INVESTIGATION: is it too late to save the Murray-Darling?

Fish are dying, rivers have stopped flowing, and farmers are without water for their stock and families. Samantha Trenoweth meets four women who live and work in the Murray-Darling Basin, and asks whether it’s too late to save our most critical ecological and agricultural asset.

An immense red sun sets through clouds of dust that hover above barren paddocks. The screen door slams and Gabbie Lelievre kicks off her boots at the end of a long, fiercely hot day. The 48-year-old

Darling River grazier has been handfeeding stock, as she does every other day now, with her husband Stuart, 57, and whichever of their five sons is at home and can lend a hand. The drought has taken a toll on the landscape, the stock (Gabbie and Stuart raise sheep and cattle), family morale and the farm’s bottom line, but that’s not the worst of it. What’s breaking Gabbie’s heart is the river.

“From our backyard you could throw a rock into the river. Now it would pretty much land on dry earth,” Gabbie says, turning on the tap to wash her hands in a stream of thick, greenblown sludge freshly pumped from what’s left of this tract of the Darling.

The river has stopped flowing here at Louth, south-west of Bourke. Their rainwater tank is all but empty so the Lelievres draw water for toothbrushing and bathing from a stagnant pond in the riverbed behind their house.

“It smells terrible,” Gabbie admits, “but that’s all the water we have. We turn on the taps and that’s what comes out.”

The Lelievre’s property is one of many that’s been devastated by both drought and the Murray-Darling crisis.

Gabbie grew up just 100 kilometres downstream. “My family started farming there in the early 1900s,” she says,

“and Stuart’s family were here, opposite where we are now, in the late 1800s.”

The Lelievres have seen droughts and floods aplenty on their 40,000-plus hectares of land.

“I remember walking along the levee banks and seeing nothing but water,” says Gabbie, “and going out across the paddocks in a motorboat with Dad. But even through I’ve been here all my life, I’ve never seen anything like this. I’ve never been in a situation where we’ve had no water in the river, no water in the tanks and no feed on the ground.

It’s a bit frightening. You can’t let it come too far into your mind – you have to look for some positives – because it would be very easy to let the situation at hand overwhelm you.”

The Murray-Darling is one of the world’s biggest basin systems. It covers over a million square kilometres – an area greater than France and Germany combined – and is home to 2.6 million people, living in five states and territories, and 40 Aboriginal nations. The MurrayDarling is Australia’s food bowl: agricultural production in the basin was valued at $24 billion last year. It contains Australia’s three longest rivers, the Murray, the Darling and the Murrumbidgee, and 62,000 square kilometres of rivers, streams, lakes, floodplains and wetlands – 16 of which are recognised as internationally significant by the Ramsar Convention. It is critical habitat to hundreds of water birds, mammals, fish and frogs, many of them threatened with extinction.

However, river flows in the basin are among the most variable in the world.

It is the embodiment of Dorothea Mackellar’s “land of drought and flooding rains”. And climate change is making water security in the basin increasingly precarious. The CSIRO and others have predicted worsening drought, diminishing rainfall and decreased runoff over the next 10 years and from there into the future.

But Gabbie and Stuart don’t think climate change and drought are entirely responsible for their current water woes. Like the people of Menindee, to the south-west, where more than a million fish died over the summer, the Lelievres believe that governments and regulators, the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, and large-scale agricultural interests upstream have some explaining to do.

“The reason we are without water in the river,” Gabbie insists, “is because of mismanagement and overallocation. The drought is a factor, but it is not the cause.

“Yes, it’s dry and it’s a terrible drought but that’s not why we have no water. That’s not why my children have to bathe in filthy green water with God knows what chemicals in it. We’re having to wash our teeth in it, bathe our children in it, and the government thinks that’s okay. Well,

I’m sorry but it’s not okay at all and I don’t understand why the government doesn’t make the changes necessary to allow the river to flow.”

Emma Carmody is helping to find answers for the Lelievres and farmers like them. Emma grew up in Young, in central NSW. Her bush childhood, she says, “is what gives me the fire in my belly”. Now she’s a lawyer with the Environmental Defenders Office (EDO NSW) and has taken up the MurrayDarling farmers’ cause with a passion.

“Since I was a small child,” she says, “I have known that in life there is no such thing as a level playing field, that terrible things happen to good people, and often the only thing standing between the vulnerable and the abyss is another person who is willing and able to take up their cause.”

Emma has been following the plight of the Murray-Darling for decades.

