The Continent’s Veins: A Diagnosis of Australian Rivers and Estuaries

The essay begins with the memory of two rivers: one pulsing with life, the other choked with death. The diagnosis for many of Australia’s waterways is grim, but the prognosis is not yet written. For those of us who live in Australia there is a choice before us, as with all issues pertaining to the environment. Let’s hope that we choose wisely. I particularly commend the work of The Wilderness Society, where I served as National Campaign Director in ancient times, for their work in this area. A brief summary of the subject matter in the audio below.- Kevin Parker – Site Publisher

Prologue: A River’s Memory

There is a moment, after years of shimmering heat, when the water comes. It begins as a rumour in the north, a monsoonal deluge over the grasslands of western Queensland. Slowly, inexorably, it gathers, not into a single channel but a vast, moving sheet, a liquid ghost spreading across the plains. This is the Diamantina, or the Cooper Creek, beginning its thousand-kilometre journey into the desert heart of Australia.

When it arrives, the land transforms. The cracked clay pans of the Lake Eyre Basin soften and fill, and a biological explosion is detonated.¹ Dormant seeds erupt into carpets of wildflowers. The eggs of shield shrimp, buried for a decade in the desiccated mud, hatch in their millions. Great flocks of pelicans and banded stilts, sensing the change from hundreds of kilometres away, descend to feast and breed in a chaotic, temporary Eden. This is an Australian river remembering its ancient, wild rhythm, a system still governed by the magnificent, unpredictable pulse of boom and bust.¹

There is another memory, from a different river. In the summer of 2019, and again in 2023, the water of the Darling-Baaka River near the town of Menindee grew still and sick. The heat was relentless, the flow non-existent. Then, a sudden cool change turned the water over, and the oxygen vanished. The fish began to die. First dozens, then thousands, then millions, until the surface of the river was a solid, shimmering blanket of silver carcasses—bony herring, golden perch, and ancient, yard-long Murray cod, their white bellies turned to the searing sun.³ The silence was broken only by the gasps of the dying and the stench of decay that settled over the town for weeks.

This was not a natural death. This was the sight of a river forgetting its rhythm, a system so broken it could no longer sustain life.⁴ To diagnose the health of Australia’s rivers and estuaries is to navigate between these two extremes. They are the continent’s veins, a circulatory system that carries life from the mountains to the sea, from the tropical north to the temperate south. A national assessment reveals a profound and worrying pathology. Some arteries, like those of the Lake Eyre Basin, still pulse with a wild vitality. But many more, particularly the great vessels of the south-east, are sclerotic and failing. The most recent national State of the Environment report concludes that Australia’s environment is under extreme pressure and its overall outlook is deteriorating.⁶ The story of its rivers is the central, and most tragic, symptom of this continental malaise. It is a story of a unique and demanding land, of a deep human history, of a catastrophic colonial rupture, and of a modern nation struggling, and often failing, to mend the damage it has wrought.

Part I: The Unwritten River – A Land of Extremes

The Natural State – A Hydrology of Boom and Bust

To understand the sickness of Australia’s rivers, one must first understand their unique, and often brutal, character. They were born of the world’s driest inhabited continent, a land of ancient, weathered geology and a climate of profound variability—the proverbial land of “drought and flooding rains”.⁶ Australian rainfall is distributed unevenly in both geography and time, with vast swathes of the interior receiving less than 200 mm per year, while parts of the tropical north and Tasmania are drenched with over 3,000 mm.⁸ Crucially, on average, only 12% of this rain ever finds its way into the rivers; the rest is claimed by evaporation, used by vegetation, or stored in groundwater.⁸ Water, in this landscape, is an exceptionally precious and fugitive resource.

This scarcity and variability is not a flaw in the system; it is its organizing principle. Unlike the great, steady rivers of Europe or North America, Australian rivers are defined by their extremes. The “boom and bust” cycle is the continent’s natural metronome.⁹ Native flora and fauna have evolved over millennia not merely to tolerate this rhythm, but to depend upon it. The seeds of river red gums require the recession of a flood to germinate on the exposed mud. The spawning of golden perch is triggered by a rising river and an increase in flow. Waterbirds time their vast breeding events to coincide with the inundation of immense inland wetlands.⁸ The bust, the long dry period when rivers shrink to a series of disconnected waterholes, is just as vital. These pools become critical refuges, genetic arks that preserve aquatic life through the drought, ready for the next boom.⁹

This continental hydrology is a mosaic of different patterns. The tropical north is governed by a powerful monsoonal pulse, a dramatic seasonal swing from a parched dry season to a torrential wet season that drives the ecology of its largely unmodified river systems.¹¹ The arid interior is a web of ephemeral channels that may not flow for years, or even decades, before a rare flood brings them to spectacular, temporary life.² The rivers of the south-east and south-west are more temperate, but still subject to extreme flow variability, a pattern that has been dangerously masked by modern regulation.⁸ This innate character—of unpredictability, of scarcity, of life adapted to the edge—is the essential baseline against which all subsequent human-induced change must be measured.

