It starts at the beginning

Like most things in life the best way to understand a river is to start at the beginning.

Up in the mountains clouds drop rain on the high peaks, filling headwater streams with life-giving flows. Water takes the easiest course and it is this simple fact that has carved out the gorges, valleys and waterfalls that the first custodians made some of their most sacred of places And through all these processes a remarkable feat: the amount of water on earth remaining the same for billions of years.

As water follows gravity, slowly yet constantly wearing down the earth beneath it, the river brings to see the impact of modern humans. Sediment accumulates from deforested land, a collection of big hooves trample a platypus’ burrow, an oil slick fans out across the surface not far from a male freshwater cod fastidiously cleaning the nest for his offspring.

The descent continues and the river widens now as it splays out onto the floodplain. The wetlands once dubbed “the Kakadu of the south” have long been drained to suit the pastoralists that did not recognise the value in the literal lungs of the river. They chose to see these boggy wastelands through the lens of the colony: as a waste of prime land. Forests are a dime a dozen down here now too. Shame the same can’t be said about the carp.

Agriculture is king and the river now resigns itself to playing second fiddle. Absorbing all the by-products of productivity and progress. Once all the goodness is sucked out of the rich alluvial soils that the river itself created it’s time to look elsewhere to keep these monocultures growing. The fertilisers continue to produce for the harvest and the pesticides keep the bugs away. But everything comes at a cost and once again it's the river that pays.

The estuary does it’s best to disguise the true plight of the river by flushing it daily with ocean tides. An old man sits perched on a wooden wharf as the river shimmers in the late afternoon light. ‘It’s still clear down here’ mutters the man to himself, shirking whatever responsibility he could have shouldered before turning his back to walk away.

And after a journey through space and time the river meets its end in the sea.