Yarra River
— — the brown water the city built itself around.
Not only on a wall.
“The river the Wurundjeri call Birrarung: a slow, tannin-dark current that gathers in the Yarra Ranges, drops through Warburton's tree-fern gullies, and threads the length of Melbourne before opening into Port Phillip Bay. The brown is real, the colour of mountain-ash tannin and forest sediment, not pollution as the old joke has it. Rowers at dawn, ferries at noon, footbridges by the casino at night.
Yarra 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 Yarra rises near Mount Baw Baw at roughly 1,250 metres in the Yarra Ranges east of Melbourne and runs about 242 kilometres to its mouth at Port Phillip Bay. Its traditional custodians are the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people, who know it as Birrarung, often rendered 'river of mists.' The catchment covers more than 4,000 square kilometres and includes Melbourne's main water supply at the Upper Yarra Reservoir. The river threads the central city between Southbank and Federation Square before reaching the bay at Williamstown.
The brown colour is not pollution. It is tannin leached from eucalypt forests in the upper catchment, together with fine clay sediment carried out of the Yarra Ranges, the same chemistry that darkens tea. Melbourne Water samples the river continuously, and the headwaters above the Upper Yarra Reservoir, protected as closed forest since 1891, are among the cleanest urban supply catchments on earth. Downstream the lower river runs slower and warmer, used by rowers from Mercantile and Banks, dragon-boat crews at Herring Island, and the morning ferries to Williamstown.
The riverside path runs continuously from Dights Falls in Abbotsford down past the MCG, Federation Square, Southbank, and Crown to the bay, about 25 kilometres of bicycle and pedestrian track. Morning is for rowers; the Mercantile and Melbourne University boatsheds launch from 5:30 most weekdays. The middle Yarra at Warrandyte and the upper river through Warburton offer the gentler, forested water. The Punt Road bridge gives the postcard view back toward the city skyline.