A pale gold horizon stretched across the great Murray River as dawn broke over Albury. Mist curled like restless spirits above the water, dissipating under the gentle warmth of a New South Wales sunrise. The river breathed with measured calm, its surface mirroring the skeletal silhouettes of river red gums and willows that lined the banks. In that hush, the city’s heartbeat was still slow—Dean Street Bridge slumbered in half-light, and the rumble of the Border Mail delivery truck was yet to disturb the morning air.
Seraphina O’Connor stood at the water’s edge in Noreuil Park, her gaze tracing the soft eddies marshaling past the old timber jetty. At twenty-eight, she carried an ancient soul. Her dark curls caught the glow of first light; her green eyes held the depth of poetry and the clarity of someone who had read too many truths. Despite her Irish surname, she was born on Wiradjuri Country, and she bore the dual heritage with reverence—once studying Irish language and myth in Galway, now translating Wiradjuri place-names for the Murray Art Museum Albury, where she worked as assistant curator.
She knelt by the water, fingertips skimming its surface, feeling the pulse of country. Each morning here was a ritual—an offering to ancestors and to the land that cradled this border town. Albury, she thought, had always been a place of crossings. Hume and Hovell had traversed these plains in 1824, explorers chasing legends; the railway had stitched Victoria and New South Wales together at this very point; and through it, people came and went—pilgrims seeking fortune in gold-rush dreams, refugees after global wars, families chasing a simpler life.
At the edge of the jetty, an echo of footsteps on weathered boards broke her meditation. Seraphina looked up to find a young man standing hesitantly in her periphery. He leaned against the railing, guitar case slung casually by his side. His features were strong—high cheekbones dusted with travel, eyes rimmed with exhaustion and longing. He wore a faded Army surplus jacket over a plain shirt, the emblem on its sleeve obscured by wear. Something about him was both guarded and open, as if he carried a story he craved release from sharing.
“Good morning,” he said softly, voice low like the river’s undercurrent. “Is this Noreuil Park?”
Seraphina nodded, rising. “It is. It’s one of Albury’s secrets to early risers.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I’m Seraphina.”
He offered a hand—strong, calloused. “Lucas Beaumont.” His accent was a gentle Sydney drawl, softened by months on the road. “I just arrived yesterday at the old railway station. I’m heading north, but I thought I’d catch sunrise by the river first.”
“Most do,” she replied. “It’s why Albury was founded here—water, trade routes, a meeting place.” She gestured east toward Monument Hill. “And that,” she said, “is where you’ll get your first real look at the city.”
Lucas followed her gaze. Monument Hill stood sentinel over Dean Street Bridge, crowned by a World War I memorial. Its slopes were carpeted in native grasses and waratah bushes, and he sensed the weight of memory in the place even from afar.
“I’ll go later,” he said. “But tell me, Seraphina, what makes Albury special to you?”
She paused before answering, eyes on the river’s steady flow. “I came home after Galway thinking I’d never feel rooted again,” she admitted. “But when I learned the Wiradjuri stories of how this land formed—the serpents that carved the Murray, the spirits of waterholes—I realized Albury isn’t just where I’m from. It’s part of me, like language in the blood. I stayed to give these stories a place in the museum’s galleries.” Her voice grew quiet, but her gaze was bright. “And I think the land rewards you for listening.”
Lucas studied her. He’d been a photojournalist once—covered conflicts in the Middle East and Africa—until the weight of others’ grief drove him out of the dark. He had come to Albury to heal, to let the silence there reshape him. And here, before this gentle stranger, he felt an unfamiliar stirring—not guilt or pain, but hope.
They stood together as the sun ascended, golden shafts dancing on ripples, wattle blooms brightening the riverbank. In that tranquil communion, their worlds touched: her ancient roots and his nomadic scars. Both felt the first brush of something that might—if nurtured—grow into something profound.
Later that morning, the city awakened. Dean Street filled with cars threading between the Flour Mill theatre and the pastel façades of cafés. The Border Mail’s “Community” headlines were smoothed over in shop windows, and the scent of flat whites mingled with pastries.
Seraphina walked toward MAMA, the Murray Art Museum Albury, housed in the former Albury Railway Goods Shed, a hulking brick structure brought back to life in 2017. She passed frescoed walls where street artists once sprayed murals, then entered the airy gallery. White-washed walls displayed works by Aboriginal artists like Tony Albert and Rover Thomas—stories steeped in red ochre and desert light. Seraphina moved among them, a custodian of memory.
