Jessica K. Weir: Murray River Country — An Ecological Dialogue With Traditional Owners. Aboriginal Studies Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780855756789. Online
The task Weir has set herself in this book is to explain how one of the most pressing ecological crises facing Australia — the decline of the Murray-Darling Basin — might be better understood if we attempt a synthesis between the points of view of the traditional owners and the 'modern' engineers for whom the river system is most often conceived as a giant piece of plumbing. Weir includes in her book a fascinating Murray Darling Basin Commission diagram in which the river system is depicted as little more than a set of pipes and valves.
Modernism, in Weir's lexicon, describes 'a type of thinking that separates the world into binaries that are placed in oppositional relationships'. Thus, the economic importance of the engineering works along the Murray River is opposed to the ecological and cultural values of the waterway, and understandings of rivers that are to do with more than mega litres and dollars.
What Weir attempts is to convince the reader that the different values we set on a river need not be opposed — that the view of the traditional owners for a healthy river can potentially bring the economics and the ecology into alignment.
Her sources include the bureaucrats and engineers of the Murray Darling Basin Commission on the one side, and on the other the traditional owners who have formed an alliance, the Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations (MLDRIN) to assert their role in decisions concerning water management.
Weir has set herself a big task. The Murray Darling Basin remains the food basket of the nation, and a big earner of export dollars. Only last week I was in the town of Griffith, a town where, thanks to water brought from the Snowy Mountains scheme, it is still possible to believe in the potent narrative of gardens in the desert. It is no coincidence that the town takes its name from a former NSW Minister for Public works, or that its chief public monument is to the Dethridge wheel — an invention used to meter irrigation water usage. Engineering is the dreaming story of so much of white settlement in Australia.
Yet downstream, the narrative of gardens in the desert is, basically, over. In South Australia and western Victoria, fruit trees are dying, grape