Film follows Murray journey

But unknown to most, at the height of the drought an ancient ceremony took place for the first time in 200 years and, as it turns out, heralded the arrival of breaking rains.

Called the Murrundi Ruwe Pangari Ringbalin, River Country Spirit Ceremony, it was held in 2010 and was supported by the Murray Darling Basin Authority, which contracted a film company to document the event and every year since.

It was led by Ngarrindjeri Elder Uncle Major Sumner, Camp Coorong, who decided it was time to reinstate a ceremony that for thousands of years had gathered tribes from all areas of the system to ceremony together.

"I was looking at how sick our country was," he said.

"There was no water and people were talking about the Lake Albert bed bubbling up with poison coming out the ground and mixing with water.

"The Western society people tried everything that they knew they could do for the river.

"We, as Aboriginal people, had to do what we could do – the ceremonies – bring them back and get people to understand them."

Now Goodmorningbeautiful Films – the company charged with documenting Ringbalin – is creating a cross-platform documentary on the Murray Darling System and the stories of its indigenous custodians, to be released at the Adelaide Film Festival this October, called Ringbalin – River Stories.

Director Ben Pederick, Adelaide, says debate about the MDB was a constant theme throughout the project's three-year lifespan.

"Everyone was aware that this was something that should be more broadly known about," he said.

"At the time you had farmers in despair because of a lack of water, and all this hysterical chaos and debate at a national level.

"But there was nobody going down the river, hanging out and checking it all out – it seemed just to be people having conversations in Canberra."

The Ringbalin ceremony involved a pilgrimage made by traditional owners and clans who gathered from throughout the system to travel from the Darling Downs in Queensland to the Coorong.

As the convoy travelled south through the remote towns of the Darling in 2010, a sense of desperation in the community would shortly change to hope as drought-breaking rains fell in the ceremony's wake.

Uncle Sumner says he remembers dancing 200 metres off-shore on the dry bed of Lake Albert near the end of the pilgrimage.

"I look at that now and think about how we were out there dancing, and people were walking under the jetty at Meningie, and how when we finished up that night the rains came," he said.

"When we finished up at Murra Murra too, the next day the rains came and followed us down.

"At Wilcannia we were dancing with lighting in the sky, and the thunder was going, and then when we finished the rain fell."

Before the year was over Australia would go on to experience one of the biggest rain in recorded history.

"I told a couple of people that we'd done this dancing and that, and all they said was, 'it had to rain sometime'," Major Sumner laughs.

"And I said, 'oh, yeah, yeah, it had to rain sometime. We all know that'."

Since 2010, Ringbalin has taken place every Easter, with indigenous people and non-indigenous people travelling up to 2500 kilometres to get involved and pay respect to the land and its river.

*Full report in Stock Journal, March 7 issue, 2013.