Alexandrina Lake

Lake Alexandrina is a shallow freshwater lake on Ngarrindjeri country in South Australia, lying behind the coast about one hundred kilometres southeast of Adelaide. It meets the smaller Lake Albert to the southeast, and together the two are known as the Lower Lakes. The Murray River supplies most of their water, joined by the Bremer, Angas and Finniss rivers draining the southern Mount Lofty Ranges.

Low islands and sheltered bays give the lake its broken shore, while a narrow channel leads toward Lake Albert. The short Murray Mouth provides the outlet to the Southern Ocean; sand bars can close it when river flow falls, but ordinary river discharge kept the lower system predominantly fresh before colonial settlement. Ngarrindjeri communities knew the lake by several names and used its reeds, fish and birds within a wider network of river and coastal country.

British colonists named the water after Princess Alexandrina, heir to William IV, after whom Adelaide and the new colony were also named. Pastoral settlement and river traffic began from the 1830s, relying on the lake as the meeting point of the Murray navigation and the coastal route. Its value lay in that junction: a broad inland waterway reaching the sea through a narrow, shifting entrance.