I arrived in Melbourne very early in the morning.
Unfortunately I hadn’t slept very much on the flight. A few of us were picked
up by one of the buses and were driven up to Mildura with a few stops along the
way to look at historical and geological features... we were roughly following
the Burke and Wills route. After a lot of flat, straight roads, past lots of fields and
eucalypts, and salty lakes we arrived in the heaving metropolis of Mildura....
The Burke and Wills Route
Dead trees due to the high salinity of the lakes
The Sealake salt company - harvesting salt and gypsum from the lakes
Mildura is the result of large scale irrigation scheme set up by the Chaffey Brothers siphoning water from the river Murray. This allows fruit to be grown, specifically oranges and grapes - the latter to make sultanas, raisins and currants out of. I went for a wander along the river and around town before the conference started.
The river Murray
Rio Vista - the Chaffey house, now the art gallery
The next few days we had a whole range of talks covering topics of archaeology, dunes, lakes, changing climate, management, Antarctica, and much more.
The conference dinner was held on a paddle boat on the Murray River that runs past Mildura.
One of the many paddle boats on the Murray River
Half way through the week we went on a little field trip in the afternoon to Kings
Billabong and Psyche Bend – named after a paddle steamer, but why was the
paddle steamer named Psyche? This was a billabong that they pumped river water
into using a large steam engine, to store it for irrigation. However, it has created
a super saline and acidic wet land (pH of 3).
Kings Billabong - one of the many wetlands along the Murray River
Psyche Bend - with lots of dead trees killed by the corrosive and saline waters
The old pumps that used to pump water from the Murray River into Psyche Bend lagoon
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