THE CORD
"You came from where?" asked a lady standing on a short, wooden jetty. Behind her, sat the rest of her family eating afternoon tea, but she hadn't directed the question at them. She had posed it to the end of her jetty. There, bobbing in the small swell of the windblown Murray River, sat two bedraggled men in long yellow/green kayaks.
"The top" they replied again, followed by a rushed, "Kosciuszko…The Snowy Mountains…near the ski resorts?" but the lady only looked more puzzled with each word. And fair enough. The two paddlers—Jason and myself—were well over 2,000km from the Snowy Mountains where our 76-day journey down the Murray River had started. Now, just outside the town of Wellington, there wasn't a hill in sight, the river was wide, and the smell of salt was in the air. We were almost to the sea.
The barrage of questions was an almost daily occurrence for us. Nearly every conversation consisted of, "How long have you been paddling for?", "I bet you're glad you aren't going the other way" And, "Aren't you sick of each other yet?". But, when we crossed the trip's halfway mark near Swan Hill, Jason noticed that people were more impressed with where we’d come from rather than where we were going.
And people's idea of the upper Murray also grew increasingly obscure. The lady standing on the jetty was a case in point; almost a year later, her comments have still stuck with me. She didn't know where the river had been, what it looked like or where it had been. Then again, neither did I before the trip. It made me realise—she was like most people along the Murray. They had grown to know their part of the river intimately. They knew the good fishing spots, the best places to camp and where the water had reached in the big floods of the past.
To them, their part of the river was the Murray. But rivers don't live in isolation. What happens in one part of the system affects everything. Rivers are not just a channel full of water; they connect vast landscapes, communities, and ecosystems. Through our journey, this was what Jason and I were trying to capture.
Our paddle down the Murray River was actually part of a joint project between the Australian National University's Fenner School of Environment and Society, and the ANU’s School of Music. The project—still ongoing—will create a public installation combining a music composition created from scientific
