E24 - Off to the Rush - Crossing the Murray

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A river in flood can be a teacher and a judge.  We open on the Murray–Darling Basin’s split personality—winter-and-snowmelt-fed Murray versus summer-storm-fed Darling—to explain why our 1852 trek met a swollen Murray while the Darling ran lower.  From there, the story flows to Gundagai, a town mapped neatly between a big river and an anabranch despite Wiradjuri warnings.  Earlier floods wrote clear messages in mud, yet officials kept the town on the plain until the Murrumbidgee rose in June 1852 and carried away lives, homes, and any illusion that tidy grids beat water.

At the heart of the tragedy are two names more people should know: Yarri and Jacky.  In bark canoes, they moved through wreckage and current to save at least 34 people.  We talk about why their recognition arrived late, how memory gets made, and why First Nations knowledge is not a footnote but the backbone of survival along the river.  Their skills—choosing landing trees, reading the pull of the main channel, timing the ferrying of loads—echo downstream in the practical rivercraft that helped our gold-rush convoy cross  the Murray at Gol Gol.

Then the journey turns mechanical, muddy, and mesmerising: empty hogsheads lashed under drays, a five-gallon keg on the pole for lift, long ropes ferried by canoe, and bullocks chest-deep on the inner floodplain dragging frames toward higher ground.  Plans to speed things up with a midstream buoy meet a firm no from the experienced river workers, and for good reason.  We sit with the friction between haste and safety, track a rogue horned bullock a mile downstream, and keep flour and port above four feet of brown water across a swamp one and a half miles wide.  Nearby at Euston, another party uses near-identical methods, proof that river wisdom travels faster than roads.

History adds a twist: Joseph Hawdon once crossed the Murray on a marked sandy bank “without much trouble.” Same river, different stage. That contrast underlines the theme running through every scene—hydrology sets the conditions, but listening to Country, choosing where to build, and respecting those who read water decide the outcome.  If you love Australian history, disaster lessons, and ingenious problem-solving, you’ll feel the pull of this story from the first eddy to the last rope knot.

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