Ovens River

Title

Ovens River

Description

The data from this study region includes 6 oral histories (audio as mp3s, and transcripts) and 2 image galleries, as well as a georeferenced hand-drawn map of the area.

The Ovens River rises in the Victorian Alps where it is linked to significant freshwater meadows and marshes. At Wangaratta it is joined by the King River and it meets the Murray near the top of Lake Mulwala.

The Ovens River is one of the last largely unregulated rivers in the Murray Darling Basin and is particularly important as a reference against which to assess the state of other lowland rivers in the region. Since Europeanisation, industries including grazing, gold mining, tobacco and plantation forestry, have bought different types of workers with new needs to the river.
There are areas where the riparian vegetation has been replaced by willows, there have been significant water quality issues and there are far too many pest fish.

These are the traditional lands of the Bangerang people and their neighbours the Taungurung and Yorta Yorta peoples. They have fished the river and surrounding waterways and hunted the wetlands and the ebb and flow of water guided their travels and featured in their stories.

(Source: Frawley, J., Nichols, S., Goodall, H. and Baker, E. 2011. Ovens: Talking fish, making connections with the rivers of the Murray‐Darling Basin. Murray‐Darling Basin Authority, Canberra.)

Identifier

12df16e2-0ff1-11e5-8eb9-005056a4d06a

Source

Map image attribution: Murray-Darling Basin Authority, Talking Fish Project see details...

Relation

Frawley, J., Nichols, S., Goodall, H. and Baker, E. (2011). Ovens: Talking fish, making connections with the rivers of the Murray‐Darling Basin. Murray‐Darling Basin Authority, Canberra. View or download from publisher...

Date

2015-06-10

License

CC-BY

Provenance

hand-drawn map georeferenced by Kevin Davies

Geolocation

Position: 153 (78 views)