What the Coorong Actually Is
The Coorong confuses people when they try to explain it, because it’s not simply a lake or a wetland or a beach. It’s a lagoon, or rather two lagoons, separated from the Southern Ocean by the Younghusband Peninsula — a long thin barrier of dunes that runs for a hundred and forty kilometres between the freshwater of the Murray River mouth and the salt of the sea. The water in the Coorong ranges from brackish in the north, near the Murray mouth, to hypersaline in the far south, and the ecology responds accordingly along that gradient.
I drove the Coorong from the Murray mouth south and the landscape kept doing something different every twenty kilometres. Near Goolwa, the water is dark and heavy with reed beds, pelicans floating between the rushes. Further south, the lagoon narrows and the water colour changes — jade, then green-brown, then in the far south an almost-pink tinge from microscopic organisms in the ultra-saline water.
Birds in the Thousands
For anyone who watches birds even casually, the Coorong is somewhere you stop making excuses not to visit. The national park is listed as a Ramsar wetland of international importance, which is the bureaucratic way of saying: something rare happens here. Over 230 species of waterbird use the system, including migratory waders that have flown from Siberia and Alaska on flyways that have operated for millennia.
I pulled over at a viewing point south of Salt Creek and counted, conservatively, four hundred pelicans in one reach of the lagoon. Australian pelicans are large birds — wingspan to two and a half metres — and in the late afternoon light they had a pink-gold cast that I initially assumed was a trick of the sun on water. It wasn’t; their plumage genuinely picks up that colour in warm light.
The Ngarrindjeri Country
The Coorong is Ngarrindjeri country, and this is not incidental background. The Ngarrindjeri people have managed and inhabited this system for tens of thousands of years, and their relationship with the Coorong — the fish, the shellfish, the birds, the seasonal patterns of the water — is embedded in language and ceremony in ways that contemporary conservation management is slowly beginning to work with rather than around.
The Coorong Wilderness Lodge near Meningie offers experiences with Ngarrindjeri guides, and these are worth seeking out specifically because the ecological knowledge they provide — about which wind means what for the fish, about how the pelicans indicate conditions in the lower lagoon — is the kind of information that takes decades to accumulate and changes how you see the country.
The Far South
The track south from Salt Creek eventually requires four-wheel drive, and then eventually requires nerve. The Younghusband Peninsula narrows to almost nothing, the Southern Ocean audible beyond the dunes even when not visible, and the Coorong on the other side narrows correspondingly. At the far end of the lagoon the water is so saline that almost nothing grows in it, and the landscape takes on a bleached, minimalist quality — white salt margins, pale water, grey-blue sky.
I sat there for an hour with no particular agenda and felt the distance from everything else as a physical thing.
When to go: September through November for peak migratory bird numbers and mild temperatures for driving the tracks. March and April are also excellent — slightly less crowded than summer and the light in autumn has a quality on the water that is worth timing a visit around. Summer is hot and the unsealed tracks can be rough; winter can mean road closures after rain.