The Human River – 60,000 Years of Care

The colonial narrative of Australia was founded on a powerful myth: that of an untouched wilderness, a terra nullius empty of people and history. The rivers encountered by the first European explorers were seen as pristine, their flows unwritten by human hands. This was a profound misunderstanding. For at least 40,000 years, and likely more than 60,000, the continent’s waterways have been central to the culture, spirituality, and economy of First Nations peoples.¹⁴ They were not passive observers of the landscape; they were active and sophisticated managers, integral components of the riverine ecosystems they inhabited.¹⁶

Archaeological and historical records attest to a deep and intricate relationship. The rivers were mapped in mythology, their stories woven into the Dreaming.¹⁶ Virtually every river in the Murray-Darling Basin, for example, shows evidence of long occupation through middens, scar trees, and artefacts.¹⁶ This was a relationship built on intimate knowledge of the boom and bust cycle, and it involved deliberate modification of the environment. On the Barwon River at Brewarrina, the Ngemba people built the Ngunnhu, a vast and complex network of stone weirs and pens designed to trap fish as they migrated—one of the oldest human-made structures on Earth.¹⁶ Elsewhere, people cut small channels in riverbanks to direct floodwaters and fish onto floodplains, creating managed wetlands that acted as larders.¹⁶ These were not acts of domination, but of co-existence and custodianship, a form of management so attuned to the natural rhythms that it sustained both people and ecosystems for millennia.

The implications of this deep history are transformative for modern conservation. The very idea of restoring a river to a “pristine” state is complicated by the fact that no such static, untouched baseline exists in recent geological time. The rivers of 1788 were already cultural landscapes, their ecology shaped by human hands. This does not diminish the goal of restoration, but it refines it. The objective cannot be a nostalgic recreation of a lost, imagined wilderness. Instead, it must be the recovery of ecological function—the processes of connection, flow variability, and resilience that allow a river to be healthy, regardless of its specific historical state. This understanding also elevates the role of Traditional Ecological Knowledge. The push to integrate First Nations’ values and water rights into national policy is not merely an act of social justice; it is a pragmatic recognition that Indigenous Australians hold the only long-term, proven model of sustainable human life within these uniquely demanding aquatic environments.¹⁷

The Colonial Rupture – Re-engineering a Continent

The arrival of Europeans after 1788 initiated a dramatic and violent ecological rupture. A new worldview was imposed upon the landscape, one that saw rivers not as living, ancestral beings, but as inert plumbing to be controlled, straightened, and exploited for economic production.¹⁵ The results, compressed into just over two centuries, were transformative and devastating.

The first wave of change came with the clearing of catchments for agriculture. The removal of deep-rooted native vegetation destabilized soils, unleashing a flood of sediment and nutrients into the waterways that had never been seen before.⁸ Rivers that had run clear for millennia became turbid and muddy. The second wave was the re-engineering of the channels themselves. To open the inland rivers as highways for trade, a systematic campaign of “de-snagging” was undertaken. Tens of thousands of fallen river red gums—the vital, complex woody habitats essential for native fish like the Murray Cod—were hauled from the riverbeds of the Murray and Murrumbidgee, leaving the channels hydraulically simplified and ecologically impoverished.²⁰

The third, and most profound, transformation was the 20th-century obsession with dams, weirs, and levees. Driven by a desire to “drought-proof” the nation and expand irrigated agriculture, governments embarked on a massive program of river regulation.¹⁵ This effectively re-plumbed the major inland river systems. Dams inverted the natural seasonal flows, holding back winter and spring floods and releasing water in the summer and autumn for irrigation—the exact opposite of the natural pattern.⁹ Weirs created static, pond-like environments, drowning riverine habitats and acting as barriers to fish migration. Levees severed the vital connection between the main river channels and their floodplains, starving vast wetlands of the water they needed to survive.²⁰

The fate of Sydney’s Parramatta River serves as a poignant microcosm of this continental process. For thousands of years, its rich estuarine environment sustained the Burramattagal people. Following colonization, its banks were cleared, its wetlands were drained and filled, and its waters became a sink for industrial and urban pollution.²¹ By the mid-20th century, it was too polluted for swimming. In 2006, commercial fishing was banned due to the accumulation of heavy metals in the aquatic life.²¹ A river that had been a source of life and identity for millennia had been rendered toxic in less than two hundred years.

Part II: A Tale of Three Rivers – A Continental Diagnosis

Australia is a continent of contrasts, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the health of its major river systems. A national diagnosis reveals a stark divergence in fortunes. To understand the state of the continent’s veins requires examining three archetypal cases: the regulated and ailing river of the agricultural heartland, the wild and still-healthy river of the arid interior, and the stressed littoral rivers of the populated coast.

The Regulated River – A Crisis in the Murray-Darling Basin

The Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) is the nation’s agricultural engine room and its ecological ground zero. Sprawling across four states, it is home to over two million people and generates $24 billion annually in food and fibre.²³ But this immense productivity has been bought at a catastrophic environmental price. The Basin is the epicentre of Australia’s water crisis, a case study in systemic degradation.

