Meningie - Culture and History

Historically there were five Aboriginal tribal groupings living on The Coorong and in the Meningie district. They are still known as the Ngarrindjeri people (they are the same people who fought over secret women's business at Goolwa). They made bark and reed canoes, lived on the fish and molluscs in the area, and built shelters against the cold Southern Ocean winds.

The Ngarrindjeri people were decimated by the arrival of Europeans. The combination of smallpox (which raged all the way up the Murray River) and massacres saw the numbers of Aborigines on The Coorong drop from an estimated 3200 in 1842 to a mere 511 by 1874. It is widely accepted that 'meningie' is an Aboriginal word meaning 'mud' - an entirely appropriate name for the town.

The first European into the area was Captain Charles Sturt who, being assigned to solve the great mystery of why so many rivers flowed westward from the Great Dividing Range (often known as the question of whether Australia had an 'inland sea') rowed a whale boat down the Murrumbidgee in late 1829 and reached Lake Alexandrina, at the mouth of the Murray river, on 9 February, 1830.

Following Sturt the whole area along the Murray was opened up particularly by overlanders who moved sheep and cattle across the land. By the 1840s the area around Meningie had been opened up to large property owners and there was a ferry across the Murray River at Wellington. This led to the establishment of a coaching route from Adelaide to Melbourne which, until the 1850s when a route was found through the deserts further north, travelled along The Coorong. Travellers crossed the mouth of the Murray by paddlesteamers which plied the route between Meningie and Milang.

When the traffic moved north the town's importance declined but the richness of the local soils and the ready availability of water ensured its continuing importance as a centre for the surrounding agricultural lands.

Today, with modern agricultural methods of irrigation and cropping, the Meningie district is known as a hugely successful dairy area as well as producing substantial acreage of irrigated crops. The town also has a large fishing fleet.