RIVER YARNS: THE MURRAY-DARLING MYTHS: WEEK FOUR
Talking about River Yarns
With assistance from the Walkley Foundation, McPherson Media Group has commissioned Jane Ryan, a consultant with long experience and deep knowledge of water and resource management in the Murray-Darling Basin, to unravel the complex issues surrounding the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.
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Jane’s brief is to do so without the bias and hyperbole that has accompanied most commentary on the plan since its inception 14 years ago.
At a time when the Federal Government seeks to amend the plan to give effect to election promises to South Australia, Jane’s analysis will canvas what the plan has achieved already in the long history of resource management in the basin.
She explores the shortcomings of a political compromise on ‘a number’ for water recovery, when what is really required is a nuanced approach to securing the original ambitions for the plan.
In this fourth article in the series, Jane describes the variety in basin landscapes and how on-the-ground engagement and action has been, in the end, the critical factor in how we’ve made a difference.
THE BASIN’S LANDSCAPES
At the biggest scale, the Murray-Darling Basin lives large in most Australians’ minds as a vast, mostly natural river system.
A system that flows without interruption from its Murray headwaters in the Great Dividing Range and its Darling Baaka headwaters in southern Queensland, through to the Coorong and Murray Mouth.
Popular trivia night questions are about the length of the Murray, its size in relation to other Australian waterways, and the 2.2 million people who live in the basin.
But in reality, the basin is a patchwork of interdependent landscapes at regional and local scales.
The history of how people made their homes among valleys, forests and waterways of the basin makes up our many different communities across the basin.
As humans populated the basin, living in urban and agricultural landscapes, the Murray-Darling Basin has changed and is no longer the mostly natural river systems described in student assignments.
The complex and different needs of these patchwork pieces exist within a bigger landscape. This makes it easy to lose sight of how to get better results from returning water to the environment for the whole river system and native plants and animals.
This week, we’re looking at some elements of the basin landscapes we need to consider when investing in achieving ecological responses to improve the health of the Murray River.
These factors that catchment managers are compelled to consider rarely get a hearing in the noisy political football of water management.
People in the landscape
As identified last week, there have been people living along waterways in the basin for centuries – they are attractive landscapes for people to live, work and play. Later in this series, we will explore the tsunami of change to these landscapes as they were populated and the impact on the basin.
This week, we want to acknowledge some social aspects of living in the basin and examples of the community’s role in successfully working to rehabilitate these landscapes.
Did you know that everyone lives in a catchment, and most Australians live on a floodplain?
Australian landscapes are very different from the typical colonising country’s rolling green hills, channelised river systems and already severely reduced plants and animals.
Despite famous lines acknowledging just how varied the rainfall and resulting waterway flows can be, our waterway landscapes continue to be an enigma at their extremes. Droughts, dry spells, periodic high rainfall and big river floods continue to devastate communities that deal with living in this naturally varying landscape.
Obviously, First Nations people recognised these rhythms, having lived with the landscape for thousands of generations. They recognised places of plenty most of the time, as well as where the best refuges were – high places in river Country with floods, parts of the waterways with deep chains of ponds, oxbows or billabongs in dry times.
Victorian towns like Mildura, Swan Hill and Shepparton have the highest levels of Indigenous communities as part of their overall population.
As custodians of the river Country around these areas, Traditional Owners have a significant role in protecting their cultural places. Their work in guiding land and waterway managers in this has offered local communities the opportunity to get a deeper appreciation of river Country and the history of the region.
Did you know Victoria has the highest density of people living in the agricultural landscapes of the Murray-Darling Basin?
When we’re talking about the 2.2 million people cited as living in the basin, the livelihoods of a large proportion of them are not depending on the water flowing from the headwaters through to the Murray Mouth.
Like many of the natural landscape elements in our perception of the basin, averages don’t particularly help us understand how people live in the basin. The average density is 1.9 people per hectare, which is less than the national average of 2.7, and well below the highest numbers of more than 130 people per hectare living in Canberra.
In comparison, northern Victoria has a density of 4.4 people per hectare.
Among the 600,000 Victorians living in the basin, some are in a number of big towns not associated with irrigation, like Wodonga and Bendigo.
There are about 450,000 people living along the Murray and her major tributaries – the Ovens, Kiewa, Goulburn, Broken, Campaspe and Loddon rivers.
It is difficult to get a clear picture of people in the landscape. Nearly one million people live in places within the basin that are not affected by the water recovery required for the environment, either because they are urban centres or have a terminal water system, such as the Wimmera.