Halfway through her morning, she glanced up to find Lucas in the doorway. He hesitated, as if uncertain whether to tread upon hallowed space.
“Seraphina?” he said. “I hope I’m not intruding.”
She smiled. “No, it’s fine. I thought you might come by.” She approached with an easy warmth, guiding him to an installation of Wiradjuri totems. “This piece is by Ella Hoy—the totems represent the seven waterholes the people respect along the Murray.”
Lucas nodded, eyes tracing carved shapes. “I didn’t expect this,” he admitted. “I came to shoot landscapes, but the art—it’s alive.”
“That’s the heartbeat of Albury,” Seraphina said. “It’s boundary-crossing, like this city on the border. We celebrate both the Indigenous legacy and the waves of settlers who passed through.”
He turned to her. “Can I tell you why I’m here?”
She regarded him gently. “I’d like that.”
He exhaled, gathering courage as if strumming unseen strings. “I was in Kandahar last year,” he began. “I took a photo of a child clutching a ragged doll, her eyes—” He broke off, voice thickening. He could see in Seraphina’s eyes the compassion to bear witness. Slowly: “Her name was Amina. The bombs came at dawn. I couldn’t save her.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Ever since, I’ve been running—from pictures, from guilt.”
A hush enveloped them amid the vivid swirl of paintings. Seraphina reached out, placing a hand on his arm. The contact felt like a lifeline. “Grief doesn’t choose where to end,” she said softly. “But maybe why we suffer can become purpose. You came here—to Albury—to let the land mend you, didn’t you?”
He looked into her eyes and saw no judgement, only deep understanding. “Yes,” he whispered.
She guided him to a balcony overlooking the original goods shed’s steel beams. Below, visitors moved like pollen on a breeze. “I find solace in stories,” she told him. “Sometimes the land itself is a narrative that helps us heal. You carry images of loss—maybe you can capture images of rebirth here. The borderland is fertile for that.”
He nodded, a tentative spark of resolve flaring. “I think I will.”
They lingered there until midday, talking of poetry and photographs, dreams and dread. Over the roar of traffic far below, their voices became an intimate current. In that gallery of memory and hope, they found in each other a companion: she, a vessel of ancient songlines; he, a witness to the world’s darkest corners.
That evening, Albury’s lamplight shimmered against the sky’s velvet canopy. Seraphina suggested they climb Monument Hill for the Harvest Moon Festival. Cool night air carried the murmur of visitors gathering at the Shrine of Remembrance—soldiers’ names etched in granite, a sentinel of their sacrifice.
They ascended the winding path beneath scribbly bark of manna gums. Lucas paused to rest, leaning against a basalt outcrop. Seraphina watched constellation patterns above—the Southern Cross blazing, hung like a promise.
“Seraphina,” Lucas said, voice low as leaf-littered earth. “Why do so many come here at night?”
She placed a hand on his back, guiding him upward. “When darkness falls, this city holds its breath,” she murmured. “Monument Hill is where people feel closest to their losses—and their hopes. Anniversaries, weddings, farewells… it’s a crossroads of emotion.”
They reached the summit. The festival lights below the town glittered like mother-of-pearl against river dark. Lanterns bobbed at café tables on Dean Street Bridge. The Murray flowed silvered by moonlight, Halkett bookstore’s sign glowing neon. At the monument’s base, a lone fiddler played a lament, mournful and sweet.
Seraphina pressed a hand to the cold stone. “My grandfather marched from here in 1916,” she said. “He returned with songs in his head but never spoke of the trenches. He told me: ‘Memory is heavy—lighten it by telling it.’” She turned to face Lucas. “I think that’s why we gather under the moon—to remember and then set each other free.”
He lifted his guitar case. “Play for me?”
Her brow rose with surprise. “Me? I can’t play.”
“Then tell me a story. I’ll play.”
She smiled, her eyes reflecting the memorial’s candlelight. “All right.” She drew her jacket closer against a rising breeze and began to speak in a low, rhythmic cadence:
“Long ago, the serpent Ngurambang carved this river,
tongue flicking across plains, rivers, and forests,
leaving water in his wake—life for birds, fish, and people.
When the moon was young, he rested here, his body coiled in the hill,
and his spirit sleeps beneath the stones we now honour.”
