6/23 Murray River Walk

On Tuesday, June 22 we returned to Calperum Station. I took the opportunity to relax a little and get caught up on some things. I also made plans for what to do on the 23rd, which, I had decided, would be to walk to the Murray River. I've read before that the Murray is "the Mississippi of Australia." Now, however, its flow is completely managed by numerous dams and locks. Ill effects of human activity in the environment is plentiful around Calperum. I wondered if their were any similar signs with the river. More than that, I wanted to see the force that helped shape the area long before people existed here.

Cedra joined me on this extraordinary walk. It is approximately 3 miles from Calperum Station traveling south-east. Like my walk to the salt lake a few days before, it featured several changes of scenery — from cess pools and dead trees to sun-parched mud and mammoth bird's nests and finally to the surprisingly serene Murray River itself. Once there, Cedra and I broke for lunch. It was truly peaceful and quieting. Not quiet — things rarely are — but the sounds we heard, primarily occasional bird calls, had that effect. I took a little nap by the riverbed. After about an hour and a half or two hours, we started back. The pics don't do it justice, but here they are anyway.

6/18-19 Intro to Bookmark and Calperum

Filling in the gaps, because there's more to the trip than I was able to complete while I was still in Australia...

Calperum Station is located on the Bookmark Biosphere Reserve north of Renmark in South Australia. The Station promotes awareness of the unique environment of the Biosphere through educational and community outreach programs. From 6/18-24, we stayed on site along with eight ANU art students (aside from two nights when the Land Arts folks went camping not far from there...more on this later). The people who work at Calperum were truly generous and great in every way. Grant, who runs the place, was very keen to the idea of working with artists as a means of communicating issues of the Biosphere to the broader public. In the U.S., such openness to artists by people in scientific fields seems rarer. Possible residency for the future??

The station and its surroundings were quite varied and strange, as I saw on a couple of my long walks. Some of the nearby lakes look utterly bleak, like they belong in a haunted forest. Others are completely dried out, with a top layer of encrusted salt (and more salt beneath the surface, as found by Joseph in his hole-digging). The mallee, which is the unique environment around which the biosphere was formed, are quite lovely and strange. These eucalypts produce several trunks from a single underground root, called a lignotuber. Something like 80% of these trees were removed from Australia to create grazing lands. On the two nights away from Calperum, we stayed deeper into the mallee woodland to experience this type of environment more closely. Here's some pics of Calperum and my walk to the salt lake.

Calperum Station and the Murray River Basin

My Path from Calperum Station to the Salt Lake

Out of the Mallee onto the Crusty Rocks

Salt Lake