Once Were Waterways:

Words and photography: Jack Latimore

Ten minutes after the meeting concluded a haze of dust barrelled in from the dry plains to the south-west, shutting the sky out and spilling over Balranald like fury. In a sudden gasp sandwich boards collapsed, litter flicked out of garbage cans and went swirling wildly up and away as though chasing after the heat that had been scooped out of the day. 

Outside a single-fronted office building, a small pack of smokers huddled together evaluating the worth of the meeting that had occupied the better part of a day. When the dust storm bowled in, each of them ditched the remainder of their cigarette either into paper cups or empty plastic water bottles and bid farewell to one another before scattering towards the cover of their nearby vehicles. 

Inside the office building, three representatives from the New South Wales Department of Industry (DoI) for Water and two consultancy specialists from SevenSeas Creative, gathered their papers. The workshop with the Mutti Mutti Traditional Owners had proceeded as expected. They’d heard similar sets of concerns aired in meetings held with First Nations peoples elsewhere in the Murray-Darling Basin.

The  brief was to consult with the Nations groups to develop a suite of Water Resource Plans (WRPs). Prior to meeting the Mutti Mutti, the department had released eight draft WRPs to the public for consideration. Another dozen, including the WRP pertaining to the interests of the Mutti Mutti, were progressing through earlier stages of their development. There was a considerable way to go working with the 30 Nations across the Basin in NSW before any of the plans could be finalised.  

As an instrument, the WRPs would primarily do three things: set out strategic arrangements for sharing water resources for consumptive use; consider potential and emerging risks to water resources; and establish rules to meet environmental targets, including water quality standards.

The Murray-Darling Basin Plan set forth specific requirements for the development of the WRPs when it was enacted in federal parliament in 2012. Several of these related essentially to First Nations values and uses of water  on Country.

A total of five WRPs out of the 20 WRPs in New South Wales would affect the Mutti Mutti Nation: two of them for surface water and three for artesian water resources.

On the sweltering morning of the Balranald meeting, Brendan Kennedy, a Tatti Tatti, Wadi Wadi, and Mutti Mutti man, received an alert for the lower Murrumbidgee River about a blue-green algal bloom. With the impending cold front from the south-west forecast for midday, there was concern the combination of those conditions created the potential for the Bidgee –as the Mutti Mutti referred to their river– to suffer a mass fish kill. 

Only a week before the meeting, Brendan had captured the aftermath of a fish kill event at the nearby Redbank weir and in 12kms of “off take” channels which serviced a nearby landowner. An estimated ten thousand fish had perished, most of them the invasive carp, but many were large native perch and cod. 

Soon after the meeting got underway, the department’s WRP consultants faced an outpouring of anguish and despair from the Mutti Mutti Traditional Owners over the state of the Bidgee. The waters of the river were rotten, they said.

The toxic algae bloomed because there was rarely adequate amounts of water permitted to flow through the weirs upstream. The algae made the fish inedible, which meant fishing was now pointless. The toxic water also meant there was no more swimming, which used to occupy the community’s youth. 

The link between the health of the river and health of the Mutti Mutti people, young and old, was emphasised repeatedly. As was the loss of important cultural practice which was disappearing with the frogs, mussels, shrimp, yabbies, crays, eels, turtles, fish, and water fowl that had effectively abandoned the Bidgee, or perished, or were too contaminated for use. 

Access to special and significant sites along the river was also often restricted or outright denied by landowners. Gates are locked. Fencing can run down the riverbank and into the water. 

More disastrous though was the lack of natural “over the bank” flow which provided seasonal nurseries for wildlife, replenishing lagoons, billabongs, below-ground water stores, entire ecosystems sufficiently to endure prolonged extreme conditions in future years. The result was distressed, dying country, or dead and already arid country, ghost memories of lively waterways beside the river channel.

“In five to eight years the Bidgee will be as dead as the Barka,” they agreed.

“We are all suffering,” lamented Mary Pappin, a Mutti Mutti Elder whose mother was born on the bank of the Bidgee a kilometre upriver from the office the meeting sat in. “The state of mind of our people is very sad indeed.”

There was also mention of water theft, of illegal pumping, of illegal canals, levees and culverts constructed by “alpha irrigators” to “harvest” water travelling across floodplains into their supersized private reservoirs because they were worried somebody else might waste it. 

“Our old people used to go out to meet the flood waters,” said Aunty Mary. “I’ve been waiting years now for that water to come down.”

“We have been dispersed from our waterways and now we want our water back,” declared Brendan Kennedy. 

