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.

We return to the victorian side, to spend our first night in Rutherglen. A former gold rush town, Rutherglen is now one of the world's leading fortified-wine regions and boasts fine restaurants and cafes as well as 19 wineries, one of the oldest of which is All Saints Estate.

Eliza Brown (of the Brown Brothers wine family from Milawa in Victoria's King Valley), chief executive of All Saints, leads us to the river lapping at the back of the vineyard at Federation Bridge. A thick pipe leads straight from the Murray to the winery's water pump. "I suppose vineyards aren't the healthiest thing in the world for the Murray River," says Brown.

In 2007, the local water authority cut All Saints' allocation to one-fifth of its previous 440 megalitre allowance, or 400 Olympic-sized swimming pools, of irrigation water a year. A staff competition came up with the water-saving idea of capturing "back flush" water from the pumps and using it to water All Saints' gracious gardens and 120-year-old elm-tree driveway leading to its cellar door, an 1880s Scottish-style castle built from bricks made in a kiln that arrived on the Murray.

Yet gazing across the river here gives me no sense of a crisis. Although we have travelled less than one quarter of its distance, its regulated flow has it looking much as it will continue to look until we enter its lower reaches in South Australia: full, wide, a yellowish-brown colour and flanked on both banks by towering native river red gums.

Morris Wines nearby relies on capricious rainfall rather than irrigation, yet the family has survived, making excellent muscats and tokays since 1859. David Morris, the fifth-generation manager and winemaker, looks on the Murray as an old friend. He reckons it is now as high or higher than when he swam in it as a kid 35 years ago: "It wasn't so important to keep every drop back then. The authorities are more judicious in how they regulate it now."

If the Murray's water levels surprise me, the dry country along the road to Echuca shocks me. The rain back at Tom Groggin was but a forlorn hope. Still two-thirds of the river's length away from its mouth, this aridity will be our companion for the rest of the way. Yet it is easy to forget the drought at Echuca. It is now the Murray's biggest recreation town – a far cry from the 1880s when it was the river's busiest working hub, in a vast trading network of paddle steamers.

The grand days live on in a restored section of Echuca's old wharf, complete with lively bars and fine restaurants. We spend a night on one of the 50 commercial houseboats that draw visitors to Echuca for a self-drive exploration of the Murray. Our timing, though, is a bit unfortunate as the town is being taken over by thousands of people pouring in for a water- skiing carnival. A week later and our visit would have coincided with a jazz, food and wine festival, rather more our style. Deluxe 2, our comfortable, four-bedroom houseboat, owned by Rich River Houseboats, stays moored by the bank. But the sheer calm and silence of the setting at night makes for a perfect sleep. And it is magical to be woken by kookaburras, and to stare at ducks paddling up to the houseboat.

Over coffee on the old wharf at the Star Hotel, a pub that looks like ∫a set from a movie Western, the speedboats zooming past suggest a bitter irony. "Farmers have to pay more and more for Murray water now," comments Andrew MacKenzie, who owns Rich River Houseboats with his wife, Jacinta. "But there's more than enough flowing past here for we recreation users."

We leave Echuca to the skiers and head west past Torrumbarry, the weir that holds the Murray full at Echuca. The little town of Barham offers the cheering sight of a snapshot from the Murray's confident heyday as a river highway: its 1904 cast-iron suspension bridge is one of the oldest on the river.

I'm itching to reach an even more symbolic place about 130km further on: the junction of the Murray and the Murrumbidgee, one of its two great tributaries. A bumpy dirt road barely signposted off the highway, almost midway between Swan Hill and Mildura, takes us to the spot on the Murray's south bank looking directly across to where Charles Sturt in his whale boat rowed down the narrow Murrumbidgee in 1830 into the Murray. He pronounced it a "broad and noble river". In the late afternoon sun, the waterways' meeting place seems so unspoilt that I imagine Sturt could have rowed in yesterday. Instead, two men in an outboard tinny suddenly putter past, the only other humans in coo-ee.

At mildura we are two-thirds of the way into our journey, still 878km from the Murray's mouth. The town has wide boulevards and a mixture of Federation-era and 1930s buildings, and with its handsome rows of tall palm trees and young people thronging its bars and cafes, I half expect to find a beach on the edge of town. However, we're almost 500 kilometres from the nearest ocean.

