Think of the landscape and you think of its smell. In South Australia, the Murray winds through dry, flat land on its last dawdle to the sea. In summer the air smells spicy — of baked eucalypt, and of river water.
Last summer, the smell changed. You could say that it turned rank, except that the Murray is always a bit rank, in the fashion of big brown rivers. Kerouac described the Mississippi as 'the great, rank river', and Huckleberry Finn smelt its earthiness: 'It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn't ever feel like talking loud, and it wasn't often that we laughed, only a little kind of low chuckle.'
But the Murray is half a world away from this and, to most Australians, more foreign. We feel more at home with Kerouac and Huck's river than we do with our own. When the smell of our river changed, it was the difference between rank and fetid. The new smell was musty; sinister. It rose to meet you in the evening, when the overhead sprinklers were switched on in the fruit orchards. It rose out of the sink when you washed your dishes. The smell covered you when you were in the shower.
The Murray water, pumped straight from the river, was poisoned by an overgrowth of blue-green algae. Outbreaks of the algae are nothing new; they have happened every hot summer for some years. Blue-green algae grow in still, warm water with high nutrient levels. The Murray, once an unreliable and faster-moving beast, has been tamed and slowed by locks and weirs so as to provide a reliable source of irrigation water. Irrigation run off, fertilisers, cattle droppings and human sewage draining to the river have enormously increased nutrient levels ...
Algae, of course, are only the most visible and topical symptoms of damage to the river system. Salinity is old news. It is caused by rising groundwater dissolving the salts locked in the soils and bringing them to the surface. Since Europeans cleared native trees and replaced them with shallow-rooted perennial crops, the groundwater has been rising fast.
Drive north from Melbourne on the Calder highway and you will see, as you approach Mildura, the frighteningly acne-like scars in the Mallee, where the soil looks greasy and nothing will grow but salt bush. Water tables in areas