27 May 2026 – 47 kms – Barmah to Moama via Goulburn River
Yorta Yorta/Bangerang Country
There is the pitter patter of rain outside early. Then the sun tries to break through. But that lasts less than 10 minutes. By the time we are packed up to leave, a low and misty stratus has set in. The guys go in a pannier to stay dry.
Our ride today will take us along the Murray and Goulburn Rivers. I want to see the approximate location where the Yorta Yorta/Bangerang ancestors dug through the low end of the Bama Sandhills to help the Murray River break through and drain the flooded land behind at some point in the distant past.
Today will be a short day. Combining today and tomorrow’s ride would be a 100km day. That distance is fine, but in winter, with short daylight hours, it is hard to do that distance, stop to see all I want to see AND get a tent set up before dark so it has time to dry out before the wet sets in again. So I’m breaking the day into two so that I don’t feel pressured to keep moving and then miss out on some things I want to see.
We head out of town on the main road to Nathalia. I suspect this might be a bit stressful later in the day, but it’s early enough that I don’t get any traffic squeezes. RidewithGPS and Google (I didn’t check komoot which is generally better than either of those) suggest I can get through on backroads near the river.
However, my Rooftop hardcopy map, which is much more reliable, says otherwise. So I stick to the main road for 8kms or so until we reach the turn-off to the gravel road. I don’t want to waste time and have to backtrack, as this misty drizzle stuff is supposed to turn to actual rain showers later. I’d like to be in town and under shelter before that occurs.
Stewarts Bridge Road is flat. It’s in good condition. We pedal through the quiet morning under that dingy grey sky. We’re looking for the big sandhill in the distance. Once we see that, we just need to find where the road intersects that.
The sandhills were formed by prevailing southwesterlies blowing sand and silt across the dry lakes and depositing that sediment on the north and east sides of the lakes. The sandhills get smaller as you go south, and presumably got low enough that it was feasible to cut through them with hand implements in the distant past. See pics of the sandhills at their high point below.
We only have to go a few kays up before I can see the line of the sandhill in the distance – it runs through cropped pasture and has a smattering of trees on top.
I love geomorphology because it is a story told in the landscape of how the things we see today came to be. Today’s ride is sort of the cultural anthropology version of geomorphology. It’s the story passed down through many generations of how history played out and the Yorta Yorta/Bangerang Nation’s role in what has come to pass.
It is quite easy to see where the sandhill is across the river. We just need to head downstream a bit. So we curve along through the scraggly regrowth and big river red gums. There are dispersed campsites through here – all empty. We see several scar trees.
And then we are there. The road rises gently and has a road cut of less than a metre into the sand. Across the river, the sandhill is a bit higher. The home and outbuildings of a property sit on top of it (which makes sense in a floodplain to use the highest ground). They have several dogs that are barking a whole bunch, which takes away from the experience a bit. But I ignore them and stand there for awhile, trying to absorb the thousands of years of history and geology that is sitting right there but not signposted in any way.
Yesterday, today and tomorrow, I am just dumbfounded at how little information and interpretive material is available about the Cadell Fault and its impact on the land and its people. If it’s one of the world’s best examples of how seismic activity changed the course of a river, and there are First Nations stories going back thousands of years related to that, you’d think you’d want to promote that.
From here, we ride on along the river until it heads off to the north for a few kms and we continue west. It’s a pretty scraggly regrowth forest with lots of small trees and not much undergrowth. Large river red gums tower above the road and river here and there, but it’s mostly flogged forest.
We see heaps of scar trees today – I can’t imagine how many there are out there in the forest if we can see dozens just from the road. There is one set of them near the ‘digging stick’ site where five trees in a circle all have scars at about the same height.
I wonder if this is more of a ceremonial site than a utilitarian site, given its proximity to the ‘digging stick’ site and the Old Maloga Mission (the story of this site and the move to Cummeragunja is a fascinating story about dispossession, civil rights, etc and worth a google. Here is a bit of information in the two links below):
Eventually we meet up with the Goulburn River. The Murray and the Goulburn join a few kms downstream – we’ve been riding in between them – sorta like riding the space between lines in a ‘lesser than’ symbol.
The forest gets thicker as we wind our way between the rivers. At one point, we riding on something like an isthumus of land where we can see the Goulburn River on our left and the Murray to our right – yet it will still be a few kilometres downriver that they actually join.
We pick up a bit more traffic through here and come to a road closed sign. Hmmmm….. I hope there is a suitable detour because it’s a long way to go all the way ’round on the NSW side.
Thankfully there is a detour. It takes us straight down into the heart of old Lake Kanyapella (the lake formed when the Goulburn River was dammed by the earthquakes). For a moment, I contemplate riding the levee bank and skipping the detour. But I don’t know how long the levee goes for and where I might get stuck if it ends before another cross road. So I stick to the detour and ride some crappy gravel with a bunch of other vehicles before we get down to a road heading west that is wider and eventually becomes paved.