We join a Sunday morning cruise on the P.S. Melbourne, probably no better way of discovering how the Murray really works. Built as a snag-clearing vessel in 1912, the Melbourne (the last surviving steam-driven paddle steamer working from Mildura) has since been converted to look like something straight out of Show Boat. Neil Hutchin, the driver, and John Lauder, the engineer, clearly love their work. Flying the Murray River flag, we cruise down to Lock 11, built in 1927, with a blast of the ship's whistle as we approach. The gates close, we drop about four metres, and then come out into a vast expanse of water, covered in ducks and blue cranes. Hutchin assures the passengers that the Murray has always flowed since the locks were built, "contrary to some of the stuff you read in city newspapers". Lauder stokes the beautifully maintained red cast-iron engine with wood to produce steam from the Murray's water to turn the paddles, explaining that the boat functions "basically like a kettle".

Mildura owes its existence largely to three enterprising immigrants. The Chaffey brothers, George and William, arrived from California in the 1880s and selected the town's unlikely site by the Mallee desert, near the junction of the Murray and Darling Rivers, to launch Australia's irrigation system. Little did they know what environmental traumas they were to unleash a century later.

Their colossal 1891 cast-iron pumping station, still standing in its original brick housing on the edge of town, is a wonder to behold. Built in Birmingham, England, and shipped along the Murray to Mildura, the station was lovingly restored by the Sunraysia Steam Preservation Society and re-commissioned for demonstrations in 1995. Beneath its dark-green turbines lies its original bronze plaque, declaring that it was built for the "Mildura Irrigation Colony".

But the man who has done more to put modern Mildura on the map is an Italian, Stefano de Pieri. Since he arrived in Mildura from Melbourne 17 years ago, de Pieri has blazed a culinary trail with his landmark restaurant Stefano's, at the Grand Hotel, bringing upmarket dining with local produce and excellent wine lists to country Australia. Stefano's is an unmissable experience for any serious visitor to the Murray.

De Pieri himself is more than an Italian chef. He stood for the Upper House in the most recent Victorian state elections. He helped create Murray River Salt, a scheme to intercept saline water from entering the Murray and turn it into gourmet salt flakes (you can buy them at 27 Deakin, his bakery around the corner from the Grand Hotel). De Pieri and his wife, Donata, started the Mildura Writers' Festival, an annual July event whose speakers have included authors such as J.M. Coetzee and Clive James. And they helped launch Chances for Children, a scheme to help disadvantaged country kids further their education.

We meet de Pieri by the Murray, the morning after dining at Stefano's on his quail ravioli, asparagus risotto and other exquisite offerings. He is wearing his trademark Italian Borsalino panama hat. Explaining why this river region has inspired his creative energy, he draws me a quick map covering the catchment area of our journey so far: the Snowy Mountains, the wool districts north of the Murray and the Mildura of the Chaffeys. "There you have the building of Australia," de Pieri says. "I realised Mildura was at the epicentre, and if I could create a food space there, well and good."

Now, he worries that his beloved Murray is being "trashed" by too many people pulling too much water from it. "I must confess I am beginning to dry up myself," he adds. "This drought has really knocked a lot of us around. It's really testing our ability to come up with new ideas."

We stop at Wentworth, 35km west of Mildura, for another Charles Sturt discovery: the confluence of the Darling River, which flows through western NSW from Queensland, and the Murray. Without its own regulatory system, the Darling almost emptied in the latest drought. Now, after big rains in NSW and ∫Queensland in late 2007, it flows beautifully. The Darling is a milky coffee colour to the Murray's light olive green, almost as if an artist had kept them separate with a brush. I'm not the first person to make this observation. In his book Cooper's Creek, Alan Moorehead writes that Burke and Wills, on their ill-fated 1860 expedition to northern Australia, found the Darling near the Murray junction "rising and café-au-lait in colour." Little seems to have changed almost 150 years later.

Just beyond wentworth we cross our last state border into South Australia near Renmark, the other desert town the Chaffeys founded for their irrigation empire. The road between Mildura and Renmark is a sad one. We pass farm after farm of wine grapes, most struggling and some dying on the vines. "For Sale" signs are everywhere.

