Murray River
Australia's longest river, lifeline of a parched continent
The Murray is Australia's longest river and the central drain of the world's driest inhabited continent. It rises in the snowfields of the Australian Alps, near Mount Kosciuszko, then meanders for thousands of kilometers across a vast flat interior with almost no fall, forming much of the border between New South Wales and Victoria before reaching the Southern Ocean in South Australia. Together with its great tributary the Darling, it waters the agricultural heart of the nation.
The Murray runs about 2,508 kilometers, but its character is defined by how little it drops along the way — for hundreds of kilometers it barely descends, looping in slow billabong-fringed bends across the plains. It joins the Darling at Wentworth, drawing on a basin that sprawls across four states and territories. Near its end the river passes through a string of shallow lakes and the Coorong lagoon before squeezing out at the small, sediment-choked Murray Mouth, which must be dredged to stay open to the sea.
For the Aboriginal nations of the basin the river system has been a source of food and meaning for tens of thousands of years. Since European settlement it has been locked, dammed and pumped for irrigation on a scale that the dry climate can barely sustain. The Murray-Darling Basin produces a large share of Australia's food, but over-extraction, drought and salinity have repeatedly left the river struggling to reach the sea, making water allocation one of the country's most bitter political fights.