Born below Mount Lindesay in country thick with subtropical rainforest, the river runs a long, looping course south-east then north-east through the Northern Rivers region. Its catchment covers 6,862 square kilometres, the sixth largest in New South Wales, and its floodplain sprawls across more than a thousand square kilometres of cane fields and pasture, flat as a table and prone to flooding. The Wilsons River, the major tributary that runs through Lismore, was once considered the North Arm of the Richmond itself, which is why Lismore was long said to sit on the Richmond. In 1976 it was formally renamed, after the European family who had first held the land.

The river's modern history was written in timber. When colonists first pushed up from the Ballina entrance in the 1840s, they found the valley full of Australian red cedar, a richly grained hardwood so valuable they called it red gold and chased it with the obsession of prospectors. The river was the only practical way to move the felled logs, and for decades it ran thick with rafted timber bound for the coast. This cedar rush was also the spark for catastrophe. The arrival of cedar getters, then squatters and their sheep, brought the violence of the frontier to Bundjalung country, including the Richmond River massacres in which around a hundred or more Aboriginal people were killed in the 1840s.

Where the river meets the ocean at Ballina, it once guarded itself with shifting sandbars. From the river's charting in 1828 until the close of the century, the bar was notorious, swallowing ships and lives with a regularity that made the crossing a gamble. The lighthouse on the headland, raised in 1879, helped, but the real fix came with engineering. Two long breakwaters were built in the early 1900s to pin the channel in place, and as sand piled up behind the works, a new body of water formed, Shaw's Bay, sheltered behind what is now Lighthouse Beach. For more than a century the river was the region's highway, until better roads and rail, and the closing of the North Coast Steam Navigation Company in 1954, finally let the water rest.

The Richmond once held a fish found nowhere else: the Richmond River cod, a relative of the Murray cod and likely a form of the eastern freshwater cod. It did not survive the twentieth century. Habitat destruction, heavy siltation, and gross overfishing wiped it out somewhere between the 1930s and 1950s, the destruction so reckless that dynamite was used to clear fish while a railway line was built. The endangered Oxleyan pygmy perch still clings on in the system, a small survivor of a much richer past. Recent efforts have begun reintroducing eastern freshwater cod to the river, an attempt to put back something the cedar century took out.

Today the Richmond is navigable for boats only a short way inland, perhaps as far as Casino, with weirs along its length holding back floods and feeding irrigation. But near the sea it comes alive again as a place of leisure. The sheltered estuary offers sandy beaches for swimming and sunbathing, water for yachting and fishing, and a home for the Richmond River Sailing and Rowing Club. Trawlers work out of the Ballina harbour where Fishery Creek joins the flow. The river that once meant cedar and danger now means weekends on the water, though its deeper history, of Bundjalung country and frontier loss, still runs beneath the surface like a current you cannot see.