Cry Me A River
photo: Ian Waldie
If it's true that all roads lead to Rome, then it's fair to say that all water policy in eastern Australia eventually leads you to the Murray-Baaka/Darling. While you have to travel west from the Northern Rivers and over the Great Dividing Range to find yourself within its incredibly vast catchment, water policy on the Murray-Baaka/Darling has ramifications for the rest of new south wales & australia more generally.
Back in 2020, acclaimed journalist Margaret Simons penned a piece for the Quarterly Essay titled Cry Me A River: The Tragedy of the Murray-Darling Basin of which you can read an extract here. To read the whole lot, you'll have to buy the book and we highly recommend doing so. Because the story of the Murray-Darling is a tragedy that makes Shakespeare's works seem petty; the enormity of the problem and the constant failures of governance is enough to bring anyone to tears. Simply put: the lifeblood system that is Murray-Darling has paid the ultimate price through finding itself right at the confluence of colonisation, capitalism, global economics & the politics of water. It is undoubtedly Australia's most contested river.
As Margaret Simons says in the essay:
"The story of the Murray-Darling Basin, and the Plan that is our modern attempt to manage it, is a story of our nation, the things that join and divide us. It asks whether our current systems – our society and its communities – can possibly meet the needs of the nation and the certainty of change. Is the Plan an honest compact, and is it fair? Can it work? Are our politics up to the task? And what happens when the abstracts, the macro policy, the plumbing, the schemes, the "events" or the lack of them hit the realities of the landscape and the figures within it?"
Without diminishing the careful crafting of this compelling essay, Cry Me A River reads as a bit of a Dummies Guide to the Murray-Darling. Simons attempts to explain the mind-bendingly complex arrangement of plans across the river system that determine who gets water, when and where. She finds herself being made aware, after a few beers at local taverns across the Murray-Darling, of the ease with which these regulations can be cheated or loopholes found. It's amazing what people will admit under the guise of anonymity. Simons also paints a picture of the water engineers – who speak in bureaucratic language devoid of life during their dealings with a system that is undoubtedly gasping for air. It's yet another example of modern humanity's strange approach to the environment: we first attempt to remove ourselves from the orbit of the ecosystems that sustain us, in order to make decisions about their future and our own, and then scratch our heads and wonder why it doesn't work.
Three years on from the publication of Cry Me A River, in March of this year, people in the town of Menindee woke to yet another mass fish kill. Estimates suggested in excess of 30 million fish had died. It was yet another stark reminder of a river on life support, and the enusing coverage – most notably and consistently from Guardian Australia – yet again put the Murray-Darling in the spotlight.
At this point, you might be wondering what this has to do with the Northern Rivers. Although the main river systems of our region – the Tweed, Brunswick, Richmond & Clarence – couldn't be more different to the Murray-Darling, a reading of Cry Me A River draws ugly parallels to the surface like a dead Murray Cod.
In the end it all comes back to politics.
As the supposed advocates for farmers, the pervasive politics of the National Party emerge in both places. Margaret Simons likens their behaviour in the Upper Murray-Darling to having a drunk-driver behind the wheel, particularly in relation to Barnaby Joyce in his time as the Minister for Water. If you listen to the political rhetoric of someone like the Federal Member for Page Kevin Hogan speak about flood mitigation or water policy in our region, you start to wonder if he's in the same boat. After a few years floating around in river circles, it becomes clear to anyone who's listening that the very same political party was primarily responsible for the gutting and disintegration of Catchment Management Authorities in nsw, before replacing them with a relatively toothless approach to riparian & water management with the creation of Local Land Services. That is not to say that LLS doesn't have some good policies, or great people working within its ranks, but the movement away from water policy focused on catchment-wide decision making is clearly more than a few steps in the wrong direction. The momentum, at least at the public sector, is not flowing downstream.
Another curious comparison between the two regions is that of unexpected alliances. Simons delves into friendships and cooperation in unexpected places of australia's inland east. Like the progressive think-tank The Australia Institute teaming up with lobby groups run by irrigators to challenge the validity of the Plan on the Murray River. The same can be said back here, where relationships have been formed in all kinds of surprising ways. This was particularly evident in the wake of the 2022 floods, which instigated a form of musical chairs – finding friends in unexpected places – when it came to the future of our rivers. Water may be divisive, but it's also the great connector.
Margaret Simons appears to have done what so many have been unable to acheive: to condense the social, cultural, environmental & political elements of the Murray-Darling into a piece of work that will stand the test of time. In doing so, Simons conveys the vastness, beauty and fragility of our largest river system in a way that is both poetic and lyrical. Unlike the water engineers' language, it incorporates human emotion. Simons does what any good journalist should and leaves you with more questions. The answers to those questions, unsurprisingly, are fair from simple. When water allocations lead farmers to be involved in futures trading on the stockmarket, you've got to wonder how much more abstract it could possibly get. The fallacy of a free market being able to effectively manage our most precious resource and the inescapable myth of trickle-down economics has led us into a quagmire that provides no easy exit. It also poses another question: if a rising tide lifts all boats, then what happens when the water disappears?
There are many conclusions that can be drawn from reading Cry Me A River. This is but one: as climate change brings with it more uncertainty & an increased frequency of extreme events to the driest inhabited continent on earth, water policy will only become more controversial. If we are to learn from the mistakes of our past, try to remediate the worst of the damage, and move towards a system that prioritises the health of our rivers as the lifeblood of our society, there will be winners and there will be losers. And some of those losers will have very, very loud voices.
Rivers have helped to gift australia an unimaginable wealth. But these living systems have paid an insurmountable price and many are now cheating death. The Barkindji people along the Barka (Darling) River, much like the Bundjalung on the Richmond, understand that water represents life in every form. This isn't a figurative idea but a literal one.
If state and federal political structures and institutions are the answer to the enormous crisis of water policy in this country, then maybe we're asking the wrong question.