She remembers the NSW government calling a State of Emergency over a 1000-kilometre-long blue-green algae outbreak in 1991. The Millennium Drought, a decade later, underscored the crisis and made it public. People were shocked by the eerie white carcasses of dead Murray River Redgums on the evening news. The iconic Coorong in South Australia was on the brink of ecological collapse. Scientists warned that if water use went on unchecked, it would lead to irreversible damage.

The Howard government passed the Commonwealth Water Act in 2007 and five years later, the Murray-Darling Basin Plan was introduced, with

$13 billion of Commonwealth funding. The plan was supposed to incorporate

the world’s best scientific knowledge, account for the impacts of climate change and prioritise the environment, while ensuring the basin could retain its role as food bowl to the nation. But the best laid plans can run awry, and this one did.

“The Water Act,” says Emma Carmody, “was fundamentally a very good piece of legislation,” but the plan that followed has been plagued by oversight and maladministration.

Emma began working for the EDO in 2011 and spent a lot of time in western NSW, helping farmers navigate the increasingly complex laws and regulations around water use. By 2016, she “had become increasingly concerned by reports from farmers about alleged, ongoing water theft and meter tampering on the Barwon-Darling River, and worse, about the NSW government deliberately turning a blind eye.”

There was already criticism abroad that the pumping limits set for upstream irrigators did not allow sufficient water through to communities and wetlands downstream. Now Emma was hearing that even those insufficient limits were being brazenly flouted.

Emma asked questions and travelled along the river to see the massive storage dams and often unmetered pumps for herself. She reported what she learned to government bodies and regulators, and grew increasingly frustrated when her complaints were ignored.

As a last resort, under instruction from a client, she enlisted the help of an investigative journalist, Linton Besser, and her dogged efforts led to the ABC Four Corners program Pumped, which exposed alleged water theft and administrative corruption, provoked the recent South Australian Royal Commission and an ongoing ICAC investigation into water management in NSW.

Emma is currently representing a community group in a legal action against an upstream irrigator accused of massive over-pumping. “A lot of people are following the rules,” she says, “but the fact that the government wasn’t enforcing them was disadvantaging all those people, including our clients. It was on that basis that we decided to act.”

As we go to press, a damning study by the Australian National University

claims that hundreds of millions of litres of water, intended for the environment, have simply “gone missing”. Where the federal government claims to have saved 700 gigalitres (700 billion litres) of water for environmental flows, the actual figure is closer to 70 gigalitres. How could such an oversight have occurred? According to the authors of the study, it’s because that water has never been accurately measured.

The South Australian Royal Commission has accused the Basin Authority of maladministration, negligence, acting unlawfully and allowing “politics rather than science” to influence critical decisions, such as the setting of pumping limits. Where the initial peer-reviewed guide to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan advised setting aside between 3856 and

6983 gigalitres of water per year for the environment, that figure was ultimately eroded to just 2750 gigalitres, which cannot possibly sustain critical areas like the Coorong and the Macquarie Marshes. The

NSW government’s decision to repeatedly drain the Menindee Lakes has also come under fire.

Moreover, recent regulatory changes have allowed irrigators to pump substantial volumes of water even during drought and “low flows”.

“That has been particularly controversial,” Emma says, “and there’s plenty of evidence that shows it’s unsustainable. Some of them have very large pumps that can extract huge volumes of water quickly, even when there is not much water in the river. Another problem is irrigators pumping water that has been set aside for the environment. The biggest issue in the basin is over-extraction, particularly in light of climate change. Basically, we’re taking too much water out of the system and it can’t cope. We’re seeing the results of that in places like the Darling and the Coorong.”

There has been vehement criticism of “big cotton” and a tendency to tarnish all growers with the same brush. But Emma insists that “no particular crop is to blame. Cotton is not the enemy per se. It’s way more water efficient than many other crops, and it’s seasonal, so you don’t have to grow it every year.”

Emma believes the farming conversation should be about the scale, flexibility and compliance with the rules.

Susan McCutcheon sits on the board of Cotton Australia and is an unlikely friend of the green

movement, but she and Emma agree on some fundamentals.

“Corporate cotton is only a part of the picture,” she insists. “Most cotton growers are on family farms. The best cotton growers aren’t even cotton growers. They’re farmers who grow a bit of cotton,” as she and her husband Paul do on their property at Narromine in the Macquarie Valley.

“You’ve got to diversify these days,” says the 58-year-old mother of two and grandmother of four. “We grow winter cereal crops, which are wheat, barley and oats. We grow canola and chickpeas because you’ve got to have a rotation. We don’t rely on irrigation. We only expect a full allocation [of water from the regulator] probably once every 10 years. If we get a

30 per cent allocation, then we grow an irrigated crop, which might be cotton or whichever will give us the most value for water that year, because it’s about utilising your water to its full extent. In 2016, we grew 400 hectares of cotton. This year, it’s 43.