Along with Canberra (450,000 people), cities and big regional towns like Toowoomba (162,000), Albury-Wodonga (93,000), Wagga Wagga (82,000) and Tamworth (63,000) have little connection to the contribution of water that flows to the Murray Mouth.
Their regional economies have not been built on industries that depend on water, and so the Murray-Darling Basin Plan has had a small to negligible impact.
Depending on the aim of the studies, it can be disingenuous to include their numbers in analysis of the impacts of water recovery because they would not be part of any basin plan transition.
Local issues for landscape change
It is said that the lack of drainage and salinity management has been the downfall of every irrigation community across time and geography.
Large, closely settled communities were initially successful based on irrigation systems that allowed regulation of water supply and protection from flood waters. Some of the first systems of storages, canals, gated ditches and levees had to be abandoned because of their impacts on soil and waterway health.
For Victorian basin communities, it was the 1980s when they were confronted with seriously alarming salinity levels that would affect large swathes of agriculturally productive land unless there was action.
Then again in the wet 1990s, it was frequent blue-green algal blooms affecting waterways and storages and threatening drinking water for communities, as well as irrigation and water for stock.
Before these challenges to landscape health, governments had been the drivers of action by setting up advisory boards or legislating action. Government-led programs for change have had mixed results in catchment management, and we now know that top-down programs can have unintended and perverse outcomes.
Did you know community leadership has driven some of the most successful environmental responses?
It is well documented that during the 1980s and 1990s, community leaders put their hands up to work with the government to change alarming environmental trends. This was on the back of governments understanding the role of community consultation in water issues after the backlash to unilateral decision-making in mineral resources.
Changing land and watering practices based on scientific evidence required an understanding of the social and economic components of the landscape.
Community leaders, themselves affected by the risk posed by increasing salinity and nutrients in local waterways, listened to the technical explanations and advice and used their relationships to spread the word.
Actions during this time included developing plans with those landholders and water managers who would be asked to carry them out.
Efforts were made to use citizen science for increased and widened monitoring and communicating results. Local government agencies organised extension activities showcasing better practice opportunities for landholders. Community leaders also worked with governments to invest in science to inform practical applications at a property scale.
Soil profiles across the Murray Valley documented changes in the volume of salinity making its way into rivers through reduced mobilisation. Through practice and legislation, there were documented reductions of nitrogen and phosphates found in waterways.
These changes reversed the catastrophic scenarios faced by Victorian communities 40 years ago, and many changes made during this time have been embedded in Victorian management arrangements and legislation, but most importantly, by community practices.
Action from the ground up
The sentiment is to never doubt that small actions make a difference – it’s the only thing that does.
This is doubly true for making improvements to the condition of catchments and waterways. Local and regional actions make landscape-scale improvements, and it takes consistent efforts over time.
In the public and political drive for simple answers, it seems that catchment management is the missing ingredient from current basin plan discussions.
I’m often asked to simplify my answers to questions about how we can improve the health of the Murray River, its estuary and mouth, and all the remnant parts of the system in between.
There are no silver bullets – not even more water – and there is no parallel universe that turns the river systems back to a natural state. Nobody is talking about decommissioning the big dams in the upper catchment, therefore impossible for natural conditions to be returned.
For improvement in environmental condition, active management of the basin is required.
The answers are simple enough. The work with communities is not a one-off.
Waterways in all forms are attractive and valuable places to live, relax and play, so rehabilitating living landscapes from one state to another must involve the people living in those landscapes.
Observable change in the condition of waterways and their catchments has only come about by people collaborating, listening to each other and working at a scale that makes it possible.
There is a term for it – subsidiarity. Or if you like – think global, act local.
In Victoria we think of it as the catchment management framework and I can see that the kind of changes that transform landscapes happen through local know-how, combined with advocacy from the cities.
NEXT: River Yarns will return in January with an article on ‘working’ rivers – what the regulated river environment means, both good and bad.
About the author
Jane Ryan — a former school captain at Notre Dame College in Shepparton — was deputy chief of staff to former Victorian Water Minister Lisa Neville, and has worked in senior roles in water resources and catchment management, including Director of Rural Water Policy and Programs, Strategic Engagement Manager for River Health and Consultation Manager for the Northern Region Sustainable Water Strategy.
During the millennium drought, Jane was involved in the development of the key water policies that remain the cornerstone of water management in northern Victoria, including environmental water recovery targets, carryover arrangements and changes to allocation water policy for the Goulburn and Murray systems in response to climate change.