The Finke River, or Larapinta, is a river in centralAustralia, one of four main rivers of the Lake Eyre Basin and thought to be the oldest riverbed in the world. It flows for only a few days a year and when this happens, its water usually disappears into the sands of the Simpson Desert, rarely if ever reaching Lake Eyre.
Geography
The source of the Finke River is in the Northern Territory's MacDonnell Ranges, and the name Finke River is first applied at the confluence of the Davenport and Ormiston Creeks, just north of Mount Zeil. From here the river meanders for approximately to the western edge of the Simpson Desert in northern South Australia. It flows through the West MacDonnell and Finke Gorge National Parks. Usually the river is a string of waterholes, but it can become a raging torrent during rare flood events. In extreme events, water from the Finke River flows into the Macumba River, which empties into Lake Eyre, a total distance from headwater streams of around. Major tributaries include Ellery Creek, and the Palmer and Hugh Rivers.
The Finke River was named by John McDouall Stuart in 1860 after an Adelaide man, William Finke, who was one of the promoters of his expedition. The Indigenous name for the river in parts of the Northern Territory, usually taken as Larapinta, may have been incorrectly translated by its first transcriber, the explorer Ernest Giles. In August 1872, while camped at Charlotte Waters Telegraph Station, Giles was the first "outsider" to record the Arrernte name for the Finke River. He incorrectly deduced from his conversations with Southern Arrernte that the name was derived from the gigantic mythological snake which was believed to have created the river, and thought that larapinta meant snake in the local language. However in July 1876, Rev. Georg A. Heidenreich, the Superintendent of the Finke River Mission Station, appears to have been the first to have confirmed the Western Arrernte name of the river, which was actually "Lara Beinta", which means "Salt River". This translation is now widely accepted because the Finke contains certain waterholes that are constantly salty. The legend of its derivation from the serpent is nonetheless held by the local people. The original spelling was a deliberate choice used for the main exit road west from Alice Springs, Larapinta Drive, as it leads to the Finke River at Hermannsburg; the name was also used for an Alice Springs suburb and the Larapinta Trail.
Antiquity of the Finke River
The Finke River is frequently cited as the oldest river in the world. Its age has been deduced from observation and analysis of various factors in the geology of the area. In places such as the James Range, the Finke flows through deeply incised meanders. Because meanders only form on flat plains, the river must have formed before the ranges were pushed up; this happened in a mountain building event referred to as the Alice Springs Orogeny which peaked between 400 and 300 million years ago. It is not possible to say with absolute confidence that it is the very oldest river, but it is certainly one of the oldest rivers in the world. However, southern parts of its course must be much younger, because the areas where the Finke now flows near the southern edge of the Northern Territory, and further south, were under the sea during the Mesozoic Era, part of the Great Artesian Basin. The antiquity of the Finke River is not unique, but applies equally to other large mountain-sourced river systems in central Australia, such as the Todd and Hale Rivers and many others, because most of the central Australian mountain belts formed at around the same time. There are other eroded mountain ranges of equal or greater age to the MacDonnell Ranges, both in Australia and on other continents, so present rivers in those areas may have evolved from ancestral streams of equal and greater antiquity than the Finke.
