Quentin Beresford - Wounded Country: The Murray-Darling Basin - a Contested History

Australias MurrayDarling Basin is under threat. This vast geographical region, covering one million square kilometres and spanning four states and the Australian Capital Territory, has been over-exploited for nearly 200 years. It is an engine of national economic wealth creation through its vast river system comprising 20 main rivers and 77 000 kilometres of waterways and extensive grazing lands. Its delicate ecosystems have, for decades, been in decline. Waves of settlers plundered the regions potential, with little consideration for the consequences. An economy cannot be sustained forever on a degrading environment.

Agriculture has been conducted on a grand scale in the Murray Darling Basin. Pastoralism, wheat production and irrigated crops today generate agricultural production exceeding $10 billion each year; other industries, such as tourism and mining, lift the regions contribution to the Australian economy to an estimated $75 billion annually.

In recognition of the deteriorating state of the Basins ecology, and the economic consequences arising from it, the largest environment program in the nations history was unveiled in 2012 in an attempt to find a balance between the need to restore the Basins ecosystems and the demands of agriculture. But it is widely thought to be failing to stem the ongoing environmental decline. At stake is the future of Australias premier food bowl and the two million people who depend on agricultural industries for their livelihoods, and the iconic status the MurrayDarling has for Australians, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous.

St George in south-western Queensland is as good a place as any to contemplate the start of the MurrayDarling River system that acts as the main artery through the Basin. This picturesque, isolated town, nearly 600 kilometres west of Brisbane, is reached along a gun-barrel straight highway that shimmers in the summer haze. When I visited in November 2020, the Balonne River was a magnificent sight, with water flowing majestically through stands of river red gums.

One branch of the Balonne flows into the narrow, winding Culgoa River and then on a 3000-kilometre journey through the Darling and the Murray, eventually flowing into Lake Alexandrina and the Coorong wetlands on the South Australian coast. It takes eight months for the water to meander from its source to its final destination. Along the way it traverses varied and unique ecosystems: internationally renowned wetlands, important for their abundant wildlife; arid, flat plains that challenged the perseverance of explorers Charles Sturt and Thomas Mitchell and where all manner of marsupials and native birds co-exist; alpine regions providing melting snows to re-charge the Murray; and the verdant grasslands of western Victoria. Each is a quintessential Australian landscape. But for two centuries European Australians failed to appreciate the delicate balance that had sustained these ecosystems for thousands of years.

This book sets out to be an environmental history of the Murray Darling Basin. It seeks to explore Europeans relationship to the landscape, from the epic story of its discovery by explorers Sturt and Mitchell, through the invasion into Aboriginal traditional lands and the rapid dispossession of the Indigenous population, and on to the succeeding waves of settlement infused by grand ideas of nation-building. Both profiteers and the poor worked to fulfil the dreams of the nation-builders. But from the earliest years of white settlement, the exploitation of the Basin revealed Australians destructive relationship with the environment. Generations have been driven to tame this wilderness. Many bent it to their will and made fortunes; many others were broken by its harsh realities.