“We want to be drivers of water. We want to be instrumental in the management and ownership of water for our people. We don’t want to be tacked onto the back of your trailer. We don’t want to just be consulted, written up into your plans and then have you misconstrue things and say that you have met your obligations. We don't want to be here just so you can tick boxes. We want to be heard and be part of the solution.”

In July 24, 2017 ABC Four Corners broadcast Pumped, an expose of how the Murray-Darling Basin was being corrupted, and the extent to which, in the five years since the implementation of the plan, water had become an increasingly valuable asset.  

With huge sums of taxpayer money going into the establishment and administration of the plan, and water continuing to disappear from the river, Four Corners made serious allegations about systematic mismanagement, malfeasance, environmental exploitation and corruption at a governance level. 

The program also illustrated how the lives and livelihood of regular farmers, small business owners, and small towns were impacted by the marketisation of water, particularly communities downstream from big irrigators.

In general, Pumped was applauded as exemplary investigative journalism and a vital intervention in the interests of the Australian public. However, it overlooked First Nations perspectives and experiences almost entirely. There was no voice from the Northern Basin Aboriginal Nations (NBAN), nor from the Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations (MLDRIN) in the lower basin to the south, and there was a notable absence of the Barkandji people in between. 

In 2015, the Federal Court recognised the rights of the Barkandji to 128,000 square kilometres of land in western New South Wales, which includes land on both sides of the Barka, or Darling River, for nearly its entire length. It was the largest Native Title determination in the state, running from the south-west NSW border with Victoria, north to the town of Wanaaring in the state’s north-west.

Aboriginal media outlet, IndigenousX worked with MLDRIN to provide a necessary First Nations perspective on the controversy. Two days after Pumped went to air, Barkandji Elder William ‘Badger’ Bates, a director of the Barkandji Native Title Prescribed Body Corporate, had a column published in Guardian Australia as part of the collaborative partnership between that news organisation and IndigenousX. Uncle Badger’s voice reached a national readership, and revealed the issues afflicting the Barka to an international audience through the Guardian group’s US and UK bureaus. 

“For the last five to eight years, we say the Barka’s buka,” wrote Uncle Badger. “That means the Darling River’s dead. It stinks of the dead fish. It’s rotten.” 

Eighteen months later, in early January 2019, over a million native species of fish were discovered floating dead along a 40 kilometre stretch of the Barka around Menindee in a mass fish kill event. The bureaucrats attributed the disaster solely to natural conditions caused by sudden drops in temperature and dying blue-green algal blooms sucking the oxygen out of available pools of water.

Critics of the Murray Darling Basin Authority (MDBA), the agency established to administer the Basin Plan, said the fish kill was due to sustained mismanagement of the river systems.

Federal minister for water, David Littleford, dismissed those claims.

“The reality is we’re in a serious drought and the only silver bullet is rain,” he said, adding that the government had offered NSW any assistance it required to respond to the incident, and to rebuild fish stocks when it did eventually rain.

To prove how common fish kill events in times of drought were, the New South Wales water minister, Niall Blair, ended his inspection of the tragedy at Menindee to travel hundreds of kilometres south-east to Lake Hume, located on the New South Wales - Victoria border outside of Albury-Wodonga.

Eighteen hundred fish were said to have been discovered floating dead on the lake. When the minister arrived for a media statement it was revealed 60 carp were involved. Undeterred, the minister doubled-down on the government line and pointed to the discovery of dead fish in rivers and lakes in diverse locations around the state.

At the time, Professor of Environmental Science at UNSW, Richard Kingsford was contacted to provide a comment.  

“Algal blooms flourish when rivers stop flowing,” he told NITV News. “Flows in the Darling River have declined by about half as a result of irrigation development upstream. This means that the drought effects, with over development, are the main long-term cause [of the mass fish kill].” 

The MDBA convened a meeting in the national capital on January 14 to co-ordinate a response to the environmental disaster for the months of extreme weather ahead. Water policy officials, river operators, government fish scientists, environmental water holders, and relevant state representatives were invited to participate. Those unable to make it to Canberra were invited to ‘dial-in’ by telephone or video link. 

Nobody from the Barkandji, on whose Country the fish kill occurred, was invited. NBAN and MILDRIN were also left out. New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council CEO, James Christian said representatives from the council had not been asked to participate either.

That day, Uncle Badger was travelling to Wilcannia from the Menindee Lakes area to inspect a weir when contacted by NITV News. He was surprised to learn of the meeting and said he had not previously been informed of it or received any kind of request to be included in it.

“This is what happens all the time,” he said.

Along the mighty River Murray, locals said the health of the ecosystem is just as dire, due directly to the mismanagement of the water.