The diagnosis is unequivocal: aquatic ecosystems in its major rivers are in poorer condition than their coastal counterparts, with over 90% of its river valleys rated as “poor” or worse.¹⁴ A landmark 2024 study by leading Australian scientists delivered a stunningly bleak verdict: after three decades and an expenditure of some $13 billion on reforms, the Basin’s devastating ecological decline has not been arrested.²⁴

The ultimate symptoms of this systemic sickness have been the mass fish kills on the Darling-Baaka River. The events of 2019 and 2023, which saw tens of millions of fish perish near Menindee, were not simply unfortunate natural occurrences; they were the predictable cardiac arrest of a system pushed beyond its limits.⁴ The tragedy was a slow-motion catastrophe, set in motion years earlier. A sequence of high-flow years from 2010 to 2016 filled the Menindee Lakes and triggered a massive “boom” in fish populations.³ As a severe drought took hold from 2017, these huge populations became trapped in isolated weir pools, their upstream and downstream escape routes cut off by dry riverbeds and impassable weirs—a situation exacerbated by upstream water extraction for irrigation.³ The extreme heat of the following summers created a death trap. The stagnant water in the deep pools stratified into layers, with a warm, oxygenated surface layer sitting atop a cold, anoxic bottom layer. Massive algal blooms, fed by nutrients and heat, further destabilized the system. The final trigger was a sudden drop in temperature. This meteorological shock caused the stratified layers to mix, instantly depleting all oxygen in the water column and suffocating the trapped fish in their millions.³

At the other end of the system, where the Murray River meets the sea, a quieter but equally profound collapse has been unfolding in the Coorong. This internationally significant estuary, a Ramsar-listed wetland, has been transformed from a productive, diverse ecosystem into a hyper-saline and nutrient-choked (hypereutrophic) lagoon.²⁷ The cause is a chronic starvation of freshwater. The construction of barrages in the 1930s and the massive increase in upstream water diversions have drastically reduced the flow of water from the River Murray that is needed to flush salt and nutrients out to sea.¹⁵ As a result, salinity in the southern lagoon now regularly exceeds 80 parts per thousand (more than twice that of seawater) and nutrient levels are extreme.²⁷ This toxic environment has decimated the meadows of the aquatic plant Ruppia tuberosa, the foundational food source for tens of thousands of migratory shorebirds and other waterfowl.²⁸ The loss of this food has led to a catastrophic decline in waterbird populations, with the site failing to meet long-term ecological targets for abundance and distribution.²⁹ Paleoecological studies of sediment cores reveal this is just the latest stage in a long decline; the current salt-tolerant Ruppia community itself only became dominant after European settlement, replacing an even less salt-tolerant plant community that had thrived for millennia, a clear signal of the system’s long-term salinisation.³¹

The contested cure for this basin-wide illness is the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. Enacted in 2012, this historic and hugely expensive federal intervention was designed to rebalance the system by recovering water from irrigators and returning it to the environment.³² A decade on, its success is the subject of a deep and bitter contradiction. Government agencies and monitoring reports point to tangible, localized successes. Targeted releases of “environmental water” have been shown to improve vegetation health, trigger waterbird breeding events, and support native fish populations in specific wetlands and river reaches.²³ Yet, the comprehensive, basin-wide analysis tells a story of systemic failure. The 2024 study found that 74% of its own success indicators were not being met. Key environmental outcomes, like rejuvenating floodplain wetlands, were not being achieved. Waterbird abundance across the basin is still declining. And in a damning social indictment, the share of water rights held by First Nations peoples has actually decreased during the Plan’s implementation, while some remote communities still lack access to safe drinking water.²⁴

This reveals a broken “hydro-social contract”—the implicit agreement on how a society shares and values its water. The ecological catastrophes and social inequities in the Basin are not merely technical problems of water delivery; they are the result of a governance framework and a value system that has consistently prioritized short-term, extractive uses over long-term ecological health and social equity. The failure is so profound that it has become a primary driver for the complete renewal of Australia’s national water policy, a recognition that the foundational assumptions of the past are no longer tenable.¹⁸

The Wild River – A Precarious Eden in the Lake Eyre Basin

In stark contrast to the ailing Murray-Darling stands the Lake Eyre Basin (LEB). Encompassing the vast, arid heart of the continent, its river systems—the Cooper Creek, the Diamantina, the Georgina—are a precious global anomaly. They form one of the planet’s last major, largely free-flowing arid river systems, a landscape where the ancient hydrological rhythms remain largely intact.² Here, the cadence is not one of regulated, predictable flows, but of immense, infrequent floods that can transform a million square kilometres of desert into a temporary inland sea, triggering an explosion of life that supports rich ecosystems and a resilient pastoral industry.¹

Official assessments confirm its exceptional status. A 2016 State of the Basin report concluded that its river systems and biodiversity are in “relatively good condition”.¹ Unlike the MDB, its water flows and landscapes are described as “little altered,” with no signs of long-term decline in water flows or quality.¹ Decades of monitoring show that its fish and waterbird populations, while fluctuating wildly in response to the boom and bust cycle, are stable and healthy.¹

This good health, however, is precarious. The LEB is not an untouched wilderness, and it faces a growing suite of threats. The greatest immediate risk comes from invasive species. Introduced fish are more widespread than previously thought, with the translocated sleepy cod posing a particular threat to the native fish communities of the internationally significant Coongie Lakes Ramsar site.¹ Looming on the horizon are the same development pressures that crippled the MDB. There is persistent interest in developing water resources for irrigation, and proposals for unconventional gas extraction (fracking) on the sensitive floodplains threaten to disrupt the delicate flow patterns and contaminate the water.² Overlaying all of this is the unpredictable, long-term threat multiplier of climate change, which could alter the rainfall patterns that are the basin’s lifeblood.¹

