town's tourist precinct on the edge of one of the world's largest red gum forests. Inside, a long bar has been hewn from Sydney bluegum and a giant fireplace includes parts of the old bridge that once spanned the river. The fireplace divides the spacious bar area from the dining room, one wall of which is lined with bottles of the 570 wines (local, interstate and international - French, Italian, German, Austrian, Canadian, New Zealand) on the wine list; 24 are available by the glass. Overhead in the rafters of the bar area is a timber replica of the small rowboats that once bobbed along behind the river's paddle-steamers. Fittingly, Oscar W's is named after Oscar Wallan, the son of the captain of the last paddle-steamer built in Echuca.