Watti Watti and Wemba Wemba woman Jacinta Chaplin Morgan grew up in Nyah West in the 1970s and 80s and on the riverbank near Nyah’s football oval, she pointed out old community campsites. A burial site had been fenced with cyclone wire to keep visitors from parking their RVs on it, but it was more difficult to identify the campsites Jacinta spoke so fondly about. Giant, centuries-old red gums stood back from the river, most dead. Around them, saplings had matured into a scrap of thirty-year growth. Fields of tall, invasive thistles covered a bone dry plain.

Jacinta explained that one of the first consequences of the water reforms in the 1990s had been the loss of places of cultural and spiritual significance to her people.

“There’s a lot of culture sites in here, in this forest, for my family group,” she said. “We used to have big family camps and all sorts of people would turn up. You’d meet distant cousins that you’d never met before, different family would bring their in-laws and stuff, and everybody would just be together. 

“You’d get to spend a weekend or a few days with them. You’d get to teach the younger kids things. Like in this area where all the thistles are now, we used to be able to get the Bardi grub and all the little bush plants. Now that the thistles are here you can’t even camp here. You can’t take the younger ones and show them. 

“One of my younger nephews just turned 18 and he hardly knows anything because we can’t get out here to show them. It’s just all dying off.”

Another long time local resident, Nicole McKay agreed the water reforms in the 90s – combined with the Sustainable Diversion Limits (SDLs) reforms that came into effect at the turn of the century –significantly changed the natural ecosystem of the Murray River area.

“Flooding is an essential part of the Australian environment,” she said walking across the exposed bed of Bucky Creek, a tributary of the Wakool River situated just off Yanga Way road between the villages of Tooleybuc and Kyalite.

SDLs are designed to provide water managers with the ability to manipulate water along the river system. SDLs consist of the implementation and construction of a suite of mechanisms to enable this facility. This suite involves ‘supply’ projects, which may include modifying natural structures, such as river banks; the construction of ‘constraint’ projects, such as weirs and culvert systems; and ‘efficiency’ projects like urban water restrictions, and improved irrigation systems. 

The objective behind the SDLs is ultimately to service more water consumers, including households, industry, and irrigated agriculture, by reducing water ‘wastage’.  The issue for concerned environmentalists like Nicole and Indigenous communities within the lower Murray-Darling lower basin riverina, is the routine privileging of certain water interests over those of others.  

Manipulation of the water capacity in various areas along the river harms the complex balance of the ecosystem, said Nicole.

“Building on a flood plain makes it seem like floods are a disaster, but in these areas beside the river, regular flooding is how they exist, it’s why they exist,” she said. “If regular flooding, and ‘over the bank’ and ‘through the channel’ flooding didn’t regularly occur in the past, these areas would have been taken up by colonial-settlers and cleared for farmland. The fact is, 90-year-old people would call it a swamp. It was regularly inundated by water. That’s what the riverine environment is. It’s not just the river channel with gumtrees growing along the edge. 

“When the river reforms took away the water, or restricted over the bank flows, the unique biodiversity began to alter and disappear. A lot of it rapidly became arid. Lignum took over a lot of areas, and lignum has got its place, it’s not a bad thing, but it's not the natural ecosystem of these areas. 

“Without the natural water flow regime, over time the riverine environment will turn to dust.” 

Nicole, who is a member of the lower Murray-Darling lobby group, Healthy Rivers, said concerned locals were not asking for a return to the pre-irrigation age. 

“We’re certainly not asking for no irrigation. It's essential for our economy, it’s essential for these river communities, but it’s no good for anyone if we’ve got blue-green algae in the river, if people are taking their finger off the pulse of the most important thing, which is keeping the river healthy and having the riverland ecosystem function in respect to its natural integrity.”

On a property just outside Kyalite, Nicole and fellow Healthy Rivers group member, Greg Ogle, walked through a dead lake system. A tangle of eucalyptus scrub had laid claim to the old lake’s bed. On the surrounding shore was a graveyard of red gums, many of them ring trees. Between them, mounds of mussel middens, slowly blending back into the river sands. 

Beside the Murray River at Wood Wood, Marilyne Nicholls, a local artist, explained how the new water management reforms had destroyed ancestral fishing practices. Marilyne, who identified as a multi-nation woman, explained how the fish would come in and clean the land when the seasonal river flows came over the bank. With this way, she said, the old people never knew any ‘blackwater events’.

“The fish come in and eat around where all the food is on the land. At the moment the river doesn’t flow like that anymore,” she said.