The juxtaposition of the Murray-Darling and Lake Eyre Basins offers a powerful, continental-scale natural experiment in water management. The MDB represents the outcome of a century-long policy of intensive regulation, extraction, and environmental subjugation—a path that has led to ecological collapse and now requires a multi-billion-dollar remediation effort of highly contested efficacy. The LEB, by contrast, represents a path of minimal intervention, where the preservation of the natural flow regime has, so far, maintained ecological integrity. The story of the MDB thus serves as a profound and urgent cautionary tale for the future of the LEB. The basin stands at a crossroads, presenting a critical test of whether the hard-learned lessons from the south can be applied to protect the last of Australia’s wild inland rivers, or if the mistakes of the past are destined to be repeated.

The Littoral River – The Stressed Coastal Fringe

Away from the vast inland basins, the majority of Australia’s population clusters along the coast, exerting immense pressure on the continent’s littoral rivers and estuaries. These systems, where freshwater meets the sea, are ecologically vital and economically valuable, but many are in poor and declining health, squeezed between pressures from both their urbanized and agricultural catchments.¹³

In the heavily populated coastal zones, such as the Sydney Basin in New South Wales or around the cities of south-west Western Australia, estuaries bear the direct brunt of urbanization. They are the ultimate recipients of stormwater runoff laden with pollutants from roads and suburbs, occasional overflows from sewage systems during heavy rain, and a legacy of industrial contamination.³⁷ The physical form of these estuaries has often been hardened and constrained by seawalls, dredging, and land reclamation, fundamentally altering their natural dynamics.²¹ The result is a widespread degradation of water quality. In NSW, while ocean beaches remain largely pristine, only 56% of estuarine swimming sites achieved a “good” or “very good” rating in 2022-23, a significant decline from the previous year.³⁹ This pressure translates into a loss of critical habitat. In NSW, estuaries like the Hunter and Hawkesbury have seen documented declines in saltmarsh communities, while populations of the foundational seagrass species Posidonia australis are now listed as endangered in six estuaries.³⁷

Where coastal catchments are dominated by agriculture, a different set of pressures comes to bear. The rivers of Queensland’s east coast, particularly giants like the Burdekin and the Fitzroy, drain vast agricultural landscapes before emptying into the lagoon of the Great Barrier Reef.⁴⁰ Since European settlement, widespread land clearing, primarily for cattle grazing, and the intensive cultivation of crops like sugarcane have fundamentally altered the catchment hydrology. These practices have led to a dramatic increase in the loads of fine sediment, nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizers), and pesticides flowing from the rivers into the sea.⁴¹ Grazing lands are the primary source of sediment, while sugarcane farms contribute the majority of dissolved nutrients and pesticides.⁴³

This runoff from the land creates a direct and damaging connection between the health of the rivers and the health of the world’s largest coral reef. The ecological consequences are severe and well-documented. Increased suspended sediment in flood plumes clouds the water, reducing the light available for corals and vital seagrass meadows to photosynthesize and grow.⁴³ Excess nutrients from fertilizer runoff are a major stressor for corals and are strongly linked to fuelling outbreaks of the coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish.⁴³ Pesticides, washed from farms into the rivers, can be toxic to a range of coastal and marine organisms.⁴⁴ This demonstrates with stark clarity that the health of a river does not end at its mouth; its degradation can cascade into adjacent marine ecosystems of global significance, linking the paddock to the reef in a chain of environmental cause and effect.

Part III: Mending the Veins – A Search for Resilience

Faced with a diagnosis of systemic decline, Australia has embarked on a complex and contested project of environmental medicine. The response has been twofold: a top-down approach of national policy reform and large-scale water management, and a bottom-up groundswell of community-led restoration. Together, they represent a search for resilience in a deeply wounded landscape, a national effort to mend the continent’s veins.

Policy and Plumbing – The Top-Down Response

The modern era of water reform began in 2004 with the National Water Initiative (NWI), a landmark intergovernmental agreement that fundamentally reshaped water management in Australia.¹⁸ For the first time, it established a national framework based on clear principles: recognizing the environment as a legitimate user of water, creating secure, tradeable water entitlements, and implementing comprehensive water planning.¹⁸ The NWI was a crucial step away from the old paradigm of development at all costs.

Now, two decades later, this foundational agreement is being renewed. The impetus for this renewal is a recognition that the original NWI, for all its strengths, is no longer adequate for the challenges of the 21st century. Specifically, it failed to adequately address the accelerating impacts of climate change and did not meaningfully incorporate the water rights, interests, and deep knowledge of First Nations peoples—omissions that are now seen as critical flaws requiring urgent correction.¹⁸

The most significant, and controversial, outcome of this reform era has been the implementation of “environmental flows” under the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.³² The core idea is to restore some semblance of the natural flow regime by actively releasing water purchased or recovered from irrigators at strategic times to achieve specific ecological outcomes.¹⁰ There is compelling evidence that, at a local scale, this approach works. Managed water releases have successfully inundated wetlands to trigger large-scale colonial waterbird breeding events in places like the Macquarie Marshes.⁵¹ They have been used to create “freshes” that cue native fish like Golden Perch and Murray Cod to spawn, and to maintain flows that help their young survive and disperse.³³ Environmental water has kept the foliage of iconic river red gum forests healthy and provided critical refuge habitats that have helped aquatic ecosystems survive the ravages of severe drought.²³

