South Australia 2024: houseboating on Murray River

We hired a boat from Kia Marina in Younghusband, South Australia, and spent 4 nights on the lower part of the Murray River.

We stopped in Mannum to get some provisions then headed towards the ferry. The ferry is free, runs 24 hours a day, and it only takes 8 minutes to cross the mighty Murray River. From the other end of the ferry it took us only another 10 minutes to get to Kia Marina, where we got our home for the next 5 days, Li’l Miss Champagne.

After filling in the paperwork and doing the mandatory briefing, we got going around 14:45. We headed up river. Kilometre 0 is where the Murray goes into the ocean. Kia Marina was just before km 160, which we passed not long after our departure. The majestic Murray River surprised us with its size – we expected it to be big, but it is bigger. Even though it was quite windy, there weren’t really any waves. And the houseboat only did 4 max 5 knots so the ride was very, very smooth. The landscape kept changing, from arid, dry pastures to ochre-coloured cliffs, weeping trees (probably river wattles and weeping tea trees), different types of gum trees, shacks, fancy holiday houses and permanently-inhabited houseboats on moorings. We saw lots of pelicans, cormorants, darters, corellas, as well as the occasional falcon or local rosella. There were lots of fish (carp) jumping out of the water and swallows either catching a ride on our boat or darting around it. We went past Lake Carlet and a grove of canoe trees, and pulled in for the night at Maidment Swamp.

We did some fishing and caught quite a few carps – we only kept the biggest one that we cooked on the barbeque, and it was quite tasty (although we only ate probably less than a quarter as we had already bought plenty of food). We also saw the Murray Princess going up river, past us, and that really took us by surprise as she appeared around the corner. The night was magical as in the absence of any light pollution we could see plenty of stars.

We slept in the first morning and were surprised to see an old man in a dinghy fishing and setting yabby traps not far from our houseboat. We had a relaxed breakfast then took off.

Bowhill has lots of big, reasonably nice houses that are uninhabited, probably holiday houses. We passed Chucka Bend where they were advertising chips and grill, Craignook, Saltbush flat. In Purnong we sounded the obligatory one long horn to warn the ferry about our approach, then waited for the green light to cross its cables.

Just after the 198 km mark we pulled into another scenic spot where we spent a couple of hours having lunch and showers.

In the afternoon we continued past Fromm’s Landing (where they found the oldest dingo skeleton in Australia – dated at 3300 years ago), Scrubby Flat, Walkers Flat (where we crossed paths with another ferry and admired more ochre-coloured limestone cliffs), Wongulla, Ngeut Ngeut National Park (where there are Aboriginal rock paintings which unfortunately were flooded in 2022-23 and they found stone age tools in the caves), and stopped just before Nildottie.

The third day we navigated past Nildottie, Sunnydale, the Big Bend (where the cliffs are meant to be spectacular – and they did not disappoint). Big Bend is also the spot where, before trucks were mainstream, apparently they used to load sheep and wool on ships destined for Adelaide or export. Just after the Big Bend we turned around and started heading back. We found another nice spot for lunch where we stopped for a couple of hours then got going again. We crossed the ferry at Walkers Flat then pulled in for the night in the same spot where we had lunch the day before. We tried fishing again and fed the carps that we caught to the pelicans, which were not very skilled at catching and also made a deep growling grumpy noise when they missed the flying fish! We went for a walk up the hill to a cairn, and saw an echidna on the way.

We understood why Storm Boy was written in this country – there are soo many pelicans! We saw corellas and Sulphur-crested cockatoos nesting in the cliffs, and also lots of pigeons in similar spots but on separate cliffs. We saw lots of cormorants, darters, falcons, a couple of ospreys, some rosellas. We saw rakalis that we initially took for water rats. We also saw lots of houses flying an interesting flag that we later found out was the SA Murray River flag.

The fourth day we continued driving back past the empty holiday houses, blokes in dinghies and speed boats pulling skiers.

We went past the Purnong ferry and the spot neat Maidment Swamp where we slept the first night. The landscape of cliffs, gum trees, paddocks, plots that either had crops on them or were in between crops kept rolling on. The ochre orange alternating with green where there was some water. We stopped for lunch around km 165 – the quickest lunch out of the 4 days as it wasn’t a great spot with trees being a bit too close to each other, lots of flies and hot air outside (as it was a 37 degree day). We kept going past Kia Marina, all the way to Mannum, crossed the ferry then turned around. Crossed the ferry again, kept going and stopped for the last night about 20 min up river from Kia Marina, around km 161.

We watched a magical sunset from our night spot and by the evening it cooled down a tiny bit. A huge change compared to our first day, when we couldn’t stay outside for too long to watch the stars as it was so cold (and also turned the heater on for a bit). The bird noises around us were amazing – they probably couldn’t get to sleep at their usual time because of the heat!

The last night was beautiful (stars, bird songs) and ended up cooling down quite a bit. We woke up a bit earlier to pack up and be ready to be back at the marina by 9:30 am. While we were having breakfast we saw Murray Princess going back the other way.