An Open Letter to the Premier of NSW

22 March 2025
 
 
Dear Mr Minns, Premier of NSW
 
I wish I could bottle up the smells that’ve confronted me this week and send them to you. The acrid smell of death would hit you like a slap in the face. On the worst day it left me with a raging headache that I couldn’t shake.
 
I wish I could show the jet-black colour of the water so you could see it with your own eyes. You don’t have to know the science behind it to know it just doesn’t look right.
 
I wish you knew what it was like to wake up at 2am wondering why you couldn’t get the smell off your body only to realise it was everywhere; in the air around you, floating up from the floodplain onto the plateau where I lay awake.
 
I wish you saw with your own eyes what I have witnessed every day this week: eels, crabs, fish and prawns gasping for oxygen; literally suffocating in the river that is their home. These animals are the victims of a history they played no part in creating.
 
Maybe, Mr Minns, if you saw these things you’d realise that in order to right the wrongs of the past you’ll have to make some brave decisions; to stand up and fight for voiceless rivers before they pass the point of no return.
 
I am well-versed on the science behind blackwater. I’ve read the literature, examined the graphs, perused the albums of photos of dead fish. I have spent years slowly wrapping my head around how it works – what it’s caused by and the simple practical solutions that can hopefully all but eliminate the phenomenon from our rivers forever. Decades of incredible hard work has culminated in incredibly well-informed research that shows us that the lowest lying areas of our floodplains, where enormous swamps were historically drained, contribute to the vast majority of blackwater discharges. To understand it is one thing; to witness a disaster unfold day after day – in what feels like slow motion, right before your eyes – shifts the experience into a different realm.
 
I know you were up here to visit us during the floods caused by Cyclone Alfred – and as a community we are grateful for your visit. But after the risk to human life and property mostly subsided, the threat to aquatic life on the lower floodplain has become catastrophic. This is not a new phenomenon Mr Premier but a pattern that has existed for over 50 years now. The river of my childhood – the Richmond – has seen over 80 fish kill events since 1970. The worst on record, in 2001, totalled deaths in the millions.
 
The depressing irony of this situation is that the places on our floodplains that once held the greatest concentrations of life – our vast backswamps – are now the places that leech death.
The Tuckean Swamp was once called “the Kakadu of the south”. Old tales recount flocks of birds so thick they’d black out the sun. They were breeding grounds for rays, sharks and countless species of fish. These days, if you’re lucky, you might spot a lone kingfisher or a couple of mullet eking out a living there.
 
Those of us who know these rivers live in fear of something that scares us to our core. Our dread stems from the idea that these events – which have now been occurring for three generations – could be seen as natural of the system; something that “just happens after every flood.” As a student of both observation and formal education when it comes to rivers, I can promise you that these events are anything but natural. The discharges of blackwater and the thousands of dead fish are not caused by natural ecosystem processes. They are the direct result of maintaining a status quo that benefits a select few at the cost of so many lives. What’s that famous quote? “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is just a statistic”
 
So here we find ourselves, perched on a precipice and peering over the edge into a void where rivers no longer hold the ability to be cradles of life. It is a right we have denied them. That leaves me with a question for you Mr Minns. It is a question that has been throbbing in my head all week as I drive across a dying floodplain.
 
If a fish dies in a river does it make a sound?
 
I hope you take the time to read this letter and think about what a future with dead rivers looks like. Because if we continue on this path that is where it will end. It breaks my heart to tell you that future is not as far away as you might think.
 
For the voiceless rivers,

Tom Wolff
Revive the Northern Rivers

This letter was signed by 763 signatories and sent to the Premier on Friday 28 March, 2025.