Go With The Flow
Australia's greatest river is enduring one of the country's most prolonged droughts. but, as Robert Milliken travels the mighty murray's full length, he finds that all is not lost.
At 2350 kilometres, the Murray is Australia's longest river. In the days when paddle steamers ruled, Mark Twain once likened it to the Mississippi. And it is still to Australia what that great river is to America: the one around which national myths are built. Now, though, it is as much a travellers' destination. It is also a river in crisis.At a time when drought and climate change are forcing us to rethink the "Mighty Murray", we have come to reassess those myths. We plan to follow the Murray River from its source in the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales to its mouth at the Southern Ocean in South Australia. In a sense, we're following in the footsteps of the 19th-century explorer Charles Sturt. His 1830 epic journey down the Murray in search of the mouths of its two main tributaries, the Murrumbidgee and the Darling, evaporated hopes of finding an inland sea. After that, as the author Kylie Tennant puts it in her book Australia: Her Story, "the whole of eastern Australia was open to the settler".
Those settlers have now become large-scale farmers, wine producers, houseboat operators, restaurateurs and hoteliers, all drawing on the waters of the Murray for their survival. These days, the number of people depending on the river has probably never been higher. But the Murray Darling Basin Commission reports that the volume of water flowing into it in the last two years, from the rivers that feed it in NSW, Victoria and Queensland, has been the lowest since records began in 1892.
By driving as close to the river as roads allow (and taking to the river itself in three places), we plan our nine-day journey to stop at six great Murray towns – Rutherglen, Echuca and Mildura in Victoria, and Renmark, Mannum and Goolwa, at the mouth of the river in South Australia – that allow us to observe the waterway at close range and see how it, and those who depend on it, are coping.
We strike out from sydney for the Snowy Mountains, climbing to the high country of the Kosciusko National Park. I have only ever seen this region covered in snow, but at this time of year it is thick with long summer grass. Soon, we are winding down a mountain road and driving over a simple wooden bridge above a clear, bubbling creek – our first glimpse of the Murray – to Tom Groggin Station.
The name comes not, as I'd assumed, from an early squatter or legendary mountain rider, but from "ton-a-roggin", a local Aboriginal name for water spider. It was the late Peter Cullen who'd advised me to start our journey at Tom Groggin, the last privately owned station in the Snowy Mountains. Cullen, a distinguished scientist who probably did more than anyone to open Australia's eyes on saving the Murray, died soon after we finished our trip.
As we pull in to the homestead, located on a lush, green plain surrounded by mountains, we're greeted by the cattle station's managers, Trevor and Lynda Davis, surrounded by a friendly throng of ∫dogs and cats. Our lodgings are a restored log cabin that was once the home of Jack Riley, the overseer of Tom Groggin in the late 19th century and the man on whom it is popularly believed Banjo Paterson based his classic 1890 poem The Man from Snowy River.
Inside, the two-room hut is simply but comfortably furnished with beds, a table and a Beaconlight fuel stove, looking sadly unlit perhaps since Riley died in 1914. We prepare dinner on a gas barbecue outside, before retiring for the night.
Rain crashing on the corrugated iron roof of the hut wakes me at 2am, unleashing thoughts about the river I am about to discover. The crippling drought threatening the Murray's livelihood is at the forefront of our journey and the stories we're about to hear. Can this downpour be a sign of hope?
After the night's rain, the early morning sky is clear and fresh. Dave Lawrence, a local ranger with the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, arrives to guide us as close as we can drive (without a day's hike) to Forest Hill, the Murray's spring. We manage to reach a point just 12 kilometres from the source, where the river is barely five metres wide and a stunning contrast to its popular wide, brown image. Here, it is so clear it mirrors the thick scrub and ferns on both banks, we see rocks on its bed and I can scoop up its water and drink it.
This vital water source gave the Murray a political role when the colonial grandees decided to make the river the natural border between NSW and Victoria in 1851. But the state border is not located mid-stream, as you might assume; instead it is the high-water mark on the southern bank, leaving NSW in control, at least back then.
The Snowy River is tantalisingly close to us in these hills, too, flowing south. But like the Murray, we are heading west. We drive out of the mountains and join the Murray Valley Way, a road that keeps us close to the river through most of Victoria.
As we approach Lake Hume, near Albury, the river opens to a floodplain where dead river red gums stand forlornly in the water. The trees were drowned when the lake was created as part of a series of locks and weirs to prop up the Murray and stop it from trickling away during harsh droughts, like the current one. From here to the mouth, the Murray is run by regulators, who release water from these storages daily for farming irrigation, town supplies and simply to keep the river flowing, depending on how much is available (see panel opposite).
At Hume Weir, we cross again to NSW and join the Riverina Highway for Corowa, a town of grand Federation-era buildings that demands a glimpse for its role in the river's history. Corowa hosted a 1902 conference of the federal, NSW, Victorian and South Australian governments to grapple with the question of saving and using the Murray's waters for the common good. The quest continues 106 years later. An agreement between the governments in March this year finally allowed Canberra to take control of a river that has been managed (and sometimes mismanaged) by the states; it has also been hailed as historic.
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