Road trip – Murray’s Mouth

Leaving the Adelaide Hills it wasn’t an over taxing drive to reach Mount Gambier that night and there was time to pull over occasionally at whatever took our fancy. The first place we pulled up was where the Murray River empties into Lake Alexandrina at Wellington. Now the locals and the SA tourist mob may disagree but I don’t believe that this is any well-known tourist spot; what motivated me to check out this spot was the debate over the last few years on the Murray Darling Basin Plan.

 

The plan was finalised at end of last year with no one completely happy with the outcome other than glad that they could move onto other things from a prolonged debate over many years. As a member of the Australian Environment Foundation I was aware of their Rivers Need Estuaries campaign. A very rough summary of the AEF argument was that massive amounts of mega litres was to be taken from upstream irrigators under the MDBP possibly destroying the economic and social futures to keep the lower lakes, Lake Alexandrina & Lake Albert, in the unnatural state of being continually freshwater. That in the 1940’s barrages were built to keep sea water out of the lower lakes and prior to this the lower lakes were an estuary system that changed from freshwater in wet seasons with the Murray running and it drier years the seawater coming into the system. The AEF sought to remove the barrages which would have meant that irrigators around the lower lakes who since the 1940’s made use of the continual source of suitable water would lose out but AEF argued that it was better to fully compensate the few rather than drastic cuts to much larger productive areas upstream. I won’t bore you with any more, if interested go the Rivers Need Estuaries link and to this speech by Dr Jennifer Marohasy to the Sydney Institute.
 

           What did we see; the Murray was running high and from the wet years 2010 and 2011 Lake Alexandrina from a distance looked as if it was full. Where we crossed the river on the ferry the land was very low lying. As a farmer the salt lakes didn’t inspire me. There certainly far better land upstream in SA that was being irrigated. But this was only one spot on a very big lake system; I was only an interstater blowing by and no doubt influenced by state parochialism.

I gained a brief SA perspective that afternoon when I stopped for a prearranged coffee with a couple of online contacts in the seaside town of Robe. South Aussie’s feel that they have improved their water effientcies dramatically over the last decade especially upgrading infrastructure and they were not using a greater amount of water and it was time for the States upstream to do likewise. BTW if you travelling the Princess Highway on route to see the Great Ocean road make the detour to Robe and even stay a while, we were very pleasantly surprised in our 1 hour stopover.

The other stop we made that day was a lookout on a mini peninsular with views of the Coorong. The day we were there didn’t do any justice to what is by all accounts a very special spot. If you need to be enlightened to what the collective conscientious within the car of the best description to the smell; SA tourism would like you not to ask.

 

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