Renmark - Hay

We crossed the Murray River several times on our way to Renmark, in the far East of South Australia. We knew that there had been flooding throughout the eastern states, but spending the summer in drought stricken WA it had been hard to really picture what the river would be like, so we were stunned to see just how high the water is. The entire floodplain area is under water, there must be trees getting a drink that haven't had one for years. Our caravan park in Renmark was right on the river's edge, the water was only about 10 metres from us, almost up to the park roadway. The wildlife are obviously coping well, one of our neighbours had a yabby trap in the water and came back with heaps of the crawly critters. They didn't offer us a feed though!

Apart from a game of golf and a walk by the river, we didn't do much in Renmark. We only spent 1 day here, and the weather forecast said rain and thunderstorms. By mid-afternoon we were beginning to think they'd got it wrong, then about 4:00 the sky darkened and the clouds opened. It pelted down for hours, we could hardly hear the tv in the evening with the noise on the caravan roof. The already sodden ground quickly became waterlogged, and the grass around our van filled with puddles deep enough to almost qualify as small lakes. We took it in turns to wear our emergency plastic rain poncho over to the amenities block, splashing through the wet in our thongs. It's conditions like this that make us wonder whether the caravanning lifestyle is all it's cracked up to be! The rain eased off during the night and by morning most of the standing water had drained away, so it wasn't too bad for us to hitch up the van and head off.

We headed east to Hay, leaving South Australia behind. The previous day's storms had obviously tracked in a similar direction, there were places on the road that were covered in water at least 30 cm deep, we were concerned that the car wouldn't be able to get through with the van on the back, but we managed to power through steadily, leaving a huge bow wave in our wake. There were intermittent showers for most of the drive, but luckily by the time we arrived in Hay in the mid-afternoon the skies had cleared.

Hay is on the Murrumbidgee River, and when we had made our plans to stop here one of the things we intended doing was a walk along the river bank, which sounded interesting with information boards and some historic sites. However, the muddy conditions made this impossible, so we contented ourselves with the heritage walk around the town centre. We also visited the Dunera museum, which gives the story of the WWII internment camps in the Hay area. The first internees were 2,500 mainly Jewish refugees who had fled the Nazis in Austria and Germany, they were shipped on the Dunera to Australia and interred as enemy aliens, not a particularly compassionate response to their plight. After a while they were moved on (and some time later someone realised that. hey, maybe they weren't enemies after all, and they were released) and the camps filled with captured Italian and Japanese POWs, as well as German, Italian and Japanese Australians, who the authorities feared would side with the enemy. After the war all these people were shipped 'home' - including people like the Japanese pearl divers from Broome who in many cases were born in Australia, but under the white Australia policy had been denied Australian citizenship. Not one of our country's finest moments.