“There’s too much control in the waterways on how much water goes in, the height of the water. There’s too much demand, and that demand is not a cultural demand, or an environmental demand. It’s a demand around crop growing. It could be cotton, rice, or almonds and apricots, for which this place is well known, from here all the way down river to Mildura, especially to Robinvale. 

“The Watti Watti people are not even in the picture. We’re only a box to tick if the managers are consulting.”  

Back on the Bidgee, Mutti Mutti women Aunty Pasty Winch, an Elder, and Tanya Charles sit close to the colossal decaying trunk of a red gum Patsy’s mother was born beneath early last century. Below, the Bidgee is motionless with a green hue to its surface. 

“They’re still saying we can drink the water, but we know we can’t drink it. You can smell it when you turn the tap on,” said Tanya. “It makes your stomach turn. But we’ve got to bath in that water. And not everybody has got rain tanks. So we’ve either got to buy the water at high prices in town, or boil the water and even when you boil it it’s still disgusting. 

“Traditionally, if the water in the river went bad the people could dig holes, starting from the edge of the bank and going back, and they would have ten holes, and that bad water was purifying through the holes, and by the time it got to the last hole it was beautiful, clean water and they were able to drink it. They knew how to do that many, many moons ago, didn’t they.”

The women agreed there is a genuine danger that the lower Bidgee will go the way of the Barka. They said at times the water level is allowed to drop so low it’s possible to walk between banks across a dry Bidgee riverbed. 

“But I’m hoping that the community – black and white–won’t let that happen,” said Aunty Patsy. “I think at the end of the day people might come together. We need people to start making noises. People have got to stand together and not let this happen like it did out there at Wilcannia and Menindee and along the Barka. It’s not gonna be good if it does go the same way. I mean, this river is old. It’s been here forever.” 

Overlooking the wide, milky-brown expanse of water lapping against the lawns of the Mildura rowing club it’s easy to get the impression the Murray is as robust as it ever was. Luxury houseboats are anchored along the river’s edge opposite, more of them are docked just up river. Up the bank, sitting opposite the Grand Hotel, the spray from a water fountain wildly ejaculated water high into the air. A sunlit mist keeps the surrounding lawns verdant green. Along the medium strip up Deakin Avenue elegant colonial-era water fountains also boast their wares. 

It is a celebration of water, and more pointedly a celebration of the manipulation of water: a feat the city was founded on. But the water channel here, and all the way back upstream to Echuca, is not so much a river as it is a series of man-made lakes. And when you detour not too far from the main track, the environmental deterioration is pronounced. 

Late last month, a flurry of reports were released that concerned the crisis in the Murray-Darling Basin. One, issued by the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, warned that without without the return of natural flows, algae blooms will continue to strain the rivers and impact pastoral industries. Another report, from the Independent Assessment of Fish Deaths, a panel appointed by the Australian Government, to assess circumstances surrounding fish kills on the Barka around Menindee in December and January found the bureaucrats had been correct in attributing the kills to natural conditions.

“I’m pleased to hear Professor [Rob] Vertessy (who chaired the panel) say he thinks the Murray Darling Basin Plan is the right way to improve the ecology and environment in the Basin,” Minister Littleproud said in a written statement after the findings were tabled. 

The next day the federal minister made his own announcement. An Indigenous member would be appointed to the MDBA after the federal parliament legislated to create a permanent identified position to “boost Indigenous representation”, the minister wrote.  

On reading the ministers announcement, I recalled the skepticism of the Mutti Mutti outside the office building at 82 Market Street, Balranald as the dust storm threatened almost a fortnight earlier. It was the first time the DoI Water had sat with the Mutti Mutti and yet they’d felt locked out of the management of their river for so long. It was difficult to trust they would bother to return.

I also recalled the declaration of Brendan Kennedy, who had postponed for a few hours his journey to a demonstration in the foyer of Parliament House in Canberra that involved First Nations rights groups from around the continent calling for climate justice and more specifically a federal royal commission into the management of the Murray-Darling Basin. 

“We want to be drivers of water. We want to be instrumental in the management and ownership of water for our people,” he’d said before rising to his feet and moving to the door to resume his drive. 

A fortnight later, I ask him over the phone for a response to Minister Littleproud’s announcement.

“It’s a milestone. We’ve been saying we want this for a long time. We want a seat at the table,” he says. I can hear his family in the background, his kids yelling out to one another around him.  

“It has to be more than a rubber stamp exercise though,” he reiterates. “The presence of a First Nations representative couldn’t and shouldn’t be misconstrued as any kind of mandate to manage water on behalf of any of the Traditional Owners. 

“That’s not how we’re entering into it,” he says. “We’d expect our representative to be pushing the envelope. To be pushing for the full recognition of our traditional water rights.”