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| Looking towards central Melbourne from the junction of the Maribyrnong and Yarra Rivers. |
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| Photo by Viv Mehes, 1994, from the exhibition 'Big River - soundings on the Lower Yarra'. |
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| 'Opening of the draw-bridge, Saltwater River (from the Punt Hotel, Footscray)', an image commemorating the first bridge across the Maribyrnong River. |
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| Wood engraving by Samual Calvert (1828-1913), published in The Australian news for home readers, March 25, 1863. Contributed by La Trobe Picture Collection, State Library of Victoria. |
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The Maribyrnong, Melbourne's second-largest river, flows through a deep valley across the basalt plain, joining the Yarra River downstream from the city centre.
The territory around the river has supported human life for at least 26,000 years, through major changes in climate and sea level. Since European occupation of the Port Phillip region, the river has been used as a transport thoroughfare, an industrial drain, and more recently as a focus of recreation for the people of Melbourne's western suburbs.
The origins of the name 'Maribyrnong' are shrouded in doubt. The nineteenth-century ethnographer, R. Brough Smyth, claimed that it came from the Woi wurrung phrase 'Mirring-gnai-birr-nong', meaning 'I can hear a ringtail possum', but his sources are of doubtful authority.
In any event, for the first seventy-five years of white settlement, the river was known simply as the Saltwater, to distinguish it from the Yarra or Freshwater River to the east. The present name was promoted as part of a river improvement campaign in the early twentieth century, and was only adopted as the official name in 1913.
Landscape
The Maribyrnong rises on the western flank of Mount Macedon, where a multitude of small streams converge into two creeks known as Deep Creek and Jackson's Creek. These creeks in turn meet near Bulla to form the Maribyrnong, which runs through a deep valley across the basalt plain to the Yarra River delta.
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| The Maribyrnong River looking downstream under the Afton Street footbridge. |
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| Photo by Jenny Lee, 1999. |
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About 6500 years ago the lower part of the valley was drowned by the rising sea. The sea level reached its high point about 3500 years ago, when much of the low-lying land around this part of the river was under water. Since then, the sea level has fallen slightly and the river has cut its bed deeper, leaving broad terraces on either side. The boundary between the salt and fresh water is now at Solomons Ford, about ten kilometres upstream from the Yarra junction.
In its lower reaches the Maribyrnong is essentially a long, narrow inlet of Port Phillip Bay, tidal and deceptively placid. Yet no-one who has seen it in flood could doubt the power of this stream. When heavy rains fall in the catchment area, the river rises rapidly, uprooting trees along its middle reaches and hurtling them towards the bay.
Copyright Imagine The Future Inc. and Australian Film Commission, 2002.
Text by Jenny Lee for ITF.
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