A few weeks back, I ventured on to a part of Red Gum Island which I hadn't been to before.
This island is of course, the small, roughly crescent-shaped section of land which lies between the Moorabool and Barwon Rivers at their confluence near Fyansford. The island is separated from the rest of the the land between the two rivers by a short anabranch which breaks away from the Barwon a couple of hundred metres below the paper mill.
Unlike most anabranches (defined as a section of the river which diverts away from the main channel and rejoins further downstream), this one is a little different in that it does not rejoin the Barwon but instead, runs into the curve of the Moorabool about 600m above its confluence with the Barwon.
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| A river of rocks |
On this occasion, the anabranch was not so much flowing with water as running with rocks. Unless the Barwon is running at least a little high, then the anabranch is dry. This reveals a stream of basalt rocks which look to have flowed down the watercourse over the centuries since those volcanic erruptions of the later Pliocene era (approximately 2 million years ago).
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| The anabranch at Fyansford April, 2012 |
Having seen some of the more recent flood events, it is not hard to imagine how these relatively small rocks would be tumbled down with all that rushing water until they came to rest in the anabranch. It also makes me wonder - could we see beneath the waters of the main waterway - what the riverbed would look like along its length. With any luck, we will never see the river run dry enough to find out.
This week, I returned to have another look. This time things were somewhat different:
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| The same part of the anabranch at Fyansford June, 2012 |
Recent rain over the past few weeks, including the "almost flood" of earlier this month, meant that the anabranch was well and truly flowing. Instead of a river of rocks, there was now a bubbling stream of water punctuated by several mini-waterfalls.
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| The anabranch flowing, June, 2012 |
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| The anabranch flowing, June, 2012 |