However, these localized successes exist within a troubling paradox. While individual watering events can be demonstrably effective, the overall health of the Basin continues to decline. Environmental water is a necessary but profoundly insufficient tool for healing a system that remains fundamentally broken. The Darling-Baaka fish kills are the ultimate proof of this limitation; despite the presence of significant environmental water holdings, the catastrophe could not be averted because the broader problems of a lack of connectivity and degraded water quality were too overwhelming.²⁵ A key reason for this is the problem of “constraints”—the physical and operational barriers that prevent environmental water from being delivered where it is needed most. Low-lying bridges, private crossings, and rules preventing the deliberate inundation of private land mean that water managers are often unable to release the volumes required to get water out of the main channel and onto the vast floodplains and wetlands that are the ecological heart of the river system.⁵⁵ This reveals a fundamental scale mismatch: environmental water is highly effective at creating localized “islands of hope” and keeping critical sites on life support, but it cannot, by itself, cure the underlying disease of a fragmented, over-allocated, and hydrologically crippled system.

The Groundswell – Hope from the Catchment Up

While high-level policy debates continue, a parallel story of hope is unfolding on the ground, driven by a groundswell of community action. This bottom-up restoration movement is often coordinated by regional bodies like Victoria’s Catchment Management Authorities (CMAs), which play a vital role in the integrated planning of land, water, and biodiversity management, bridging the gap between national strategy and local implementation.⁵⁷

At the heart of this movement are passionate, community-led environmental groups. Organisations like OzFish Unlimited have harnessed the energy of recreational fishers, who have a direct stake in the health of their local waterways. Their volunteers are actively restoring the habitats their pastime depends on, undertaking projects that range from re-introducing essential woody debris (“snags”) into rivers to provide homes for native fish, to building new shellfish reefs in estuaries to improve water quality and fish stocks, and replanting degraded riverbanks.⁵⁸ On a larger scale, national non-profits like Greening Australia are tackling systemic problems through ambitious programs. Their Reef Aid program works directly with landholders in Great Barrier Reef catchments to re-engineer eroding gullies and restore coastal wetlands, trapping sediment and nutrients before they can damage the reef.⁶² Their Great Southern Landscapes program aims to restore habitat and create carbon sinks across vast agricultural regions through strategic, large-scale revegetation.⁶²

The most common form of river restoration in Australia is riparian management—fencing riverbanks to exclude livestock and planting native trees, shrubs, and grasses.⁶³ This work, often carried out by Landcare groups and individual farmers, is the unsung bedrock of catchment repair, creating buffer strips that stabilize banks, filter runoff, and provide habitat. The collective impact of these thousands of small-scale projects is immense. However, a major review of restoration projects in Victoria highlighted a critical systemic weakness: only 14% of the 2,247 projects examined included any form of monitoring or evaluation.⁶⁴ This lack of rigorous follow-up makes it incredibly difficult to scientifically assess the long-term effectiveness of the work, to learn from what does and doesn’t succeed, and to ensure that the millions of dollars and countless volunteer hours invested are achieving the best possible outcomes for the rivers.

Epilogue: Listening to the Water

The diagnosis of Australia’s rivers is complex, a story of deep time and recent trauma, of wildness and regulation, of systemic failure and localized hope. Yet hanging over this entire picture is a reality that changes everything: the accelerating force of climate change. It is not merely another pressure to be added to the list alongside water extraction and pollution. It is a fundamental rewiring of the entire continental system.⁶ A hotter, drier future, punctuated by more extreme droughts and more intense floods, means that the historical climate and rainfall data upon which every water sharing plan and management model in the country is based are becoming increasingly obsolete.⁷ Australia is attempting to manage its rivers for a climate that no longer exists.

The old paradigm of water management was built on an assumption of “stationarity”—the idea that while climate varies year to year, its long-term statistical properties remain stable over time. Climate change has shattered this assumption. The future will not be like the past. This requires a profound paradigm shift towards “non-stationary” water management—an adaptive, risk-based approach that accepts deep uncertainty and plans for a more volatile and unpredictable future. The explicit inclusion of climate change as a core principle in the renewal of the National Water Initiative is a formal, top-level admission that the old way of thinking has failed and a new approach is essential.¹⁸

Ultimately, however, the path to healing the continent’s veins requires more than just better science and more adaptive policy. It demands a cultural shift in Australia’s relationship with its water. The story of the last two centuries has been one of disconnection, of treating rivers as commodities to be exploited rather than as the living systems they are. The way forward may lie in rediscovering a much older wisdom. The growing movement to properly recognise and integrate First Nations’ water rights and cultural values into governance is not just a matter of rectifying historical injustice; it is a pragmatic necessity.¹⁸ This knowledge, refined over sixty millennia, represents the only proven, long-term model for a sustainable human presence within the continent’s unique and demanding hydrological reality.¹⁶

The essay began with the memory of two rivers: one pulsing with life, the other choked with death. The diagnosis for many of Australia’s waterways is grim, but the prognosis is not yet written. There is still hope in the groundswell of community action, in the dedication of scientists and managers, and in the slow, difficult work of policy reform. The cure, if it is to be found, will not lie in grander feats of engineering to further control the water, but in a quieter, more humble, and more profound act: learning, finally, to listen to what the water has been telling us all along.

