Riverina

If I cast my mind back to learning about the geography of Australia when I was at school, it was all about sheep stations, iron ore mines and the Riverina. As far as the Riverina is concerned, I vaguely remember that the focus was farming and that the location was New South Wales. Today, Mark has cycled across the Riverina from south to north and I have had a revision lesson! Although the imagery is fairly low res, it is good enough to see that the landscape through which he has been travelling for most of the day is very much a chequerboard of fields...

Riverina is the name given to the area in the south of New South Wales west of the Great Dividing Range which takes in the drainage basins of the Murray and and its tributary the Murrumbidgee upriver of their confluence. the area known as Riverina is shown in red on the map below

Mark has basically travelled south to north through the heart of the Riverina through the town of Narrandera and finished this evening in West Wyalong. The warm/hot climate and access to irrigation water makes the Riverina the most productive and agriculturally diverse area in Australia. The drier west supports beef and wool production but in the central part of the Riverina it is possible to cultivate cereals, citrus fruits, wine grapes and even rice close to the rivers. Almost 20% of the economically active population are employed in agriculture . That is a very high figure for a rural area in an economically more developed country.

Having left Morundah this morning, Mark crossed the Murrumbidgee at Narrandera. The resolution offered by Google in this part of the world is generally poor (there is a certain irony in this when you consider how priviledged we were with such wonderful close up views in places like Iran and Pakistan!). However, there is almost always a photo on Flickr to 'borrow' like the one below...

It is described as being 'in the vicinity of Narrandera' and gives a little indication of the surrounding countryside. The next is in the town itself and it may well be that Mark cycled along here earlier today! Apart from its function as an agricultural service centre, Narrandera is located at an important route crossing in NSW : where the Newall Highway which Mark is following from Melbourne to Brisbane crosses the Sturt Highway from Sydney to Adelaide.

Somewhat later in the day Mark would have approached West Wyalong and would have passed this spot where, looking south back down the Newell Highway, he would have seen this sign...

Like Narrandera, West Wyalong is basically an agricultural service centre and the centre of the largest cereal growing area in NSW. Sadly, according to its Wikipedia entry, it has been in the grip of a severe drought for a number of years and has, as a consequence lost a lot of its younger population who left to seek employment elsewhere. Certainly the Google imagery ( an area where there is some high res coverage) reveals a very dry looking region....
I might have dismissed this as colour cast but if you look closely, there are a couple of small green patches suggesting that the rest of the land is indeed parched and dry. A number of sources descibe West Wyalong as having a sort of frontier town atmosphere and the monochrome photo below certainly bears that out....