Once part of Australia's irrigated dried fruits industry, many farmers here switched to wine grapes in the 1990s in a bid to cash in on the wine boom. Then came a glut, falling grape prices, the drought and cuts to their water allocations.

I realise just how much is demanded of the Murray when we take a morning's side trip to the Chowilla Floodplain, a network of creeks feeding the river north of Renmark. Despite being an internationally recognised wetland, it is now so dry that many of its 200-year-old river red gums are dying. Steve Brown, a ranger with the National Parks and Wildlife Service, takes us to Werta Wert, a site where the authorities have recently released Murray water to mimic the floods that once covered the plain and kept the trees and their ecosystems alive.

To farmers further upstream, this must seem like water wasted just to keep outback trees alive. But these "environmental flows", as they are called, are surely just as important as the needs of the farmers, wine producers and recreation users we have passed already.

We stop for lunch near Kingston-on-Murray at Banrock Station, one of Australia's most successful wineries, whose wetlands facing the Murray have been dry since January 2007. "We're pushing an entire ecosystem into a stress phase it has never experienced before," explains Tony Sharley, Banrock's manager. But Banrock Station is better placed to cope than others. Under the Murray system's cross-border trading scheme, it has bought water to irrigate its vines from a farmer on the Murrumbidgee in NSW, who calculated he could make more money by selling his water rights than by growing a crop.

From here, the Sturt Highway takes us across South Australia's south-east plains to Blanchetown, where the Murray turns south towards our journey's end. We spend our second last night in the restored 1870s homestead of Portee Station, a sheep property on the Murray. Blanchetown has the river's first (or last in our direction) lock and weir: for the final 270 km, the Murray flows naturally, without artificial regulation. Will it still look full to the brim?

At first, the answer seems to be yes. From Portee Station we take the high road, on the Murray's east side, past Swan Reach and Big Bend with spectacular views down to a sweeping river beneath cliffs whose ochre colours switch in the sunlight from orange to crimson and red. Outside Mannum, someone has hung a large, dead European carp from a red gum. It is a statement about a fish that was introduced to the Murray 40 years ago, to control plants choking farm dams, and is now the river's biggest pest.

Mannum is the murray's second main destination for houseboat explorers. We are in better luck here than at Echuca, and have the river largely to ourselves. We spend our last night aboard the Parachilna Sunset, a new two-bedroom vessel designed like a well-appointed inner-city apartment, with floor-to-ceiling glass walls that give us total connection with the river. The boat is the latest venture for Jane and Ross Fargher, who also own the Prairie Hotel at Parachilna in the Flinders Ranges. The Farghers join us on this trip and we take turns steering the boat at a leisurely pace, then tie up to a red gum on the bank 25km upstream and settle back for a delicious dinner Jane has prepared from her kitchen at the Prairie.

Next morning, the rising sun brings the ochre tones of the cliffs opposite our mooring alive. If I had a second week in hand, this is where I would spend it.

The Murray mostly disappears from view as we drive on our last leg through Murray Bridge, Tailem Bend and the wine town of Langhorne Creek. Finally, at Goolwa, we reach the mouth. But the brackish sight is a shock. I scoop up water to taste: it's as salty as the sea at Bondi Beach. We drive across to Hindmarsh Island and watch dredges working valiantly to stop the river's mouth silting up with sand.

Michael Veenstra, who runs a boat-cruise business at Goolwa with his father, Jock, tells us that half the berths at their 60-berth marina are now on dry land: the river level has fallen and salt levels have risen. "What we have now is an unnatural occurrence," says Veenstra. "The sea out there is higher than the river in here." Now I understand the gripes of South Australians who rely on the Murray, yet rightly complain that its users in the east have left little of the best water by the time it reaches them.

Unsettling though this contrast is with our start at Tom Groggin, it is hardly an anti-climax. The trip has been an unforgettable journey that has shown us the spirit of survival of both a river and the people who depend on it. In a week and a half, we have driven 2986 km. Subtract Sydney to Tom Groggin, and our journey from there almost exactly equals the Murray's length. Next time, I plan to take as long as I like, and do the trip by boat.