The Murray River courses 2520km from its cradle im the Australian Alps and is nourished by 11 major tributaries on its way to the Southern Ocean. Though restrained by a series of storages, weirs and barrages, it maintains the ancient charm and mystrey that lured explorers like Charles Sturt in the mid-1800s.

 Coursing through time.
Although the Murray River landscape began forming at least 60 million years ago (mya), the process sped up 32-12 mya, when global sea levels rose and a finger of salt water - the Murravian Gulf - extended into the western half of the Murray Basin. Sea levels waxed and waned from 12 to 2 mya, until the river was dammed south of present-day Swan Reach by earth movements, creating the giant freshwater lake, bungunnia. It covered some 33,000 sq. km before breaching about 700,000 years ago and carving a tract to the ocean.
After ice ages 300,000-150,000 and 55,000-30,000 years ago, a slab of the Murray Basin floor tilted toward the sea, forming a ridge up to 12 m high between today's towns of Deniliquin and Echuca.
This eventually diverted the Murray south. Another ice age 25,000-16,000 years ago brought drier connditions. Sea levels fell draamatically, causing the Murray to gouge deeply into the limestone laid downn by the Murraavian Gulf to form the Murray Gorge, between Overrland Corner and Mannum.

• 1824-25 expedition from Sydney to Port Phillip Bay, Victoria, shows explorers Hamilton Hume and William Hovell and their party ferrying supplies across the Murray. They had searched for four days for a narrow crossing-point and fashioned a boat from wattle boughs covered with a tarpaulin. In discovering the watercourse they named the Hume River, the pair were responsible for opening up grazing and farming land in NSW and Victoria.

  Visits
- Tourist Information Centre Ph:(03) 5021 4424
•  Rapid descent. Whitewater rafters negotiate the notorious Murray Gates in the river's upper reaches, between Tom Groggin station, 15 km south-west of Mt Kosciuszko, and Bunroy Creek. 

•  The Coorong, the wildly beautiful, a series of shallow salwater lagoons, stretches for 140 km south-east the Murray's mouth, endearing visitors with its prolific bird life, fascinating historic sites, and bushwalking and 4WD tracks.

•  The Riverland, one of Australia's most important horticultural regions, a 30,000 ha nursery of citus, grapevines, stone-fruits and nut orchards
•  Murray Bridge emerged as an important centre for trade and milk production.

•  Mildura, the promises of agricultural prosperity in the late 1880s. It hasn't disappointed.
One-third of Australia's wine grapes, 90 per cent of our dried vine fruit and one-third of our citrus is grown in this region.