Murray Mouth, SA

The Murray River is Australia’s longest river and is 2500km long. It empties into the Southern Ocean near to Goolwa and so we went on a trip after work to see what we could see at the mouth of the river.

The exact location of the river mouth apparently changes as the area is very sandy and the river creates new channels in the sand dunes as it flows out to sea. However, because so much water has been taken out of the Murray for irrigation and other purposes, the mouth of the river actually closed up, and since 2002 there has been dredging taking place to keep the river mouth open.

To view the river mouth we went to Hindmarsh Island, which is connected to the mainland by a bridge. At the far end of the island is ‘Murray Mouth Lookout’ – which was a pretty deserted area at 5pm on a weekday.

From there we could see the river mouth in the distance along with the dredging machines, and then we went for a bit of an exploration across the dried out sandy river bed – hoping that we wouldn’t get caught in quicksand.

After we got ourselves safely off the sand, we went round the corner to look at the Mundoo Channel, which separates Mundoo Island from Hindmarsh Island.