The Murray is a beautiful river. Wide and deep. As with rivers generally, you don’t have to get very deep for the water to become very cool and refreshing.
But it’s muddy. Some places worse than others.
I camped by the river at Mannum and after getting in and out of the river all day, by the end of the day I was covered in a layer of mud. Literally. It was so bad I had to have a complete wash before getting into my swag.
Talking to an ‘old timer’ in the pub in Milang, he told me that 50 years ago the river was clear. Sadly carp are taking over the river and have been for a while. They are threatening local species and causing damage to the river. As bottom feeders they churn up the mud, and can deprive the river of oxygen and cause algae blooms.
Though all the mud isn’t just because of carp, particularly in a place like Mannum. It’s also the number of boats and jetskis out on the river, churning up the mud even more. The Murray is a very popular place for boating, skiing and other watersports, and the bigger towns are visitor meccas. Mannum is one of the bigger, and more popular, places.
The Murray is also the place to go if you’re interested in locks. There’s a series of locks from Blanchetown in South Australia (Lock 1) to Euston in Victoria (Lock 15) which control the flow of the river. They are quite interesting to watch when a boat comes in. Depending on which side it comes from it either comes in to the lock, which then gets flooded to lift the boat to the level of the river on the other side, or if you’re going the other way it empties to drop the boat to the level of the river on the other side. While the locks were originally set up for the river trade up and down the river and to assist agriculture, they’re now also used to manage the environmental flow of the river, including fish migration.
There’s an additional lock near Hindmarsh Island at the mouth of the river to try to stop the salination getting from the ocean and the Coorong up the river. There’s a lot of seals live around that one. If you go through the lock to do a cruise along the Coorong you’ll see them sunbathing on the pylons, or swimming around the boat. I’ve done that cruise previously and it was very interesting. But the vegetarian lunch was a bit shit, and the vegan one even worse.
Part of the river from Swan Reach down to Mannum is a dark sky reserve. There is very little ambient light so the skies are amazing. Huge. You can see every star – and planet at the moment. I did a night sky tour while I was there and even though it’s not the best time of year for it, I got some fabulous photos of the milky way. But now my SD card’s damaged so I can’t download any of them 
Small towns & river crossings
One of the great joys of a trip along the Murray is the river crossings on the car ferries. You get to one side of the river where you wait for the ferry to come back across and pick you up and take you to the other side. I guess it’s cheaper to operate a punt than to build a bridge. And much nicer.
These ferries are usually at small towns or villages.
There’s so much to the Murray that is tied up in the small (and some not so small) towns along the way. They’re usually built around the ports where the boats ploughing the river trade stopped to drop off or pick up goods.
Most of the towns now have a museum, walking trail, or something showing the history of the town and their place in the river trade, and/or their agricultural history.
There is some, but not a lot of Indigenous history and culture, though the river was extremely important to Ngarrindjeri, Ngaiawang and Moorundie people, as well as others in the area.
