Day 550 | Rufus River: reviewing old trails
83 km | zzOz total: 17,708 km
Before I launched on this criss cross continental tour the Rufus River had been my personal big time remote bike experience as part of my two week 1999 Mildura to Ceduna expedition. If you travel on the wrong side of the river on the dirt road you can find out there are not many fellow travellers, certainly no shops between Renmark and Wentworth.
It’s strange to be trawling my history here, the landscape unfolds with some familiarity despite the passage of years but what seemed a major adventure back then is just another, splendid, day at the office now.
After lunch I peel off down the Old Wentworth Road, the lesser travelled option of the two possible routes for today, slightly more direct but not a formed roadway, it’s a hard packed clay track with patches of sand of various depths.
When I spot an historic obelisk in the distance I realise that I didn’t take this path first time around, the border has no signage indicating I’m finally out of South Australia but the obelisk is marking the transition and there’s signage telling the complicated story of the border.
Apparently the demarkation between Victoria and the newly minted South Australia was originally marked, incorrectly, in 1839, supposedly along the 141º meridian but actually about 2 miles west of where it was supposed to be. In 1868 a joint NSW/South Australian party went out to resurvey the border and Charles Todd built this cairn which has been found to be much more accurate, to within 100 m. The South Autralians were not surprisingly niggled that they had lost 138,700 hectares of their state to arch rivals Victoria and underwent a series of court cases that ended up in England but eventually SA lost. So Victoria still has jurisdiction over the disputed land, the fact that much of it is either in the Big or Little Desert, or the Sunset Wilderness Park might well have been the factor there has not yet been a civil war over the issue, although it sounds that it has been close.
So that’s the reason that the NSW and Victorian borders do not align along the 141º meridian and which eaves a short length along the Murray River where the state border is not actually defined. The state border a bit further upstream between Victoria and NSW is pretty obvious for the most part, along the Murray River with the more senior state retaining all the river in the state, not split down the middle like you might think.
My history didn’t stop there as the track became more indistinct, my water supply dwindling on a warm day. My back tyre was flat, I’d finally got a puncture.
It was late in the day, early evening, when I finally turned the corner for the last 14 km to the Rufus River campsite, but where I remembered pushing through sand and rolling over ball bearing sized limestone pellets from times past the road is now fully formed, hard packed clay, so despite lengthen shadows I raced swiftly over the landscape assisted by a huge tail wind.