As Seraphina spoke, Lucas opened his case and uncased a battered twelve-string guitar. He began a gentle plucking, notes rippling like water lapping banks. Their unplanned duet—her words and his music—felt ancestral, as though they were channeling voices beyond time. Other festival-goers paused, transfixed by the fusion of story and song upon Monument Hill.
When the last note faded, a hush held the earth. Lucas set the guitar aside and crossed the small space between them. “Your stories,” he said, voice husky, “they quiet the noise inside me.” He reached out, brushing a stray curl from her face. Goosebumps rose on her arms as his fingertips traced her temple.
Seraphina’s heart thundered. Here, beneath the watchful eyes of stars and the sentinel of soldiers, she felt a tenderness she had never dared name. She placed her hand on his chest, over his heart. “And yours,” she whispered, “give voice to a silence I never knew I carried.”
They stood in that suspended moment until a stray firework burst above the town, spilling color across the sky. The spell lifted; applause drifted faintly from below. With a shy smile, Lucas retrieved his guitar. “Walk me down?” he asked.
Seraphina nodded, offering her arm. Together, they descended the moonlit hill, each step binding them more tightly in a bond neither had anticipated, but both silently welcomed.
Over the next days, Lucas and Seraphina wove their lives through Albury’s streets and riverbanks. They wandered the Albury Botanic Gardens, inhaling the heady scent of magnolia and wattle. They rode bikes along the Wagirra Trail, the Murray’s silver ribbon glinting beside them. He photographed her reading poetry at the Olive Village markets; she framed his images in little journals where she wrote new verses beneath each snapshot.
On a Sunday dawn, they took the Border Loop track along Lake Hume. Mist lay heavy over the weir, and waterbirds rose with startled cries. Lucas paused at the lookout; the panorama of deep blue water, eucalyptus-clad hills, and empty horizon filled him with awe. “It’s like the world ends there,” he said, voice soft.
Seraphina joined him at the stone balustrade. “Or begins,” she countered. “Every horizon is a promise.” She smiled, catching his glance. In her eyes, he saw an open sky.
They shared breakfast at a timber table beneath corrugated roofs at the Old Theatricks café in Lavington. Over steaming mugs, they planned a joint exhibition: his photographs paired with her poems—an ode to this borderland’s history and healing. It would open in six weeks at MAMA, titled “Crossings: Rivers of Memory”. They spoke of inviting Barkindji Elders to bless the show, of hosting story-circles and live music.
Yet as the idea bloomed, reality intruded. Lucas’s phone buzzed—an invitation to tour regional galleries along the Murray from Swan Hill to Echuca. It was the chance to rebuild his career. His chest tightened at the thought of leaving Albury—and Seraphina.
That evening, they sat on the deck of the Flour Mill, watching the river’s black mirror reflect strings of café lights. A cool wind stirred. Lucas stared into his tea. “I’ve been offered a series of exhibits,” he said quietly. “I could take them, Seraphina. But I’d have to leave soon.”
Her heart lurched. She touched his hand. “I want you to go,” she began, voice steady though her pulse thundered. “Your art deserves to be seen far beyond Albury.”
He shook his head. “I don’t want to leave you.”
Tears welled in her eyes—grief and love entwined. She drew a breath of river air. “Listen to me, Lucas. Love isn’t possession. It’s the freedom to grow. You must follow your path. And if it leads back to me… then I’ll know this was never just a moment.”
He closed his eyes, pain and hope warring on his face. Then he opened them, steadier. “Promise me you’ll wait,” he said.
“I promise,” she replied. “I’ll wait at the river’s edge, where we first spoke.”
They embraced under the cafe lights, the night air trembling around them. Somewhere, a possum rustled in the gum trees. The Murray slithered by, unconcerned and eternal.
Lucas Beaumont stepped onto the early morning platform of Albury Railway Station for the last time in six weeks. The century-old brick archway of the Goods Shed, now repurposed into the Murray Art Museum Albury’s airy galleries, stood silent behind him. His footsteps echoed on the polished tiles, a hollow rhythm that matched the ache in his chest. Beyond the platform, steam roses curled above the locomotive, and beyond that, the wide sweep of the Murray River glittered in the dawn light.
He carried only his battered guitar case, a weather-worn rucksack, and a heartful of promise. Seraphina had pressed her hand into his, eyes bright with unshed tears, and whispered the solemn vow: “I will wait at the river’s edge, where we first spoke.” Now the moment to leave had arrived, and he felt the weight of every sunrise and sunset they’d shared upon each rippling bank of the river.
