Wide Open – Day 2 – All that irrigated ag

25 May 2026 – 74 kms – Tocumwal, NSW to Barmah, VIC

Yorta Yorta/Bangerang Country

The bed creaks as I shift my weight and swing my legs to a sitting position. The floor then creaks under my weight as I stand and then tiptoe my way to the toilet. I quietly brush my teeth and pack the panniers in the darkness of predawn. It will be the first of many dark starts on this tour.

I slowly slip open the sliding glass door and carefully lift the bike, carry it down the steps and lean it against the picnic table. I slip on the panniers and strap on the sleeping pad. I’m being quiet so I don’t wake that screaming kiddo and have to listen to that again as I prep the bike.

I’m rolling away at first light, even before the birds start in. If you’ve ever camped along a river in Oz, you know that the kookaburras, magpies, currawongs, ravens and any and all types of parrots are LOUD. There is no dawn chorus. It is a dawn cacophony dominated by screaming parrots. I get away before that begins.

I work my way through flogged forest full of bog holes where the 4WD, motorbike and ATV people have had fun playing in the mud and tearing up the forest floor. I dip and weave and swerve and curve around all the boggy bits.

We exit out of the forest on a gravel road that will, someday in the future, be paved over with a bypass of Strathmerton. But for now, it’s just a quiet little lane that follows the rail line.

We come upon a memorial cross for Peter Chambers. The plaque indicates the anniversary of his death is coming up on the 29th. It will mark 14 years since, I assume, he got taken out by a train. I suppose he was an unlucky bloke – either unlucky in that he got hit crossing the rail line after tending to the crops on the other side, or unlucky in life and genetic predisposition to mental illness and this seemed a quiet place to go. The plaques suggest he was in his late 50s and left behind a partner and family who miss him dearly.

We turn off on Old Coach Road and enjoy this one lane meander through large red gums and black box – the best and almost only remnant vegetation we will see today. Kangaroos bounce over fences and through this open grassy woodland. It’s a reminder of what this landscape once looked like.

Sadly, Old Coach Road eventually ends and spits us out on a terribly corrugated white gravel road. Oh, I’ve ridden white gravel alluvium all over this state, from Bairnsdale to Avoca and beyond. And it is always slow going, sandy, corrugated shit.

We vibrate and bounce along for too long. We meet one car. It’s an old lady in an old car that I play chicken with for some time. I’m on my side of the road, just to the inside of the right-hand tyre line in the road. It’s the least corrugated bit.

However, that old lady wants to drive right down the middle and use that line, too. Nup. You can move on to your side of the road, old woman. Corrugations are annoying in/on any vehicle, but they are much better handled in a car or truck than on a bicycle. So I just keep riding my line and she eventually moves over and gives me a dirty look as she goes by. I return the favour.

We corrugate our way down to the Murray Valley Highway, cross it by a Telstra box and then ride out into all the irrigated ag on the red sandy soils.

It all just disgusts me so much. We desperately need to expand the water buybacks and contract the industry so that the Murray River and the ecosystems it supports have any chance of survival in the future. No more rice, no more cotton, no more general allocations for exported produce. Yes, there will be people worse off. But that is the nature of change – ask the people who used to work for Ford and Holden or those that will lose their jobs to AI. This industry is no different. We can still produce all the fruit and veg Australia needs with industry contraction.

Or at least return the volume of water that scientists say is required to give the river a chance. We’re not even returning a third of the water that modelling (that didn’t even consider climate change scenarios) in 2010 showed would sustain (not improve) habitat. The latest Basin Plan review didn’t even update the modelling – because I think they were too scared of what it would show. It’s not 1910 or 1950 anymore – we can’t manage the river and its water like it’s still the 20th century. We need to face the realities of the environmental decimation and the future of climate change.

I pedal through all the ag, over sandy hills and down muddy dry weather only roads, viewing all the emerging crops and feeling my blood pressure rise when we pass a turf farm. Turf! The only turf that should be allowed anywhere is a sporting field these days. The future is so bleak and yet we proceed forth with our heads stuck in the sand.

(My view on all of this becomes further hardened on this ride as I pedal along the Darling River – if the Murray is very, very sick, the Darling is critically unwell and on life support. The youtube video below is done by one of Australia’s best storytellers. I got onto him watching his videos on trail running in the high country. But his Bad River series is very well done and this video illuminates some of the Murray River’s issues much better than I can. It’s entertaining and well worth the time to watch).

Eventually, my chosen route gets stuck in the sand, too. I’d hoped to take a back way into Barmah, but the little road just gets way too sandy. I’m not against pushing the bike through sand, but not for multiple kilometres. There’s 11 kays to Barmah that way and who knows how much is sand.

So I backtrack and take the last track we passed back to the south. This is sandy in bits, too, but it is rideable. Squirrely and loose, and requiring some concentration, but rideable.

I actually enjoy this – I’m always looking to improve my bike handling skills and this is a reminder of how to ride sand. The good thing about sand riding is that you can just jump from the bike if you start to dump it. Or if you go down, you go down on something soft. I gear down and spin hard and we make our way through.

The main road is not too busy at this time of day on this day of the week. And we have a 5-10kph tailwind. So it’s not a terrible or tense pedal on into town. Boring as beeswax, but progress is not difficult.

We roll into Barmah by lunchtime. The rain was meant to come about now, hence our early start to try to beat it, but it’s sunny and there’s no sign of rain. It’s out there, though, it’s just all formed off to the east of here. We’ve dodged it for today.

There is not much to Barmah. It’s a general store/roadhouse, a pub, two caravan parks and an aboriginal land council office, as well as a cultural centre that is being built with funds provided post-Treaty signing. It sits on a couple bends of the river that actually place the town to the north of the river but still in VIC.

I head down to the Barmah Bridge Caravan Park. We’ll stay there two nights. There is meant to be a lot of rain tomorrow, too. We can either wait it out here, or if it misses us again, then I can do the ride in the forest that I missed out doing on my 2022 tour because it was all under water.

I chat to the caravan park owner for a bit. He said the floods closed them down for about 3 months in 2022. The flood came through the forest and not up from the river bank initially (I’ll explain why tomorrow). It flooded all of the annual sites, but they were able to contact all of the owners and get ahold of massive heaters, so they were able to get all of those caravans and annexes dry before the mould set in.

The flood caused him a lot of damage to drainage pipes and the amenities/laundry block, but the onsite cabins stayed dry. He was up for 48 hours at one point maintaining the sandbags on the top of the levee, but eventually the water broke through. The local council was of little help during and after. It was really just the community coming together and responding to whomever needed help at that moment.

Post-flood, a Forest Fire Management Victoria team came in with equipment and provided some assistance. Locals and the annual site holders pitched in. However, the government grants were all aimed at larger operators and he didn’t qualify for much. He thinks he got about $3000 in total, but replacing the commercial washing machine in the amenties block was $17,000 in itself. He’s still doing flood repair projects bit by bit even now. He thinks there are some levee upgrades on the cards which will be helpful but still won’t stop the biggest floods.

Of course this is interesting to me because I’ve just done two disaster resilience project management contracts and spent the last year neck-deep in critical infrastructure resilience assessments. It’s always interesting to me to see how policy and funding settings play out on the ground before, during and after an event.

The rain never comes today. Areas get soaked further east and along the route I took yesterday. But we stay dry.

We break out the stove and cook up our first lentils and rice dinner of the trip. I get so sick of this by the end of a ride, but the first time I cook it up it always reminds me that ‘yes, we really are on the road again’. Yippeee!!