We head into Echuca on the east side of town on Goulburn Road. The houses and the traffic picks up until we pass the water treatment plant and get into the actual town. It quickly becomes apparent to me that we are riding into town on the road that became the divide between the lucky and unlucky in the 2022 floods.
I see gutted houses, boarded up houses, brand new homes, fixed up homes and several homes rebuilt on stilts. There are heaps and heaps of homes for sale on both sides of the street. I don’t take any photos, as it feels a bit ‘disaster tourist’. But the recent history is still very obvious here, even though the water is all gone. Amazing to think that the street is still in such transition over 4 years later.
So back in 2022, Echuca flooded. The worst ever, except sometime back in the 1800s before any dams had been built. When I was there in early October that year, the lady at the information centre held few concerns. She didn’t think it would ever be worse than 1993, and she said Echuca rarely flooded because Echuca was on the ‘high’ side of the river and it always flooded Moama instead of them.
I was skeptical at the time. The Murray was already less than a foot or so from the top of the levee bank, and the Campaspe had already flooded a few homes. Echuca sits just below the junction of the Goulburn and Murray Rivers, and just at the junction of the Murray and Campaspe. All three of those rivers were experiencing record flooding.
Anyway, in 2022, I left Echuca the day before the Campaspe started swallowing houses and cutting roads. The Murray/Goulburn ended up doing so a week or two later.
At some point, the officials decided they needed to build a new, temporary levee to protect the bulk of Echuca. But the only place they could do this that made geological/geographical/logistical sense was down the centre of a road on the east side of town. This guaranteed that the houses on the ‘wrong’ side of that levee would flood, and the houses in the rest of the town likely wouldn’t.
And so, even with sandbagging, plastic sheeting, pumps and prayers, all those houses on the river side of the temporary levee did flood. And the others mostly didn’t. And now, in 2026, it’s all still in a state of transition, and a fair few of those on the ‘lucky’ side of the levee have decided maybe they won’t be so lucky next time (or maybe they can no longer afford insurance or can’t get any) and have decided to sell up in decent numbers, too.
Here’s a bit on this saga:
https://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2022/echuca-levee
I pick up a couple things for road lunches/snacks at ALDI and then head over the bridge to Moama.
Neither Echuca nor Moama are blessed with really attractive parkland, so I go over to the Moama adventure playground/botanic garden area that will be nice 30 years from now when all the trees get big. I’m closer to the caravan park this way, so I can dash over there and check in if these threatening clouds decide to drop rain. We’re already damp from all the drizzle this morning – we don’t really want to be full-on wet. (There is a brief shower later, but the rain stays off to the south and east mostly).
Later on, in the evening, as I’m hand-washing my clothes, the bloke from a nearby cabin comes over and says I can use his washing machine if I like. I tell him I’m nearly finished, but thanks anyway (I’m handwashing but will stick them in the dryer – doing 1 load of washing and drying runs about $12 to $18 dollars these days). The guy, Steve (oh my god, not another Steve, I know COUNTLESS numbers of white Australian men in their 50s named Steve!), is a conservative bloke from down Geelong way. He’s way into the beers already. He owns a nice cabin on an annual site here.
When I ask what he comes up to Moama to do, thinking he’ll say fishing or water skiiing or something, he says, “oh, just to drink”. Okay, then. He likes to garden and used to plant out about 600 square metres on their block in Geelong, but it’s smaller these days because ‘you get too old to do as much’ (he is not old – he’s in his late 50s).
Turns out he and the wife are getting on each other’s nerves now that they are both retired. She has ordered him out of the house for a bit, so he’s come up to their cabin to drown his sorrows. He chats to me for a loooooong time. He cannot fathom what I’m doing and that I’m not super scared to be doing it. He can’t believe I work for the government – rotten bastards that they are. He feels sorry for himself, even though he’s got more assets, superannuation and cash than I would likely acccumulate in three or four lifetimes. He can’t believe I left my husband but remain good friends with him. He is of that mindset that you suffer through a bad marriage to preserve your financial health and wouldn’t ever take any risks that might expose you financially or emotionally.
Finally, I extract myself from Steve and his woes, but not after he insists on giving me a hug. Ugggggghhhh. I may not have much money and don’t own any assets, but I have no debt, I have a good life, I’m loved by many and I have a level of freedom and independence that many people are envious of (but not willing to be brave enough to attain themselves).
I finish drying my clothes and then get everything packed away for Part 3 of the Cadell Fault tour tomorrow. We’re going to see the actual fault scarp tomorrow which excites me greatly! And for the first time in five days, there’s no forecast rain!
You got me remembering the scar trees I passed in South Australia. There were groups of trees with the larger scars as I approached Wellington near the mouth of the Murray River. What history – who used the canoes, where did they go?
Yes, I would love to be able to see the land and its story from an Indigenous perspective. I see a lot in the land from a geology perspective that I know the general public don’t see, so I know it’d be the same with their knowledge.