You should be adding ionContent inside of your ionView. The ionContent is what wraps everything under the header, whereas the ionView is the entire page. You pretty much answered your question, the ionRefresher docs show an example where it is the first child of ionContent.
Just edited my above comment to include a working example. The Ionic directives start with “ion” not “ionic”. Changing that should fix it but refer to my example if not.