The Murray River holds a special place in many hearts and minds of locals. The river brings life to the landscape and the people who live and rely on her.

After a trip down the Murray River from Barham to Wellington in South Australia and back, retired land surveyor David Laughlin was left with reflections of natural beauty, lessons from the past and current management by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority.

The first leg of the journey saw two local couples, David and Anne Laughlin and Colin and Linda Bray, joined by former locals, Iggy and Rhonda Mays, embarking on a six-week trip down to Wellington, with David boating back solo.

David was fascinated with the changes in the landscape, the number of river ‘shacks’ in South Australia, the diversity of birds and even some old friends.

“I hadn’t seen a water rat since I was a kid,” said David.

“When you get downstream, they’re everywhere and they are cheeky little buggers.

“I’d left a dead carp on the back of the boat, I thought I’d use it for yabby bait in the morning but I got up and it was gone. Later, when I lifted my motors up in the morning to check them, I found he’d had his feed and left the remains.”

David said it was a great experience, from the social side of travelling down as a group to coming back solo, taking in the wildlife, trees and landscapes.

“Some of the river, I never knew it existed like that.

“You drive to South Australia and you go along the ridges and you look down at the river and you know it’s the Murray you’re looking at, but you don’t grasp its 4-kilometre-wide cliffs and the river just goes in between.

“You’ll be going along and it will be a dead end, and the water has hit this cliff and done a right-hand turn. First time we saw that it was just extraordinary.

“I’d heard about the shacks on the river from Morgan downstream, but they’re not shacks, they’re mansions, some of them multi-million-dollar mansions.

“We couldn’t actually find a place to park because they go for miles and miles.

“From Morgan down, the river completely changed in how it’s treated by people and governments and what they have let them do.

“A lot of them were devastated by last year’s floods, and even though they go on about the massive flows, that was nothing compared to the 1956 heights there.

“I couldn’t believe the amount of water down there; it goes back forever. There’s the 4km between the cliffs, then there’s creeks that go off and there’s so many areas just full of water, and funnily enough, a lot of the trees in there are dead or falling.”

David said the tree density was similar to the thick overgrown saplings you get after a flood around here. Having reached Wellington, David and Anne remained in Wellington while their travelling companions crossed Australia’s only freshwater estuary to Goolwa. The risk of increasing winds meant the journey would be unsafe to take the Laughlins’ vessel further.

The Brays’ and Mays’ boats were loaded onto trailers at Goolwa and returned home, along with Anne, leaving David to sail solo home. The 9-10km cruising speed downstream had been reduced to 6km, with a 50 per cent greater fuel burn against the river flow, although the wind initially gave David a push.

“It’s the same effect the wind has on a rice bay,” said David.

“You have to be careful when you’re tied up.

“The wind will blow the water from Wellington right up to Mannum and it drops about a foot overnight just from the wind.”

While South Australian lobbyists and the Murray-Darling Basin Authority maintain the SA lower lakes were always fresh, a mountain of evidence would suggest otherwise. Those include geography, archaeology, historical accounts from first nations, early explorers, river boats, fishing fleets, and even modern-day work from Professor Peter Gell and investigative journalist Ken Jury all point to an estuarine nature of the system.

David’s long history of surveying water projects leads to some straightforward observations, pointing out the artificial height the Murray-Darling Basin Plan is aiming to hold the lakes at is a losing battle.

“Because we’re running (the lakes) 75cm above sea level, the river depth is actually 20 metres below the sea in places below the last lock.”

A recent interview with Ken Jury highlighted the incredible sea penetration into the lakes even with the huge flows across the border. Ken’s monitoring of EC levels in the lake demonstrates that the target of below 100mg/ litre were eclipsed by readings as high as 50,000mg/litre.

As David headed upstream, the solo journey afforded him plenty of time to make observations.

“The main obvious problem upstream of Robinvale was the bank erosion and tree fall in the narrow sections of river, where it seems that the river is struggling to carry the current flow regime.

“In some areas, trees have fallen across the majority of the width of the river, particularly upstream of Swan Hill. It is still passable, but further tree falls may change that.”

As the Wakool River was once the path of the Murray 30,000 years ago, the current Murray upstream of the Wakool junction is comparatively a small river.

“One of the main things I realised more clearly is how little I know of the river areas outside our lived experience.

“I suspect that is also the case of many of the politicians and bureaucrats that are making decisions on how the river is run.

“The trip has made me question more how the river is managed. I can’t work out why even more water is required for the environment, but will continue to search out.

“I have tried to contact the MDBA by way of email and phone since we returned home, at least five times over almost a 3-week period, but haven’t been able to get a response to a very basic question; has the river itself been evaluated in sections with a ‘Report Card’, as is shown for other sites such as Hattah, Gunbower Forest, the Coorong etc.”

Listening to David describe the natural beauty of the river, it’s hard not to get the itch to see it for myself!

This article appeared in The Koondrook and Barham Bridge Newspaper, 14 December 2023.