Gosh, Adelaide can do a Spring day well… it’s just a pity the bright sunlight shows up just how cruddy the Torrens riverbank is.

Seriously, have you been down there lately?

While billions have been invested in hotels, extending the Convention Centre and putting our amazing medical researchers into homes worthy of their work, the rest of it looks like it’s been dragged through a hedge backwards. 

There’s moss everywhere, pavers are missing and uneven along the river’s edge, the Torrens itself near Elder Park is filled with more balls than my 11-year-old son has ever tried to hit, and the grass around the rotunda has been recovering longer than a heroin-addled rockstar from the ‘70s.

And then there are the beautiful boat sculptures sitting just off the bank, near where their artist spent time in the Elder Park Migrant Hostel.

These Origami-like boats have always been one of my favourite art installations, and not just for the potential disaster they proffer our rowers, but for how they look like they float above the muddiness, the inscriptions suggesting letters sent at the end of a journey.

Now, one of them looks like the only journey it’s on is to the bottom of the river Titanic-style… snapped in half ,with one end upended.

The scum from the river means they are muddy and if I was the artist, the critically acclaimed Samstag Scholar Shaun Kirby, I would be gutted something so important to our Adelaide identity has been treated so shoddily.

As I stood there, it was impossible not to feel a bit sad that this was the best I had to show her.

The problem is, I’m just not sure when all of this happened.

The riverbank is one of my usual haunts if I want to fit in a quick walk, so I’d probably travel it a couple of times a week.

I guess it’s like when you start putting on weight, right? It’s a choccie donut here and chips for dinner as a special treat there, until you start to notice a slight tightening around the waist of your jeans.

Things move on and you start to accept standards you never would have entertained just last year, until finally someone snaps a photo of you at a party and you look at that person and think, ‘who the hell is that middle-aged wonk’, until of course you realise it’s you.

A closer view of one of the damaged sculptures. Photo: Tony Lewis/InDaily

That’s what I reckon has happened for me, and in the ultimate lesson of the standard you jog by being the standard you accept, I finally had the duckweed washed from my eyes courtesy of a 13-year-old girl visiting from Sydney on an exchange.

She arrived on a rainy and cold day so we ruled out the beach for her initial South Australian exposure (and after all… Bondi), then wrote off shopping (and after all… Oxford Street and Pitt Street Mall,) so finally settled on checking out the Hills and taking a walk around the Torrens (studiously ignoring the whole Sydney Harbour and Opera House thing).

She loved Hahndorf, and more specifically the random horse tied up and the ye-olde-sweet shop on the main street, but once we had bought our body weight in sugar and nostalgia, we headed to the aquatic jewel in our city’s crown.

The response was as only a teenager could give was: “Like, it looks pretty, like, crap.”

As I stood there, it was impossible not to feel a bit sad that this was the best I had to show her. With only one restaurant open on the riverbank, I couldn’t even sweeten the deal with some hot chips and a lemonade.

The riverbank offers little to the visitor. Photo: Tony Lewis/InDaily

No comparison: an aerial view of the south bank ‘beach’ on the Brisbane River. Photo: Darren England/AAP

No one would believe me that people used to swim and race in the damn river (at one stage there were as many as 163 people competing in the annual Swim-Through Adelaide) and the first South Australian woman to represent Australia at the Olympic Games, Denise Norton, had even cut her racing teeth in it as a teenager.

I’m not asking for miracles as no-one needs to actually get into the thing unless they ride atop a paddle boat, the Popeye or a BBQ Buoy, but surely it’s not too much to ask for the surroundings to look just a little more presentable, a la the Brisbane, Sydney or even Melbourne waterfront?

While our Lord Mayor Jane Lomax-Smith laments the lousy state of our key boulevards and pleads the case for more resources to clean up our “shabby streetscapes”, perhaps she needs to extend her view a little further.

We don’t have to wait for meetings, focus groups and the release of masses of cash, because as anyone who has been surprised by their own ageing in the cold, hard light of day would know, even a light tweezing is better than nothing.

Ali Clarke presents the breakfast show on Mix 102.3. She is a regular columnist for InDaily.