TAKETHE HIGH ROAD
Chances are if an Aussie doesn’t live near the coast, they cling to a river somewhere, and none is more significant to our lifestyle and economy than the mighty Murray. With headwaters in the Snowy Mountains, this great river wanders lazily along its 2506km course to its destination, the ocean at the Coorong in South Australia.
That the Murray is third only to the Amazon and Nile as the longest navigable river in the world is made possible through a series of locks built in the early nineteenth century. But everyone along its meandering path is thirsty for water, and by journey's end, it can sometimes be little more than a brackish pool.
The Murray sustains many of our largest inland cities and towns and is the lifeblood to the county’s food bowl of thousands of hectares of irrigated land. But along its course, it's a river of contrasts, and there might be no better way to see those extremes than a trip along its northern bank in the far west of New South Wales.
If the river were human, no doubt it would have laughed, then cried at the attempts of early European settlers to tame it. Aboriginal occupation had long thrived along its edges and around the many billabongs and wetlands where an abundance of wildlife sustained them even in drought.
We begin our journey in Wentworth, NSW, before motoring west along the Old Coach Road to Renmark in South Australia. Although the road distance without detours is only 163km, the river follows its own ancient course, winding and backtracking