The train lurched forward, carrying him westward along the meandering river corridor—a ribbon of steel binding together towns that sprang to life on the promise of water. First Wodonga’s red-brick façades receded, then Chiltern’s quiet streets where gold-panners once chased dreams in 1850’s sluice-beds. Soon he watched through the carriage window as the eucalyptus-dotted hills gave way to the broad floodplain of the Riverina, greening under the winter rains.
His first stop was Mildura, a city born of irrigation schemes and orange groves. Only three days before, he had sent Seraphina a postcard stamped with the Chaffey Brothers’ orchard gates—“Greetings from the Fruit Bowl of New South Wales!” he had scrawled. But the paddocks of citrus and vines looked surreal through his artist’s eye: each row a river of green, the river’s own tributaries mirrored in irrigation channels that glimmered like silver threads.
He found shelter at an old shearing quarters repurposed as an artist’s residency. The squat stone walls still hummed with the memory of shearers’ songs, and Leonie, the caretaker, brewed tea in a battered urn set beside a window that overlooked the Murray’s broad backwaters.
“People come here to escape,” Leonie told him over steaming mugs of billy-tea. “Or to find something they lost.” She had grown up on Traynors Road, picking fruit alongside Italian settlers who’d arrived after the war. Lucas realized her words described him: both escape and quest wrapped in a single journey.
He photographed the sunset over the Murray—burnt-orange sky reflected in black waters, red gums leaning like sentinels into their own reflections. At night he lay awake, writing letters to Seraphina by lamplight, each sentence a brushstroke of longing:
My dearest Seraphina,
Tonight the river held the sky in its arms, and the stars trembled at our parting. I carried your promise with me across every bridge…
By the following week he was in Echuca, on the border of Victoria and New South Wales, where paddle-steamers still choked clouds of coal smoke into the sky. The wharf, built in 1864 of river red gum, creaked beneath his boots. He spent dawn crouched beside the PS Pevensey, capturing the silhouettes of its paddles slicing through morning mist.
He joined a guided tour—an elderly man named Clarrie who spoke of the river trade, of timber cut for Melbourne’s growth, of immigrant hands that boarded these vessels seeking a future. Lucas recognized in Clarrie’s gravelly voice an echo of Seraphina’s own devotion to stories, how they tethered past to present.
That night, Lucas perched on the wharf rail, guitar at his side. He fingered a melody he had just learned from a tannoy-announced folk singer—an old Murray ballad about a captain lost to river blindness, whose ghost supposedly sailed each foggy dawn. As he plucked the strings, the melody reached across the water, and he felt Seraphina’s presence in every ripple.
He mailed a second parcel of photographs to Albury: sepia-toned prints of steamer stacks, close-ups of river reeds, a panoramic shot of the junction where Campaspe and Goulburn join the Murray. He wrote on the back of each: “For Seraphina: so you remember our river as I do.”
Mid-journey, he detoured to Swan Hill to visit the Pioneer Settlement, a living museum of timber slab huts and diesel-driven traction engines. At the whirling shearing shed exhibit, he met Matt, a Wiradjuri Elder who volunteered as a guide. Matt told him of Bunjil the Eagle, whose flight created the land’s ridges.
“Water shapes the spirit,” Matt said, squinting against the sunlight. “The river is the land’s lifeblood—and ours too.”
Lucas felt an almost physical tug on his heart. Every person he met along the Murray spoke of water’s power: to sustain and to transform. It resonated with Seraphina’s morning rituals at Noreuil Park in Albury: the way she drank in each dawn, letting the river’s quiet counsel strengthen her.
At sunset, Lucas climbed Mount Hope lookout and photographed the floodplain’s patchwork: orchards, sheep paddocks, a broad river vein coiling through the land. In that light, he saw ghosts of all who had come to these plains—Wiradjuri and Wemba-Wemba ancestors, Chinese market gardeners of the gold-rush, Italian and Greek immigrants who planted vines. Each image he captured felt like a thread in a tapestry whose pattern he was only beginning to discern.
Back in Albury, Seraphina found Lucas’s postcards and letters waiting at her front door on Dean Street. Each one lay atop her desk where she catalogued Wiradjuri words and legends for the upcoming exhibition at MAMA. Sometimes she read them by the stained-glass windows of Jones’s Book Emporium; other times she carried them into the olive groves at Hovell Tree Park, the breeze bearing the scent of oregano and rosemary.