“We do whatever we can to keep our business afloat. Our boys are home and they have young families and we need our property to be viable. We need these kids to come back to agriculture and we need regional Australia to stay alive.”

Susan believes that, with all its problems, the Murray-Darling Basin Plan still has the potential to deliver an environment in which her kids and grandkids can go on to live and work on the family farm.

“I think there’s some tweaking to do,” she admits. “I think governments need to look at their policies, and water monitoring could be more thorough. I think all water should be metered. It’s important. But the basis of the plan is a good thing. It’s about sharing water across states for the environment, for agriculture, for culture, and I think everybody wants to see that.”

Tara Dixon certainly wants to see increased water flows making their way south to replenish the environment and support Indigenous culture. At 37, Tara works at the Nari Nari Tribal Council, as the project officer for the Indigenous Protected Area, though she admits with a smile that she’s not actually Nari Nari. “I’m Wangkumarra,” she says (her father’s country is further north), “but I grew up here at Hay on the banks of the Murrumbidgee River.”

Tara, the eldest of three, says the river has always been central to community life: “I remember my father, sitting on the riverbank, fishing. He caught yellow belly or cod, the occasional catfish. Now catfish would be almost non-existent and even cod are rare. Dad would descale the fish and fillet it. Then he’d cook it in flour with salt and pepper, or sometimes he’d wrap it in foil and cook it on coals or in the oven. If we were camping down by the river, he’d also make Johnnycakes. They’re made from flour, water and a little salt, and you cook them on hot coals and serve them with a curry or a stew. Sometimes you can have honey or syrup with them as well. That’s a

good memory – eating Johnnycakes on the riverbank.”

Even 35 years ago, some Nari Nari families “and other mobs” still lived along the river and, says Tara, “there are people who say the water was so clear, they could see their feet on the bottom in those days. You couldn’t see your feet on the riverbed now because of the yucky mess of it.”

In fact, in recent weeks, locals have been advised not to put their feet in the river at all, due to blue-green algae.

“We’re not getting big flows through,” Tara explains, “so we’ve had blue-green algae in our river for quite some time. The water quality is very poor and the flow of water that’s coming through is quite small, which impacts us in many ways. It’s not been possible to fish or go yabbying or conduct ceremonies. I know that further north the rivers are dry, so

I’m grateful we have water, but the quality is not good at all.”

The frustration for Tara is that she believes water could be managed better with greater collaboration between traditional custodians and the Murray-Darling Basin bureaucracy.

“We would like to be the masters of our own land, our own water and our destiny. We would like to be involved in the decision making, working collaboratively with partners around water management, rather than being sat down the back and having them come to us after the decisions are made. We’d like them not to come to us just because they’ve got to consult, but to actually involve Aboriginal people and give them a voice, particularly with management of waterways.”

The Nari Nari have begun to get a sense of this with their work on

The Nimmie-Caira Project. The Nari Nari Tribal Council – along with the international conservation group,

The Nature Conservancy, the MurrayDarling Wetlands Working Group and the Centre for Ecosystem Science at the University of NSW – were selected by the NSW government to manage the largest remaining area of wetlands (85,000 hectares) in the Murrumbidgee Valley.

When European explorers arrived at Nimmie Caira, they thought they had found the longed-for inland sea. Instead, they had found the Murrumbidgee River in flood. The project aims to restore that level of flooding to the area, to recreate a habitat for waterbirds and other species, to honour significant Indigenous cultural sites including burial grounds, and to create work in the area through eco and cultural tourism, low-impact grazing and carbon farming. And, says Tara, “it’s getting the traditional owners back on country to practise their traditional ways as well.”

It’s a sign of hope but is it too little too late? Have we run out of time to save the basin?

Tara is cautiously optimistic, if Nimmie Ciara is an indication of things to come. Gabbie Lelievre is tenaciously hopeful but admits she worries that human greed and bureaucratic inertia will keep getting in the way. Susan McCutcheon is keen for an agreement that will preserve the environment and safeguard the family farm as well. And Emma Carmody believes that the future of the Murray-Darling relies on Australia mustering the collective will.

“Whether we like it or not,” she insists, “we all belong to the marvellous tangle of humanity that makes up community and nation. And we are all contributing, either actively or passively, to the formation of our nation’s history every single day. If we like, we can choose to be spectators ... Or we can choose to be bold. We can take the best of our democracy – our courts, our civil society, our free press – and we can use it to advance a vision of a sustainable and equitable society. One that, I hope, will allow my daughters and their children to sit on the banks of the Darling River and watch a harbour’s worth of water pass under the Tilpa Bridge in a single day.”