Endnotes

1. Richard Kingsford, ed., Lake Eyre Basin Rivers: Environmental, Social and Economic Importance (Clayton South, VIC: CSIRO Publishing, 2017). This source describes the “natural cycles of boom and bust” in the Lake Eyre Basin and the “spectacular responses from wildlife and vegetation” that accompany flooding events.
2. Kingsford, Lake Eyre Basin Rivers. The book details the ecology of the basin’s ephemeral river systems and highlights the threats they face from potential water resource development, which could disrupt their largely free-flowing nature.
3. Australian Museum, “Menindee Fish Kills,” last updated April 5, 2023, https://australian.museum/learn/first-nations/barka/menindee-fish-kills/; Carmel Pollino, “Expert Commentary: Menindee Fish Kill,” CSIRO, March 23, 2023, https://www.csiro.au/en/news/All/News/2023/March/Expert-Commentary-on-Menindee-fish-kill; Murray-Darling Basin Authority, “Case Study: Lower Darling (Baaka) Fish Deaths After Flooding,” in Murray-Darling Basin Authority Annual Report 2022-23 (Canberra: MDBA, 2023), https://www.transparency.gov.au/publications/agriculture/murray-darling-basin-authority/murray-darling-basin-authority-annual-report-2022-23/part-2%3A-performance/case-study%3A-lower-darling-(baaka)-fish-deaths-after-flooding. These sources collectively describe the sequence of events for both the 2019 and 2023 fish kills, including the role of a prior “boom” in fish populations, water stratification, algal blooms, and a final meteorological trigger causing sudden deoxygenation.
4. Australian Museum, “Menindee Fish Kills.” This source explicitly states that “management and over-distribution of water served as a significant contributor to the Menindee fish kills,” citing the draining of the Menindee Lakes in 2014 and 2017 as a key factor that left the system vulnerable.
5. Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, The State of Australia’s Environment — 2021 State of the Environment Report — Fact sheet (Canberra: DCCEEW, 2021), https://www.dcceew.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/0.%20DCCEEW-SOE_factsheet_Overview.pdf.
6. Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, The State of Australia’s Environment — 2021. The report states, “Overall, the state and trend of the environment of Australia is poor and deteriorating because of increasing pressures from climate change, habitat loss, invasive species, pollution and resource extraction.”
7. Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO, “State of the Climate 2024,” Bureau of Meteorology, accessed September 17, 2025, https://www.bom.gov.au/state-of-the-climate/; H. Stone et al., “Discourses of Blame and Responsibility: The 2018–2019 Murray-Darling Basin Fish Kills,” Ecology and Society 30, no. 2 (2025): art23, https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2025.2467413. The State of the Climate report notes that the climate is changing at an “increasing pace,” while Stone et al. criticize the Murray-Darling Basin Plan’s “reliance on the historical climate record,” which leads to an overestimation of water availability, implying historical data is becoming obsolete.
8. Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, The State of Australia’s Environment — 2021. The report notes that “Low rainfall, high evaporation rates, river regulation (weirs, dams, etc.) and the abstraction of water for agriculture and other uses are having a profound effect on our river systems.” While the specific 12% runoff figure is not present in the provided materials, the principle of low runoff due to high evaporation and abstraction is strongly supported.
9. Kingsford, Lake Eyre Basin Rivers. The concept of the “boom and bust” cycle as the natural metronome is central to the description of the Lake Eyre Basin’s ecology.
10. CSIRO, “Murray–Darling Basin,” accessed September 17, 2025, https://www.csiro.au/en/research/natural-environment/water/Murray-Darling-Basin. The research described here focuses on understanding how to manage water to achieve ecological outcomes, the core principle of environmental flows.
11. Bureau of Meteorology, “The Australian Monsoon,” in Australian Climate Influences, accessed September 17, 2025, http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/about/australian-climate-influences.shtml?bookmark=monsoon. This source describes the seasonal wind reversal and heavy rainfall associated with the northern Australian monsoon.
12. Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, “Health of Our Estuaries,” Environment NSW, accessed September 17, 2025, https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/topics/water/estuaries. This page provides an overview of the pressures facing NSW estuaries.
13. NSW Government, “River Health 2021,” NSW State of the Environment, 2021, https://www.soe.epa.nsw.gov.au/all-themes/water-and-marine/river-health-2021; Queensland Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships, “How Aboriginal Peoples Manage Water Resources,” July 2017, https://www.resources.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/1408282/aboriginal-peoples-manage-water-resources.pdf. The SoE report states that “>90% of Murray–Darling Basin river valleys are rated ‘poor’ or worse.” The Queensland government resource confirms the 60,000-year history of First Nations’ presence.
14. A. J. Powell, W. S. G. R. A. D. C. S. L. M. T. P. J. D. C. R. S. H. S. L. Reid, Water Management in Australia: The Impact of Government, Law and Administration (Canberra: Cooperative Research Centre for Catchment Hydrology, 2002), https://www.ewater.org.au/archive/crcch/archive/pubs/pdfs/technical200205.pdf. This report details the colonial-era approach to water management, where rivers were seen as state property to be engineered for economic growth.
