Up close with vibrant colours of Riverland’s impressive scenery

“After the 2022 floods, there  was clutch after clutch of chicks. It was like Mother Nature flicked her switch to turbo,” says our guide, Cathy.

“Here in the anabranch of Ral Ral Creek. we’re in prime wetland territory – a rich, native fish habitat and a highway for migratory birds,” she adds, scanning the sky.

“Oh, spot the Australasian darter bird, just flying over the nesting spoonbill.”

Our tender tilts.

So captivating is the continual narrative and so engaging are the sights and sounds, it’s like a moving ‘school of the river’.

You’d think we were environmental science students out on a field trip or conservationists on a research expedition. But this is no school or university course.

Highly lauded, multi award- winning Murray River Trails is South Australia’s quintessential Riverland ecotourism operator.

A member of Great Walks of Australia and Australian Wildlife Journeys, its passionate nature guides lead immersive, unrushed wanderings on every four-day Murray River Walk, with a solar-powered houseboat to boot.

Continually refreshed, the itinerary can change as quickly as the river.

Launching from the town of Renmark is like zooming out from a yesteryear postcard where PS Industry hugs the banks. A long-retired snag remover from her early-1900s heyday, she also helped with the construction of the Murray’s locks, weirs and barrages.

Renmark’s riverfront went from riches to rags during the last major flood. But now suited and booted in newly sewn blooms and walkways, the foreshore today also comes planted with picnicking families and dog-walkers lapping up Riverland life as if it were a film set.

“Of course, we are now in the age of recreation and tourism, but back in 1830, the Murray River was a completely different scene,” Cathy says.

“When Charles Sturt was commissioned to check out the inland rivers, he set off from Sydney for Gundagai Station with bullock and dray, and a whaleboat in pieces. Reaching the Murrumbidgee River, he and his men began rowing.”

However, after failing to find the ship they hoped to meet at the Murray Mouth, they turned back, rowing upstream.

“They travelled a total journey of more than 2900km over 77 days,” Cathy reports.

Luckily for recreationists, we simply sit back and cruise to the beginning of our guided hikes, absorbing the majesty, tranquillity and ecology that this ancient waterway so marvellously showcases.

River deep, rampart high.

Our days blend into an artistic palette of colours curated by nature, in an outback setting trilling with birdsong.

Oxbow creeks tuck beneath blankets of miniature-leafed azolla fern. Mature box trees perch on higher terraces, looking down on river red gums admiring their own reflections in limpid lagoons. And mosses and lichens sculpt morning dew into webs of glassy beads.

Commonly seen in this Riverland Ramsar Wetland and between the Mallee and valley are white-necked herons, pink-eared ducks, straw-necked ibis and banded stilts, where they sip, feed, frolic and breed.

Forest ambles allow sharp eyes to clock chestnut-rumped thornbills and white-browed babblers.

Along the river itself, cormorants flaunt their drying wings beneath blue skies flecked with yellow rosellas and red-rumped parrots. We marvel at acrobatic welcome swallows and ogle at dragonflies preparing to mate. And pelicans illuminate the trees like black and white lanterns.

Lesser-trodden trails skirt us around river mussel-shell middens.

We find a picturesque Aboriginal ring tree that forms a natural window onto distant cliffs.

We hear how the original owners  of the land would fashion bark into raft-like canoes.

Using rocks to carve and hammer, they’d work together, making it a  family celebration.

“Bark would be positioned in such a way so that as it dried out, it curled to a specific degree,” Monica says.

“It was a fine art.”

Then comes that sweet siren.

“Let’s have morning tea here,” she calls. “Pull up a log.”

Sofas of the fallen trunk kind become our temporary tearoom where homemade cakes with tea and coffee magically appear from a backpack.

Other rambles reveal temporary, ever-changing landscapes.

“This brand-new sandbar emerged during the floods,” Cathy says.

“The pop-up beach is a great rest stop for rowers and kayakers.”

And now, strippers! With hiking gear (and modesty) thrown to the wind, in we slip for a languid loll. And a yarn.

Cathy grew up on the river.

“The willows we see are introduced,” she begins.

“In the 1990s, there was a concerted effort to get rid of them. It failed.

“But as kids, they were wonderful to play in.”

Nostalgia strokes her face as she wallows on her back.

A sunrise climb to Headings Cliff proves chilly, but ripe with petrichor from overnight rain. As we ascend its cool, misty sandhills, the Murray’s blissful blur of baby blue hues is revealed.

Orange-tinged hoodoos appear like shadow puppets performing a tableau until the navy sky above them becomes airbrushed with high-cirrus clouds.

Now revealing its true colours, towers of millennia-old cliffs provide an MRI-like window into the Murray’s layers of time.

Its nutrient-rich topsoil, the youngest layer, is why citrus fruit, avocados, olives and almonds are prize crops.

“The darker red and green layers are courtesy of ancient Lake Bungunnia: a freshwater lake from 700,000 years ago that left behind a sediment known as Blanchetown clay,” Monica says.

She explains how the yellow Karoonda clay at the base of the cliff dates 2.3 million years. Such timelines bend the brain.

High River at its mooring

Riverboat afloat

Hiking days are rewarded by lazy nights luxuriating on High River, the family-owned company’s houseboat.

Chef-designed meals of sous-vide kangaroo fillet, Murray Cod chowder and lemon myrtle-marinated duck are menu highlights.

Dishes come marinated in Andrew Fielke bush spices, deftly paired with Riverland wines until we bed down in bright white ensuite bedrooms.

When we wake to scrambled eggs dressed in the saltbush leaves that we foraged for the day before, we understand forest-to-plate breakfasting.

Our journey culminates at historic Wilkadene Woolshed Brewery. The restaurant is backed by mural-painted shearing sheds and fronted by mature gums raucous with corellas.

Riverside tables echo with chatter, over Bunyip Reach lamb cutlets and kale fritters barbecued by our very own guides. It’s like a family lunch at home.

Be it the native trees, the  effervescent birdlife, the timeless striated cliffs, or the produce plated up before you, a journey with Murray River Trails changes you inside.

 Visit murrayrivertrails.com.au