In his handwriting, she discovered new facets of him—gentleness mixed with fierce curiosity. He wrote of meeting a family of Ngintait custodians at a levee in Wentworth, of learning an old map of ancestral trade routes, of playing his guitar for the residents of a Murray-Islander aged-care home in Yarrunga.
And in every letter he reaffirmed his promise: “I carry your faith in me across every floodplain. I will return when I know our river has taught me its secrets.”
Between his postcards, Seraphina poured herself into the exhibition’s final preparations. She designed wall texts called Mubaan-gu—“Our River” in Wiradjuri—each phrase bilingual in English and Wiradjuri. She commissioned local photographer Brett Mattingley to document the Murray’s flood peeps, and she arranged a performance by the Border Folk Collective on opening night.
But nights without Lucas were long. She sometimes awoke on her couch in the old cottage on Thurgoona Street—her window framing Monument Hill—listening for the distant chug of the westbound train that now carried him toward endless horizons.
On a crisp morning, as jacarandas bloomed faintly in Dean Street, Seraphina found an envelope heavier than the rest. His handwriting curved across the front:
Seraphina O’Connor
Noreuil Park
Albury
Inside, beyond another letter, was a photograph—Lucas standing on the summit of Mount Buffalo, the snow-dusted granite cliffs behind him. Above his head he had inked a single word:
“Return?”
Beneath, in fine script:
I’ve been invited to exhibit alongside landscape photographers in Bright and Beechworth. They want a joint show at the Murray Art Museum Albury in two months’ time. Will you marry my wandering eye with your eternal roots? Meet me on the Border Loop at the Hume Weir lookout in two days.
–L.
Her breath caught. The pustules of hope she had tended so carefully now burst into bloom. Two months hence—a future sketched in a single photograph. Two days’ time—enough to cross a muddy track and meet him where the river’s power is harnessed and released.
Seraphina folded the photograph, pressed a finger into the corner. Then she stood, slipping on boots and her woollen scarf, and set out for the Murray’s banks. The city of Albury stirred around her—cafés opening on Dean Street, schoolchildren crossing the Dean Street Bridge, anglers casting lines from the jetty. But her mind soared beyond the bustle to the cool waters of Lake Hume, to Lucas’s silhouette against a winter sky.
The Border Loop climbed through manna gums and rocky outcrops, the scent of crushed leaves underfoot. She paused at every vantage—where the lake widened into a glass pane reflecting the Victorian high country, where the dam wall rose like a rampart. A chill wind tugged at her coat, yet she felt warmth glowing beneath her ribs.
At the Hume Weir lookout, she found him. Lucas leaned against the stone balustrade, guitar case at his feet, the same worn Army jacket slung over one shoulder. When he saw her, his face broke into a smile that made her heart leap.
They embraced in the crisp air, the dam’s gates groaning as water thundered below. Over the roar, they heard nothing but each other’s breath, each other’s heartbeat.
“I take that as a yes?” he asked, voice rough with emotion.
She laughed—a clear, bright sound that scattered the chill. “Yes. A thousand times yes.”
He lifted her hands to his lips and kissed the lines of her palms, then swept her into his arms. She pressed her cheek to his chest, listening to the steady thrum of his heartbeat.
The Mississippi-sized roar of the Hume spillway echoed their joy. Above them, silver clouds scudded across a winter sky. And in that moment, on the very outskirts of Albury—on the border between past and future—they sealed their promise: to build a life together, where currents of absence would give way to rivers of presence.
If you want to read other stories from Australia click here.
If you want to read stories from other places click here.
For more information check these posts:
- Chasing Sunrise on the Murray River
- Exploring the Magic of the Murray River at Dawn
- The Soul of the Murray: A Morning Walk
- Noreuil Park: A Quiet Morning by the River
- Reflections on the Murray River’s Silent Beauty
- Finding Calm by the Murray: Early Morning Impressions
- Monument Hill and the Spirit of Border Towns
- Golden Horizons Over the Murray River
- Sunrise Secrets Along the Murray River
- Walking the Murray Riverbank at First Light
- Dean Street and the Heartbeat of a Border City
- Stories in the Stone: Monument Hill’s Memory
- River Reverie: A Morning by the Water’s Edge
Leave a Reply