Qualla: Murray River

Murray River: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bahudhara, CC BY-SA 3.0. To the Ngarrindjeri people of its lower reaches, the Murray was made by a fish. In the Dreaming, the ancestor Ngurunderi chased a giant Murray cod named Pondi down the length of the country, and the great fish, swerving and thrashing to escape his spears, swept the river's channel and tributaries into being with its tail. It is a fitting origin for the strangest of great rivers. At 2,508 kilometres the Murray is Australia's longest, the spine of a basin draining one-seventh of the continent, and yet it is a curiously modest flow, carrying only a sliver of the water a river its size would hold anywhere else, prone to drying up completely in the worst droughts. Modest or not, it is the most important river in Australia, and the Ngarrindjeri were not wrong about its power.

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Image: Bahudhara | CC BY-SA 3.0

Murray River: The Fish That Made the River

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Scott Davis, CC BY 2.5. The story of Ngurunderi and Pondi is one of the oldest pieces of literature on the continent, and versions of it stretch across the enormous span of the Murray system. The Ngarrindjeri around Lake Alexandrina tell of Ngurunderi paddling his bark canoe in pursuit of the cod, who c...

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Image: Scott Davis | CC BY 2.5

Murray River: A River Older Than the Mountains

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Berichard, CC BY 2.5. The Murray's geological story is a saga of upheaval. Between 2.5 million and half a million years ago, the river didn't reach the sea at all; it drained into Lake Bungunnia, a vast inland freshwater sea covering 33,000 square kilometres, formed when earth movements dammed the riv...

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Image: Berichard | CC BY 2.5

Murray River: The Border and the Naming

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jacqui Barker, CC BY 2.0. When Europeans arrived they could not even agree on what to call it. Hamilton Hume and William Hovell crossed it near present-day Albury in 1824 and named it the Hume, after Hume's father. Six years later Charles Sturt, having floated down the Murrumbidgee, reached the same water...

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Image: Jacqui Barker | CC BY 2.0

Murray River: The Age of the Paddle Steamers

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mattinbgn, CC BY-SA 4.0. For roughly seventy years, the Murray was a working highway. The first paddle steamers churned upstream on the spring flood of 1853, the Lady Augusta reaching Swan Hill and the Mary Ann pushing toward Echuca, and within a decade dozens of shallow-draught steamers and barges worke...

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Image: Mattinbgn | CC BY-SA 4.0

Murray River: A Lifeline Under Strain

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hullwarren, CC BY-SA 3.0. The modern Murray is plumbed, locked, and fought over. From 1915 the three Murray states agreed to build storage dams, and a chain of locks and weirs followed, while barrages near the mouth hold back the sea. The river was inverted: its natural winter-spring floods and summer dry...

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Image: Hullwarren | CC BY-SA 3.0