Murray River
— — the slow brown water under the red gums.
Not only on a wall.
“Australia's long river. It rises in the Snowy Mountains and runs west and then south for more than two thousand kilometres, carrying the country's interior to the sea at Goolwa. River red gums lean over the banks. Paddle steamers still work the wharf at Echuca on summer afternoons. The water moves the colour of weak tea, and nobody is in a hurry. — from the studio
Murray River, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Murray rises in the Australian Alps near Mount Kosciuszko and runs roughly 2,508 kilometres west across the inland plain before turning south and meeting the Southern Ocean at the Murray Mouth, near Goolwa in South Australia. It draws together the Darling, the Murrumbidgee, and the Goulburn to form the Murray-Darling Basin, the country's most important agricultural watershed. For most of its course it serves as the border between New South Wales and Victoria, a quiet line drawn in slow water rather than fence-wire.
The colour is the colour of the country it drains. Fine clay particles, suspended in low-gradient flow, give the Murray its tea-brown cast through most of its middle reach. The river is home to the Murray cod, a freshwater predator that can exceed a metre in length, and to river red gums that root along the banks and tolerate seasonal flood. Towns like Echuca, Mildura, and Renmark grew up at the bends where paddle steamers once loaded wool. The Echuca wharf, built of redgum in the 1860s, still runs working steamers.
Away from the river towns the Murray runs through long stretches of state forest and floodplain where the loudest sound is a black cockatoo overhead. Barmah-Millewa, the largest river red gum forest in the world, sits along a kink in the river west of Echuca and floods seasonally to feed the wetlands. Houseboats drift down from Mannum at three or four knots, a pace the river insists on. The country here keeps the same colour palette: ochre bank, grey-green leaf, brown water, hard blue sky.