AS one of those local people who moved away to the city for work many years ago, I made a habit of recommending to my outdoorsy city friends that they try giving this region a go as a camping or fishing destination, especially at Easter.
I had a bit of success in that from time to time, too, and some of those friends who made the trip from Adelaide would come back espousing the beauty of the bushland parks through which our part of the Murray River winds, and vowing they’d be back.
I’ve moved back home now, but I still keep in touch with my metro friends, especially through their social media posts that of course often express excitement and anticipation for their next holiday.
I personally don’t know of any campers or fishers planning a Sunraysia trip this Easter, though. They’re going elsewhere, because they are hearing those parks are all closed because of flood damage.
What they are hearing is not quite true. I’ve pointed out that the flood is long gone and that most of the parks are in fact open, but it’s too late. They’ve made their decisions, they’re sticking with them, and that is understandable.
When people want to take a holiday interstate, they need to make plans based on where they’re going, how they’ll get there and what will be there to do when they arrive. These days, I’m sure most people are like my friends in that they do a bit of web research to see what’s available, but I’m just as sure they rarely spend a lot of time on that. This year, with the recent flood in mind, they’d probably go straight to the Parks Victoria website, where this month they would have found that Kings Billabong Park is closed, Merbein Common is closed, and that other parks and roads may be “impacted” by the flood.
Most of the time, that’s all it’s going to take to make city people and their families think OK, we should probably go somewhere else this year.
Our riverside parks may well be all opened by Easter and that will be great for local people who want to use them, but a lot of the visitors who contribute to our second-biggest economic driver, tourism, won’t be here to be part of our most important tourism season. They’ve made other plans and they’re going somewhere else, because they couldn’t have any confidence that we’d be able to provide the travel experience they seek.
This didn’t have to happen.
Yes, it is important that parks authorities check that areas are safely accessible before they are reopened, but just how safe do they have to be?
When this newspaper reported the status of local parks early this month, Parks Victoria said the floods had “impacted” the landscape, causing river banks to erode, holes to form in the ground and trees to become unstable.I’m sure all of that is true, but these are bush parks, river parks, natural landscapes. Riverbanks can erode or “slump” at any time and the same goes for falling trees and limbs. Holes in the ground? Gosh, really?
Early last month, not long after the Murray had slid back into its channel, I went to Merbein Common, an area I know well from my youth. It was indeed still too wet for vehicles, so I hiked in, and what I found was pretty much what I expected. I found the bush and I found the river and I found plenty of spots people could enjoy that environment without putting themselves in any more danger than they would have last summer.
The only issue was the muddy roads, but they were already drying fast and we’ve had a month of hot weather since. I’m pretty sure they’re all fine by now.
I haven’t been to Kings Billabong recently, but I expect the situation is much the same here. Yes, there will like by some changed banks, some unstable trees, and there might even be some of those dreaded holes, but that’s the bush, that’s the river, that’s the rugged if beautiful environment we go camping and fishing to enjoy.
I appreciate that Parks Victoria has had something like 800km of riverside park to assess after the flood and I do understand that it has a duty of care to help people keep themselves safe on this land, but this has been an over-abundance of caution at a time when even small hits to our post-COVID and post-flood tourism industry are now pretty damaging.
The really silly thing is that I know local people are now fishing on Merbein Common and walking around Kings Billabong and that no one’s screaming that they’re in peril, because they are not.
We will, of course, have future floods. One hopes that next time, Parks Victoria will worry less about the bush acting like it’s the bush and more about how important river tourism is when it plans its next flood recovery.
