The Murray has the whole river holiday thing covered with paddlesteamers, long lunches, wineries, walking tracks and slow afternoons by the water. But the region gets even more interesting when you leave room for the stops that don’t quite match the postcard version.
A submarine beside an inland highway. A wartime communications bunker under a quiet lakeside town. A country pub that leans all the way into being out there. A cactus garden that feels like you’ve taken a wrong turn into Arizona.
If you’re the kind of traveller who likes a good “wait, what is that?” moment, start here, with 7 stops worth adding to your Murray road trip.
Holbrook sits well inland, 40 minutes north of Albury Wodonga on the Hume Highway and hours and hours from the ocean. What’ll really catch your eye is the 90-metre submarine along the main road through town.
At first glance, it feels slightly ridiculous. Take a closer look and you’ll realise the HMAS Otway is a genuine Royal Australian Navy submarine (well, the above-water part).
Walk around it, take in the scale and access the top deck for a photo. Then head into the Holbrook Submarine Museum next door for the periscope (with 360-degree views of Holbrook), the control room displays, the torpedo and the story of how a town nowhere near the ocean became home to a submarine.
Lake Boga doesn’t look like a place with a wartime secret. This peaceful, lakeside town is home to just under 1,000 people, 3.5 hours north of Melbourne, and 15 minutes from Swan Hill.
During World War II, Lake Boga became home to the No. 1 Flying Boat Repair Depot after the Japanese attacks on Broome in 1942 made a safer, southern inland repair base necessary. The lake's almost-circular shape meant aircraft could take off and land in different wind conditions.
The Lake Boga Flying Boat Museum has the restored Catalina A24-30 and hundreds of wartime artefacts. Also part of the museum is a secret communications bunker, rebuilt from original plans and photographs to resemble its wartime state, and now part of the museum experience too.
Cactus Country is not trying to be subtle.
One minute, you're in farmland that feeds Australia. The next, you're walking sandy paths between thousands of cacti — some taller than you — in a spiky, silent landscape that should belong somewhere in the American Southwest.
Australia's largest cactus garden is open Wednesday to Sunday. Spreading across 12 acres, the eight trails each cover a different part of the world, from Mexico and South America to North America and South Africa, with an elevated pink dome lookout at the top and more than 1,000 plant varieties in between. The Valley of the Giants is worth finding, and so is the homemade cactus ice cream. Oh, and if you need a reason to stay longer, the Mexican bar does frozen margaritas and tacos.
Cactus Country is just three hours from Melbourne and one hour from Echuca Moama.
Sitting between the Murray River and Gunbower Creek, Gunbower Island is Australia’s largest inland island and part of a major river red gum floodplain system. It’s a place of wetlands, birdlife, forest tracks and slow water, close enough to Echuca Moama to be practical but quiet enough to feel like you’ve slipped away from the rest of the world.
You can make it simple and drive part of the forest route, stop near the creek, take a picnic, look for birds.
If you're set up for it, the Gunbower Island Canoe Trail is the better version; a two-hour paddle to experience the island from the water.
The Werrimull Hotel is billed as Victoria's most outback pub, and the surrounding landscape backs up their claim. It’s about 45 minutes west of Mildura, before you get to the South Australian border, with long flat roads doing the scene-setting before you arrive.
You’ll find classic pub meals, cold drinks, a vine-covered verandah and free camping across the road. There's also silo art in town if you want a reason to look around before you leave, and no doubt a friendly local to tell you a few tales too.
It’s one of many worth-the-detour pubs across the region. To find the rest, our country pubs guide is a good place to start.
Forget arachnophobia, Andrew Whitehead is afraid of heights. He climbed a 16-metre ladder and walked the 30-centimetre rim of Urana's water tower anyway, carrying an 8-kilogram bracket, so the giant scrap-metal spider he made could be lifted into place by a cherry picker.
The Not So Itsy Spider is made from recycled piping and an old copper washtub. It nods to Urana's former football team, the Spiders.
Deniliquin gets put in a fairly narrow box by people who don’t know it well. The pubs, clubs, Deni Ute Muster and a long tradition of people gathering in large numbers and having a proper good time.
Storyteller: The Baron's Tasting House adds another layer, built for talking and sharing stories rather than shouting over a crowd. It's a boutique bar and tasting house with a speakeasy feel from the velvet, soft lighting, books and games.
The Baron, as the owner is known, harvested the red gum behind the bar from his family property on nearby Gulpa Island. He built Storyteller around the idea of a place to share a tale or two over a drink, where you could uncover the true depth of a place like Deni with its art and history and culture and many, many stories. The kind of safe, open space where anyone could belong.
The Murray is never short on classic river holiday moments, but the odd stops are useful. They break up a drive. Or send you into towns you may have skipped. Or give you an extra story to tell when you head home. What’s not to like?
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