How to Water Down a River
THE FIGHT NEVER ends, it seems, to leave the water in the ground. The rivers in their beds. A river has a right to its own water: it's a principle written into law now, as it was always written into lore.
And look, I sit here in my cotton clothes, my shirt and my jacket and my jeans, and I'm assured they're sustainably sourced and locally designed, though I notice they are, like pretty much everything these days manufactured in China; so I am as implicated as anyone in the absurdities, the ecological travesties, I want to point up here.
Barring Antarctica, this is the driest continent on earth. Even before climate change, inland rivers did a fair bit of their work underground and took the form, more often than not, of chains of ponds. They are as often dry as they are in flow. It's the way the inland runs, as it were. The country the Murray-Darling moves through is arid. Why is it we keep insisting we can grow cotton and rice in a desert?
Why are the intrinsic rights of rivers and their communities of beings—of whom we humans are only one cohort—so hard for so many to concede and understand and hold sacrosanct? Money may have something to do with it, of course: an economics that has never had a proper account to make of the weather and the land and the rivers that it plunders and wastes. Profit and taxes may explain the sophistry of those—including now, it seems, the NSW government and those who lobby it—who want to argue away, who want to deny, Indigenous wisdom, ecology and the dryness of the continent—like the warming of the atmosphere and the strain that puts upon the Darling. We’re barely out of drought; it’s only months since the Darling was a killing ground of fish. But here is the government seizing a neo-conservative moment to diminish the protections, fought so hard for and supported by all the science, that guarantee most of the use of the river itself.
And I wonder if the "community" the NSW Water Minister says she consulted (who overwhelmingly, she says, supported watering down of the protections on environmental flows) included the fish and the birds, anyone who spoke for the interests of the river banks and red gums; I wonder what sort of say first peoples had; I wonder if the children had a voice.
