In the minds of many Adelaideans, the River Torrens has collected some unwanted baggage over the years — it can evoke images of murky waters and muddy shallows, as well as intermittent algal blooms and a submerged car or two.
But the river has not always possessed this rather regrettable tendency to dredge up unpleasant associations, and there is a renewed push to restore it to a more swimmable state.
A public forum was held last night on the subject of making River Torrens-Karrawirra Parri, especially the Torrens Lake along the CBD, safer for swimming.
The idea has periodically raised its head over the years and is now being floated again by business consultant Sam Taylor, a former Adelaide City Council candidate who wants it to become an election issue.
The river has at times battled pollution and a bad reputation. (ABC Radio Adelaide)
Mr Taylor has put the topic back on the agenda as part of the council’s current Central Ward election campaign, which was triggered by a court ruling that voided the 2022 result.
“You only have to look at every postcard of Adelaide and the Torrens is right there, so there’s something that pulls the heartstrings,” he told ABC Radio Adelaide yesterday.
“This has been a place of gathering and a place of swimming for many thousands of years, that existed certainly before the new city started unfortunately polluting the place.”
Amid South Australia’s devastating ocean algal bloom, Mr Taylor said the environment was also at the core of his proposal — making the river safe for bathing would, he argued, secure its broader health.
“What we’re seeing at the moment in South Australia particularly, in the marine environment for example, is what happens when we take the ecosystem for granted,” he said.
“Swimming is a great human goal, but from my perspective I’m really seeing this as a proxy not only for the environment … but as a real symbol for, ‘We’re a can-do place’.”
The lake bed in February 2009 after the area drained because of a weir gate malfunction. (Jason Om: ABC News)
Mr Taylor has linked the idea to “swimmable cities” — a movement encouraging the cleaning of urban waterways to better support recreational use of them.
The idea has gained currency along stretches of Melbourne’s Yarra River, and was given an extra push by the use of the Seine for events at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
“A lot of these things point to what our first peoples in Australia have known for many years — that the health of our waterways and the health of our communities are interconnected,” Swimmable Cities co-founder Matt Sykes said.
A water skiing event along the lake took place in 2018. (Supplied: Kym Bond)
The proposal for Torrens swimming has the in-principle support of Adelaide Lord Mayor Jane Lomax-Smith, who said she had just got back from Switzerland where river dips were a popular pastime.
“I think it’s a very important aspiration,” she said.
“We need real attention [on] upstream polluters. We know that there’s too much nitrogen going into our rivers, we know that there’s too much rubbish that’s going into our rivers and we have to clean them up seriously.
“If we clean them up, we get rid of the carp, I’ll be the first to get in the water.”
‘Making it like a community pool?’
According to the city council’s website, activities on the Torrens Lake that involve “primary body contact” — including swimming — are “not permitted due to the condition of the water”.
“You are encouraged to obey all signage, particularly when the lake is closed, and use the waterway at your own risk,” it states.
While the thought of dipping as much as a toe into the Torrens might send shivers down the spines of many locals, that has not always been the case.
Warning signs have at times been put up along the river’s banks, including during algal blooms. (Emma Rodgers: ABC)
From the late 1800s, before public pools were built, the River Torrens was a popular area for residents to escape the heat of summer.
But swimming came with hazards as well as tragedies — old newspaper records on Trove indicate that drownings in the river were fairly common.
To help curtail the high number, the Gilberton Amateur Swimming Club — which had its first meeting in early 1915 — introduced free swimming classes.
A swimming race at Gilberton along the river circa 1912. (History SA: SA Government Photographic Collection GN000325a)
The Adelaide Park Lands Association’s website states that the decline of river swimming coincided with rising pollution levels in the 1960s — a problem that has continued to blight the catchment in decades since.
“When we have a large flood or rain event, very large volumes of water containing all sorts of stuff off the roads, from people’s backyards, are washed into the river,” University of Adelaide urban ecologist and Green Adelaide chair Chris Daniels explained.
“There’s this continual battle, if you like, between cleaning up the river and improving it as much as we can, and then dealing with a sudden influx of a large amount of material, particularly plant material and other forms of pollution.
“We also continually monitor the river for bacteria — particularly E. coli which comes from faeces from ducks and dogs and all sorts of other sources, and also cyanobacteria, which can build up in the summer months.”
Women preparing to race at Gilberton in 1921. (State Library of South Australia)
But Professor Daniels added that the river’s reputation for pollution did not always reflect the reality.
“The view that rivers are bad if they’re brown is one that isn’t actually true,” he said.
“A river that’s very closely associated with vegetation and life is always brown. When you have completely sparkly clear water like you might get in a New Zealand melt-stream coming off glaciers — that runs over a rocky substrate — it’s clear because there’s nothing in it.”
Thanks to environmental restoration, an “enormous amount of improvement” has taken place in the river’s general health over the past 25 years.
“The [Torrens is] in so much better condition now than it was, but it’s always going to vary in quality because it depends on rainfall and inflows,” Professor Daniels said.
Brown water could be a sign of river health, Professor Daniels said. (ABC News: Brant Cumming)
On the subject of whether the Torrens should be made safer for swimmers, he said that was the “wrong question to ask”.
“If you want the river for swimming — in perpetuity, without testing — that people can have faith in, you’d want to get rid of all of the trees, all of the plants, all of the fish, all of the birds, you’d want to make sure there’s no inflow into it,” he said.
“Do we really want to do that? Why are we making it like a community swimming pool? I don’t quite understand why people want that to be its function.
“Its function as an urban river is to be a repository for biodiversity, to be a high-quality habitat.”
The proposal is being discussed amid the council’s current Central Ward election campaign. (ABC News: Lincoln Rothall)
But Mr Taylor described his own vision in not dissimilar terms, and said ecology needed to be at the forefront of river management.
“It’s really about something deeper, if you excuse the pun, than just a surface-level, ‘Let’s look at something recreational to do in the city’,” he said.
“It’s something that I think is quite deeply connected to our sense of place.”