Landscape, as a constructed idea, can separate us from our environment, with often drastic consequences for our surrounds. Rethinking landscape through Country has the potential to lead us to a new practice – one that emphasizes recognition and respect.

The act of “deep listening” is central to understandings of Country.3 Built environment academics Anoma Pieris and Janet McGaw point out that at “the heart of deep listening lies a commitment to respecting Indigenous knowledge systems as different yet equal. Where Western academic discourse favours text, Indigenous knowledge has traditionally been communicated through performative practices such as Story, dance and song … deep listening begins with sharing stories and offering an opportunity for each party to situate themselves in the story of the other. It is a process that takes time and requires patience.”4 This idea of landscape, as separated and separable, has been much documented and is one that has contributed to the commodification of the environment – a situation whose consequences are now playing out in one of Australia’s largest landscapes, the Murray-Darling Basin, and in the particularly dire state of the Darling River.

Issues of governance across state boundaries in south-eastern Australia forced the establishment of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority in 2008 and the implementation of the Murray Darling Basin Plan in 2012.

In the eyes of the government, the plan must give equal weight to the environmental, social, and economic impacts of irrigation, with the result that we now have agricultural operations running on global capital – including Cubbie Station in south-west Queensland