Of all the border crossings between Australia's most populous states there is nothing quite like the Wymah Punt. It passes over what is sometimes the Murray River, the waterway acting as the defining point on the map, and in the national mind, where the two great rivals NSW and Victoria face off. Upstream from the river's biggest population centre, the 83,000 of Albury and Wodonga, the Hume Dam swells and shrinks like a bladder.

Now after two wet years it is a very swollen bladder, but in the decade before, during the great dry, the dam's upper reaches stopped being a dam at all and with the punt stuck in the middle above a muddy trickle of river, impatient travellers used it illegally as a short bridge, threatening the craft's ancient timbers.

At home in his saddle ... stockman Kevin Goldsworthy, who works on Towong Hill Station, crosses the Murray. A decade ago, with the Hume Dam shrunken, it was a muddy trickle of a river. Credit:Justin McManus

There has been a ferry here at Wymah or a few hundred metres upstream since the 1860s, when one was established to help to move stock.

The first European settlers probably thought the area looked like the promised land with its high, winter-snow-capped mountains, flowing water and good grazing pasture. Now the only stock that crosses using the punt is on the occasional small farm truck. Mostly it is just local cars (no more than two at a time), a single car and caravan or a bunch of cyclists or motorcyclists.