Todd River
— — a river that runs about once a year.
Not only on a wall.
“A river that flows perhaps once or twice a year, and only after the kind of rain the Red Centre rarely sees. The Todd cuts through the gap in the MacDonnell Ranges that gave Alice Springs its location. Most days the bed is dry sand and river red gums. Locals have raced bottomless boats down the empty channel every August since 1962. — from the studio
Todd 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 Todd River runs roughly 320 kilometres through the southern Northern Territory, rising in the MacDonnell Ranges north of Alice Springs and dissipating into the Simpson Desert as part of the Lake Eyre catchment. The river is ephemeral. In a typical year it flows on perhaps two or three days, after summer storms drop more than 80 millimetres of rain in the upper catchment. The town of Alice Springs sits on its banks at the Heavitree Gap, the cleft through the West MacDonnells the river itself carved over time. The Arrernte name for the river is Lhere Mparntwe.
The Todd's catchment is one of the driest temperate climates in Australia, averaging about 280 millimetres of rain a year, most of it falling in two or three storms between November and March. The riverbed is shaded by river red gums (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) that survive on groundwater between flows, some of them more than two hundred years old. Western bowerbirds, zebra finches, and budgerigars work the canopy. Summer afternoons in Alice Springs regularly cross forty degrees Celsius; winter nights drop below freezing. The dry season from May through September is when the riverbed is most walkable.
The Henley-on-Todd Regatta has been held on the dry riverbed every August since 1962, organised by the Rotary Club of Alice Springs. Crews race bottomless boats by running with them along the sand. The event has been cancelled exactly once for too much water, in 1993, when the Todd was running and the regatta had to wait a week. The riverbed also fills, infrequently, into a slow brown current strong enough to close the Stuart Highway bridges. Two such flow events were recorded in the 2024 wet season.