While most of Australia’s borders are either along straight lines or follow natural geographical features such as rivers, the recently imposed travel restrictions have once again highlighted a strange ‘quirk’ in the map.
A slight dogleg in the otherwise straight boundary near the junction of South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales is generally forgotten about … but not so during the current health crisis.
The ABC reports that the meeting point between the three states is known as MacCabe Corner, near the small almond-growing community of Lindsay Point on the bank of the River Murray. The ‘kink’ is the result of a cartographical error by surveyors back in the late 1840s.
Back then, it eventually led to South Australia accusing Victoria of wrongly appropriating more than 1,000 square kilometres of its land and prompted a dispute which only ended 60 years later when Victoria won a lengthy legal battle. It now claims the territory around Lindsay Point — some of which would have fallen into Victoria regardless, but includes farming country which would have been designated South Australia if the border had been mapped accurately.
While the Privy Council in London thought it had settled the issue once and for all, they weren’t counting on Covid-19 re-igniting the drama.
Lindsay Point almond farm manager Tim Preusker, whose home is only about five kilometres into Victoria, told the ABC that local residents mainly conduct their business in South Australia and it would ‘make sense’ for the state boundary to be redrawn.
Mr Preusker said several of the properties at Lindsay Point are owned by South Australians who travel to Paringa, 25 kilometres away, for their post, have SA prefixes on their phone numbers, and mostly work in the Riverland.
“We’ve been exempt from the restrictions up until now, and we’ve been classed as South Australia,” he said. “For us here, we pretty much completely run our life out of South Australia … me and my wife own a business in Renmark, and this has had implications on that.”
The closest Victorian regional centre is Mildura, which is about 155 kilometres away by sealed road via Paringa, or 122 kilometres by unsealed roads through the Murray-Sunset National Park.
“Even our power comes in from South Australia,” Mr Preusker said.
There are concerns that the border anomaly could cause confusion and potential delays in the event of an emergency.
Mr Preusker has written to authorities to share his fears about the restrictions.
“We feel like we’re being tarnished with the same brush as the rest of Victoria and Melbourne,” he said. “We’ve been part of South Australia through all of this, and now all of a sudden it’s this pretty hardball line.”
Welcome to the confusion as we in the border community in the South have all the same problem, Power, Phone, Hosp, shopping and all our services are all based in SA. Our average yearly spend across the Border is $ 65.000-00, that is not including bigger tickets items. So we might have to take our money else ware in future.