Murray-Darling Basin

“The Victorian Nationals [Political Party] have given voice to a radical plan to change the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.The plan is to build a new lock to better regulate the flows of the Murray River as close to the lower lakes in South Australia as possible which is the end of the river system. At the moment, 13 locks in the river control flows and heights in the middle to lower section of the Murray. Leader of the Nationals, Peter Walsh wants to build one more and remove the controversial barrages in the lower lakes which act as a barrier to salt water from the ocean entering the river system. ‘There is an opportunity to build lock zero as it is called and take the barrages out and turn Lake Alexandrina back to an estuary,' he said.”

“‘It's amazing how quickly the landscape changes, driving from Sydney and over the mountains,' Matthew Abbott, an Australian photographer, said. ‘Suddenly, it's all dust and dryness.'... The region, known as the Murray-Darling Basin, depends on the health of two rivers, the Murray and the Darling. They sustained an important Aboriginal population for millennia. When settlers displaced the original occupants, the waters were used to irrigate the land and build a thriving agricultural industry. Today, however, the wealth has dried up. Droughts and cotton farms run by multinational corporations have adversely affected the region, using up large amounts of water and requiring a skeleton-staff work force. Moreover, both rivers run through several states, making for complicated allocation negotiations. ‘By the time it gets to the South, downstream, there's barely anything left,' Mr. Abbott said.”

“Officials in Australia are calling it ‘Carpageddon', an ambitious proposal to rid the country's longest river system—the Murray-Darling—of invasive common carp. Lawmakers this week announced $AUD 15 million in funding to move forward with plans to use a virus that specifically targets and kills the carp. They hope that the invaders' demise will allow struggling native fish populations to rebound... By 2050, the strategy seeks to return native fish to 60 percent of their levels prior to European settlement. Currently, they are estimated to be at just 10 percent of their pre-European levels.”

“The Murray-Darling Basin Plan is an historic, bipartisan agreement about how to use the water that flows down the nation's longest river system. It was signed into law by then-prime minister Julia Gillard on November 22, 2012, after the Commonwealth reached an accord with each of the Basin states... But the plan remains highly controversial.... Broadly speaking, it plans to remove 2,750 gigalitres of water from irrigated agriculture, and return that to the river system.”

“Even a relatively brief flood can trigger a cascade of changes in the floodplain. Release of dissolved organic carbon initiates growth of bacteria and microalgae. Within a few days to a couple of weeks, micro-invertebrates such as copepods that lie dormant within dry sediment emerge to feed on the bacteria and algae. The micro-invertebrates in turn fuel secondary consumers such as macroinvertebrates (primarily aquatic insects), fish, and waterbirds. The dry floodplain and secondary channels effectively act as a seed bank from which abundant life surges at the cue of a flood. If the flood lasts long enough, organisms from insects to fish utilize the higher waters to disperse across the floodplain and move upstream and downstream to new breeding and nursery sites where their offspring can wait until the next flood rejuvenates them.”

“From Canberra, I drove west and south alongside the Murrumbidgee and Murray rivers to eventually arrive at the Coorong — the long narrow body of water made famous in Australia by the movie Storm Boy. The Coorong is protected from the wild Southern Ocean by a high row of sand dunes hundreds of kilometres long. The Coorong is a mixture of salty seawater and the fresh river water of the Murray River. The Murray flows into lakes Alexandrina and Albert, and the Coorong, as part of its journey out to sea. Scientists tell us that the Coorong is dying; the water is now saltier than the sea itself and not much can live in it. The pelicans made famous in Storm Boy are still present but they are no longer breeding.”

“Each day, River Murray Water staff ‘run the river’ by deciding on releases fromstorages along the River Murray and lower Darling. We release water to meet theneeds irrigators and flows for South Australia within constraints such as minimumflow requirements, dilution of salinity, maximum rates of change of water level,and capacity of the river channels... A computer-based model uses data from thelast few weeks to predict flows at key points along the River System. The modeltakes into account the time it takes for water to flow between points, the magnitudeof diversions of tributary inflows (River Murray Water obtains forecasts from theStates), irrigation water; ‘loss’ of water due to evaporation and seepage, and thechange in volume of storages and weir pools.”

“I remember as a kid growing up in Loxton how clear the river was, the water was, and my father actually making us spears from bamboo. And we used to walk down to the river and we used to spear the fish. And it is just sad what's happened to it now. That was a part of cultural living, connected to the river, that we can't really practice anymore.”

“The healing that we use Old Man Weed for needs to be done the same with fish - we need to catch, cook and eat by the River. Now, we can't get clay out of the bank to coat the fish or to use on our skin — this is a big part of a woman's business. The land and the rivers and the people are one. It should come back to life from the reeds to the insects. It is our lifeblood. It is life. Our beliefs are entwined in the river itself. We should be able to see the cod and hear the frogs. There should be plenty of yabbies and mussels. There should be reeds, catfish and birds. The grasses should come back. The scales are now unbalanced and our Ancestors are will stay this way until balance is restored.”

“In 2002 the Ministerial Council established ‘The Living Murray’, a large programto return water to the Murray and reduce water consumption. The program’s aimwas to achieve a ‘healthy working river’, which the Ministerial Council definedas ‘one that is managed to provide a compromise, agreed to by the community,between the condition of the river and the level of human use.’”

“The impact of government's faith in modern water management on the river ecologies has been staggering. This magic touch is responsible for enormous ecological devastation. The frequency, duration, and timing of floods has been abruptly changed: instead of droughts and floods, upstream storages now deliver a slow flow of predictable water down the Murray. Floodplains throughout the Basin are bone dry. The Chowilla Floodplain in South Australia has had flooding events halved by upstream Jams and diversions. Floodplains mostly receive water from high river flows that flow out onto country from the river, rather than local run-off, and thus are severely affected by the reductions in the size of river flows. The flow at the Murray Mouth is now on average 25 per cent of what it was before the large storages were built. In other places, the constant presence of water is problematic. Ephemeral wetlands that are fed a continual flow of water are never allowed to dry out, and ephemeral lakes have been drowned as they become permanent water storages.”

“By the early twenty-first century, the federal government had revised water management policies to include the participation of Indigenous people and their water issues. But the traditional owners are not waiting for different layers of government to develop models for engagement; instead they have their own organisational approach. They have mobilised as an alliance in the southern part of the Murray- Darling Basin: the Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations (MLDRIN). MLDRIN is a specific intervention by the traditional owners in water law, policy and management.”

“The physical environment of the lower Murray will probably approach a partial equilibrium in about 40 years... The ranges of many native plants and animal species will continue to decline, and inevitably some will disappear from the Murray in South Australia. The limits to overbank flows and the permanent inundation of marginal areas will cause the viable floodplain area to contract, so that the remaining riparian woodlands and wetlands will lie closer to the main channel. Salinization is likely to increase, despite efforts to halt its progress. The general loss of biodiversity, already low by global standards, may mean an increased role for abiotic factors... It is not melodramatic, therefore, to consider the lower Murray as a river in crisis.”t