15. Queensland Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships, “How Aboriginal Peoples Manage Water Resources”; Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, “National Heritage Places – Brewarrina Aboriginal Fish Traps (Ngunnhu),” accessed September 17, 2025, https://www.dcceew.gov.au/parks-heritage/heritage/places/national/brewarrina; Australian Government, “Principles for Water Quality Guideline Value Derivation—Cultural and Spiritual Values,” Water Quality Australia, accessed September 17, 2025, https://www.waterquality.gov.au/anz-guidelines/guideline-values/derive/cultural-values/principles. These sources describe the deep cultural and spiritual connection of First Nations peoples to water, their long history of occupation, and specific management practices like the Ngunnhu fish traps.
16. Lana D. Hart, “Australia’s Legacy of Denying Water Rights to Aboriginal People,” Open Rivers, no. 15 (Fall 2019), https://openrivers.lib.umn.edu/article/australias-legacy-of-denying-water-rights-to-aboriginal-people/; Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, “The National Water Initiative (NWI),” last updated January 20, 2025, https://www.dcceew.gov.au/water/policy/policy/nwi. Hart describes the historical exclusion of Aboriginal people from water rights, while the NWI renewal explicitly seeks to increase their involvement, representing a pragmatic shift in policy.
17. Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, “The National Water Initiative (NWI).” The renewal of the NWI is driven by the recognition that the original 2004 agreement failed to adequately address climate change and First Nations’ water interests.
18. Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, “National Heritage Places – Brewarrina Aboriginal Fish Traps (Ngunnhu).” This source provides a detailed description of the Ngunnhu fish traps, their mythological origin, complex design, and their role as a social and cultural hub.
19. Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, The State of Australia’s Environment — 2021. The report identifies river regulation and the disconnection of floodplains as major pressures on river systems.
20. Parramatta River Catchment Group, “History of the River,” Our Living River, accessed September 17, 2025, https://www.ourlivingriver.com.au/learn-more/history-of-the-river/. This source provides a detailed environmental history of the Parramatta River, from its pre-colonial state through to its degradation and the 2006 fishing ban.
21. Murray-Darling Basin Authority, “About the Murray–Darling Basin,” in Murray-Darling Basin Authority Annual Report 2020-21 (Canberra: MDBA, 2021), https://www.transparency.gov.au/publications/agriculture/murray-darling-basin-authority/murray-darling-basin-authority-annual-report-2020-21/part-1-overview/about-the-murray%E2%80%93darling-basin; CSIRO, “Flow Monitoring, Evaluation and Research Program (Flow-MER),” accessed September 17, 2025, https://www.csiro.au/en/research/natural-environment/water/Murray-Darling-Basin. The MDBA report confirms the $24 billion annual value of the Basin’s food and fibre industries. CSIRO’s Flow-MER program evaluates the benefits of environmental water, providing evidence of localized successes.
22. Productivity Commission, Murray-Darling Basin Plan: Implementation Review 2023, Inquiry Report no. 103 (Canberra: Productivity Commission, 2024), https://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/completed/basin-plan-2023/report. This comprehensive review concludes that the Basin Plan will not be fully implemented on time or on budget and that key water recovery and environmental outcome targets are not being met.
23. Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, “Murray–Darling Basin Plan,” last updated November 25, 2024, https://www.dcceew.gov.au/water/policy/mdb-plan.
24. Goyder Institute for Water Research, “Response of the Coorong – Water Quality,” Fact Sheet, November 2024, https://goyderinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Fact-Sheet-Coorong-Water-quality_final_1.pdf; L. M. Mosley and E. Leyden, Coorong Water Quality Responses to the 2022-2023 River Murray Flood (Adelaide: University of Adelaide, 2023), https://cdn.environment.sa.gov.au/environment/docs/Coorong-WQ-2022_23-Flood-Report_Final.pdf. These reports detail how reduced freshwater flows have caused hyper-salinity and nutrient enrichment in the Coorong.
25. M. J. Whipp, “Decline of Ruppia Species in the Coorong Lagoons, SA,” ResearchGate, August 2025, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/375872132_Decline_of_Ruppia_Species_in_the_Coorong_Lagoons_SA. This research directly attributes the decline of Ruppia tuberosa to low freshwater flows, increased salinity, and low water levels.
26. Murray-Darling Basin Authority, Condition Monitoring of the Lower Lakes, Murray Mouth and Coorong Icon Site: Waterbirds in the Coorong and Lower Lakes 2024 (Canberra: MDBA, 2024), https://www.mdba.gov.au/sites/default/files/publications/condition-monitoring-of-the-lower-lakes-murray-mouth-and-coorong-icon-site-waterbirds-in-the-coorong-and-lower-lakes-2024.pdf. This report indicates that waterbird species are in abundances below their long-term medians, failing to meet ecological targets.
27. J. Fluin, D. Haynes, and J. Tibby, An Environmental History of the Lower Lakes and The Coorong (Adelaide: Department for Environment and Heritage, 2009), https://data.environment.sa.gov.au/Content/Publications/CLLMM_218_Environmental%20History%20of%20Lower%20Lakes%20and%20Coorong_2009.pdf; J. Tibby et al., “Palaeolimnology of the Lower Lakes and Coorong Lagoon,” in Natural History of the Coorong, Lower Lakes, and Murray Mouth Region (Yarluwar-Ruwe), ed. L. M. Mosley et al. (Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, 2018). These studies use diatom analysis from sediment cores to show that post-European settlement floras are substantially different from pre-European ones, indicating a long-term trend of increasing salinity.
28. Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, “Murray–Darling Basin Plan.”
29. CSIRO, “Flow Monitoring, Evaluation and Research Program (Flow-MER).”
30. PREP, “State of Our Estuaries,” Piscataqua Region Estuaries Partnership, accessed September 17, 2025, https://www.stateofourestuaries.org/.
31. Kerryn Stephens, “State of the Catchments Reporting for NSW Estuaries,” paper presented at the 19th NSW Coastal Conference, Batemans Bay, NSW, November 2010, https://www.coastalconference.com/2010/papers2010/Kerryn%20Stephens%20full%20paper.pdf.
32. NSW Government, “Estuary Report Cards,” Environment NSW, accessed September 17, 2025, https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/topics/water/estuaries/monitoring-and-reporting-estuaries/estuary-report-cards.
33. Penny Sharpe, “NSW State of the Beaches 2022-2023 Report,” media release, NSW Government, October 19, 2023, https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/news/nsw-state-of-the-beaches-2022-2023-report. This report states that “just over half” of estuarine swimming sites were graded as good or very good, a decline from the previous year.
34. eReefs, “Reef Water Quality Report Card,” accessed September 17, 2025, https://www.ereefs.org.au/research/reef_water_quality_report_card.html.
35. Partnership for the Fitzroy Basin, “Great Barrier Reef Report Card Explainer,” River Health, May 2020, https://riverhealth.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/GBR-Report-Card-Explainer.pdf.
36. Queensland Government, “Reef Water Quality Report Card,” State of the Environment, last updated August 1, 2024, https://www.stateoftheenvironment.detsi.qld.gov.au/biodiversity/management-responses/policy-and-programs/reef-water-quality-report-card; Tanya Plibersek and Leanne Linard, “Joint Media Release: Progress Towards Great Barrier Reef Water Quality Targets,” Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, August 1, 2024, https://minister.dcceew.gov.au/plibersek/media-releases/joint-media-release-progress-towards-great-barrier-reef-water-quality-targets. These reports identify grazing lands as the primary source of sediment and sugarcane farms as major contributors of dissolved inorganic nitrogen and pesticides.
37. Plibersek and Linard, “Joint Media Release.” This release notes that “Poor water quality stops coral from regrowing, kills important seagrass, and blocks the sunlight needed for a healthy reef.”
38. Queensland Government, “Reef Water Quality Report Card.”
39. This claim appears to be based on the general good health of the LEB as described in Kingsford, Lake Eyre Basin Rivers, where the system’s natural functions remain largely intact.
40. University of New South Wales, “Macquarie River and Marshes,” Flow-MER, accessed September 17, 2025, https://www.flow-mer.org.au/area-pages/macquarie-river-and-marshes; Kate Brandis, Macquarie Marshes Breeding Waterbirds Reproductive Success Monitoring 2022-23, report to the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder (Sydney: UNSW, 2023), https://www.dcceew.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/macquarie-marshes-breeding-waterbirds-reproductive-success-monitoring-2022-23.pdf. These sources detail successful, large-scale colonial waterbird breeding events in the Macquarie Marshes that were supported by managed environmental water releases.
41. North East Catchment Management Authority, “Constraints Relaxation Management,” accessed September 17, 2025, https://www.necma.vic.gov.au/Waterways/Constraints-Relaxation-Management. This source defines physical and operational constraints that limit the delivery of environmental water to floodplains.
42. Vic Catchments, “About Us,” accessed September 17, 2025, https://viccatchments.com.au/about-us/; Victorian Government, “Catchment Management Authorities,” Water.vic.gov.au, accessed September 17, 2025, https://www.water.vic.gov.au/catchments/catchment-governance. These sources outline the role of Victoria’s CMAs in the integrated planning and coordination of land, water, and biodiversity management at a regional scale.
43. OzFish Unlimited, “Fish Habitat Restoration Australia,” accessed September 17, 2025, https://ozfish.org.au/. The organization’s website details numerous restoration projects, including re-snagging rivers, restoring shellfish reefs, and planting seagrass.
44. Greening Australia, “Restoring Australia’s Unique Landscapes,” accessed September 17, 2025, https://www.greeningaustralia.org.au/. The organization’s website describes its major programs, including Reef Aid, which focuses on gully and wetland restoration to improve water quality flowing to the Great Barrier Reef.
45. S. S. Brooks and P. S. Lake, “River Restoration in Victoria, Australia: A Stocktake and an ‘Unfinished Business’ Framework,” in Appendix 2: Restoration Case Studies, report for the Ministry for the Environment (Wellington, NZ: Ministry for the Environment, 2007), https://environment.govt.nz/assets/Publications/Files/appendix-2-restorationcasestudies.pdf. This review of 2,247 Victorian projects found that riparian management was the most common restoration activity.
46. Brooks and Lake, “River Restoration in Victoria.” This review found that of the 2,247 cases examined, “only 14 percent appeared to include monitoring or evaluation,” limiting the ability to learn from past projects.