In the postcards the river still looks wide and peaceful like a lake reflecting the sky.

Appearances are deceptive.

She has ceased to flow.

I fear she is going to die.

The people who loved her were driven off.

All those musical names they gave her we forgot.

Such a quiet river she was until her deep, strong, green opaque became the awe-inspiring spate of flood.

When the snow-waters came with the rains

she lavished her love on the ancient trees that she herself had planted across wide plains, as tender saplings, for hundreds and thousands of years

before we came.

So swift she was: she would take a leaf, a twig, or a boat into her current and could carry them away while we watched.

So swift, I was afraid, as a child,

when she was the largest creature in my world.

She is still the biggest feature in the land, seen from above: still as long as ever and beautiful as before with her rococo curves, her high, clay cliffs and crescents of white sand, her swamps, her massive trees, but only if you see her from a plane, that is.

Seen from the ground her current is no longer a formidable force.

She’s still opaque, sustained,

restrained by all those lochs and weirs.

The massive pumps which sucked her all last century

soon will fall silent.

The men who named her ‘Murray’ for their General

had no appreciation of her worth except as resource:

to be cursed in times of trouble, never to be thanked,

of course, much like our Mother Earth.

But supposing we could love her, just imagine if we called her by those names which she was used to: names like Indi, or Menindee, or Tocumwal, or Milloo or Murrundi, even now, if we could

call them softly, we might call her back again.

Lyndal Vercoe