Journeys to the heart: gathering the stories of the river country and its uncommon people
The Age
Saturday February 20, 2010
RIVERS nourish the soul. For a decade of summers the Murray River at Albury granted me and my family relief from the cruel heat that seeped in from the dry plains, bunched up as it rolled against the foothills of the Great Dividing Range and sucked moisture out of the valleys, crushing us in humidity.On evenings and weekends we sought sanctuary beneath big old gums lining the banks of the river and slipped into its cold water. The Murray at Albury in summer is swift and chilled because it gushes from the Hume Dam. It is a reversal of the natural order. Rivers are supposed to flow strongest in winter and spring and lose their power in the dry summer months.But the Murray has not been a natural river for a long time. It has been manipulated to feed irrigation channels, sustain orchards and crops and ensure the residents of Adelaide can still get a shower.Over the years, I've travelled all along the Murray and its unreliable sister, the Darling, and like just about everyone in the reporting trade, have written long tracts about the ailing nature of Australia's single great river system.It comes, then, as an embarrassment to admit that I never reached a serious understanding of that system, its rhythms, its foibles or the people and the environment that rely utterly upon it.It is an admission foisted upon me in the reading of a new and wonderful book written by a mate who spent months travelling the length of the Murray and the Darling, mostly in his little old Hyundai. He criss-crossed the inland delta of23 water catchments that converge and form the Murray-Darling, finding that only one, the Paroo, remains a wild river, undammed. He hiked through the high wilderness to find the elusive source of the Murray, drinking the sweet water "flowing icy clear over a bed of stones". And he reached the end of that mighty river system to discover that it no longer has the strength to flow into the sea. "After half a year of intermittent travel, it still shocks me," he writes. "Australia's major river system is collapsing. Parts of it are dying; parts of it are already dead."The River €” a Journey through the Murray Darling Basin is written by Chris Hammer, who has spent a quarter of a century reporting and making splendid documentaries around the world. He worked for a while for The Age in Canberra as an environmental writer.This new work, however, deserves a place among the Australian classics. Hammer has allowed the rivers and the earth and the people to wash into his pores. He has produced a laconic love story, a work of scholarship and history and a melancholy telling of an Australia becoming lost. He has captured and frozen a land crippled by drought with a broken river system running through it. Without labouring it, he poses a ghastly question: what if this is merely a portent of worse to come?Hammer leavens the writing with frequently hilarious anecdotes. Heading out to the Warrego, the first of the "outside" rivers west of the Darling, he stops at Fords Bridge €” a crossroads, three houses and a pub. "Out here beyond Bourke," writes Hammer, "the pubs lie low to the earth, cowering from the sun . . ." The publican, Andrea, seems surprised to have a customer and "she tells me Fords Bridge is experiencing a population explosion, growing from three to five."A friend of mine came out and there's a mad woman moved in down the road," she says. The other two are "a retired shearer and another bloke". Fords Bridge has an 18-hole golf course, offers Andrea, "but only if you go around it twice".Almost every page is populated with characters allowed to tell their stories. Heart-breaking stories, tall tales, stories of hope, stories of how it once was. Complicated stories, a lot of them, and Hammer lets them work their way into the reader's heart.Out at a remote property on the Culgoa, he asks an old grazier what became of the people who ran a neighbouring property."The manager's wife had cancer and she eventually passed away," the old fellow says. "And the husband, he was a very fastidious bloke. He got everything in order on the place, all neat and tidy and shipshape. And then he sat in his car and gassed himself. And there's been nobody living there since. They were very good neighbours. Very good." A metaphor, surely, for the river country.Hammer has also written a rattling good travel narrative. He wanders down tracks many of us will never go; he attends local shows and shire council meetings; he is invited to stay on sprawling properties and broken down farms; he feasts on the home cooking of women from the CWA, is drawn into long discussions all over the place and peruses ancient Aboriginal camp sites and fishtraps, guided by indigenous elders. An Australia unknown to many city dwellers emerges. Within it all, though, is his quest to understand how the inland waters have been corrupted.Sitting at the junction of the two mightiest rivers, the Murrumbidgee and the Murray, where no great city stands €” not even a shack €” and where the exhausted waters hardly move, he grows pensive."I've been thinking of the river as a uniting strand, the thread connecting the different landscapes of our lives: the mountains, the forests, the deserts, the lowlands and the sea," he writes. "But it's an old metaphor based on an old river, the river of the imagination. That river is no more, its crystalline waters polluted by politics, commerce and ideology . . . it's been dammed, managed and diverted. It's been measured, divided and allocated. It's been bought, sold and argued over."Yes. And as politicians stamp their feet about batts in the ceiling, the river has all but dropped out of the public debate.The River, published by Melbourne University Press ($34.99), goes on the shelves on March 1. Treat yourself to a journey to the heart.
© 2010 The Age