The Murray-Darling River: journeys in search of a compelling narrative

It's a particularly hot Christmas-New Year here in South Australia: time for swimming and summer reading. My daughter is reading aloud from her Kindle. Together we savour Sarah Murgatroyd's meticulously researched and marvelously evocative The Dig Tree: The Story of Burke and Wills (2002). I must have hard copy. I find it in a local Op Shop. I am given Chris Hammer's less entrancing and already out of date travelogue The River: A Journey through the Murray-Darling Basin (2011). I know most of the places and people he visits but am not held by the prose or narrative line. I dip back into Michael Cathcart's The Water Dreamers (2009). This man can tell a story. And, I have already made a start on the some thousand plus perplexing pages of legalese, scientific reviews, political pleadings, hydrological modeling, socio-economic analyses and ecological outcomes concerning the Murray-Darling Basin Authority's (MDBA) Draft Plan posted online at midnight for its 28 November 2011 release.

Eclectic readings? Turns out to be serendipitous. I am reading about journeys and they are crisscrossing each other like the enduring Indigenous narratives of pioneering heroes that reach back across the millennia, stretch across our dry continent, trace the contours of parched river beds, celebrate the coming of the rains, the snow melt and the rising of the oceans. Early explorers' journeys stoically ignored this wisdom and the new comers perished in land that had sustained those who could read the signs. Others appropriated the stories or invisibilised the experts as nameless trackers. Now comes a Draft Plan to manage a 'working river'. It opens with an acknowledgement of 'respect and support' for the philosophy of 'not taking more than one needs' of the Traditional Owners of the MDB, but this is prologue. The main text, the part that will become law, merely speaks of having 'regard' to Indigenous values (s. 7.25) and views (s. 9.58). Is this where we are going with our rivers?

Starting out

'The scientists tell me that I can start the journey,' declared MDBA Chair, Craig Knowles in his YouTube 'Call to Action': a'robust starting point' for an eight year journey to Destination 2019 when the reforms are set to 'clock in'. He invited stakeholders to inspect the 'mountain of science' on the MDB website and explained that half-way review in 2015 was 'hard wired' into the Plan.

One hundred and fifty years earlier, on 20 August 1861, expedition leader, Robert O'Hara Burke, on setting out to cross the continent from south to north declared, 'No expedition has ever started under such favourable circumstances as this' (SM 6). The assembled crowd of politicians, learned men of the Royal Society and Burke's well-connected sponsors, were buoyed by a range of expectations: glory for the newly independent and gold-enriched state of Victoria, the discovery of new species of flora and fauna, pastures and mineral resources, an overland route for the North-South telegraph line, the inland sea.

William John Wills, the all round scientist (astronomer, meteorologist, surveyor) of the expedition, would document their discoveries. Wills' father, a medical doctor, had significant reservations and would have preferred his son not join the expedition (SM 73). Those with local knowledge of Burke as the police superintendent at Castlemaine and Beechworth and of the terrain to be traversed, looked askance as the half a kilometre long procession comprising 19 men, 26 imported camels, 23 horses and 6 wagons with 8 tonnes of rations set forth into the great unknown. The kit was an eccentric and poorly thought out jumble of items reflecting in part the class-based assumptions of what a gentleman needed, an oak and cedar table, a Chinese gong, 12 dandruff brushes. Dehydration beckoned: 12 water bottles and 60 gallons of rum.

'He'll never make it. He's not a bushman,' my father's mother, recalling family folklore, would tell me as I poured over maps that documented a blank continent being transformed patch by patch from the solid black of terra incognita to an inviting bright yellow. Patch by patch, explorer after explorer, the interior was penetrated. Grandma knew the story of the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition from members of her family who had been present at the departure from Melbourne's Royal Park in 1861 and her in-laws who had lived in rural Victoria since the late 1830s. They knew Burke as the man who could get got lost going home from the pub (SR).

Science in the balance

'Scientists and trailblazers tend not to mix', says Murgatroyd of the 'muddled objectives' of the Royal Society (88). Burke had little time for men of science and at one point required Wills to jettison much of his equipment to lighten the load. In an act of pseudo-egalitarianism, all members of the party were allocated 15 kilos (SM 110). Wills complied. The scientific credibility of the journey evaporated. Burke recorded a mere 850 words in his diary (SM 173).

In developing the Basin Plan, the Water Act 2007 requires that the Authority and the Minister must 'act on the basis of the best available scientific knowledge and socio-economic analysis'. But, in May 2011, the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, whose expertise had been central to the process, walked away from the MDBA. They wanted an independent peer-review of the science. Knowles read their action more as petulance than principle, a power play in a tug of war.

Then, late November 2011, the long awaited MDBA-commissioned Science Review of the Estimation of an EnvironmentallySustainable Level of Take for the Murray-Darling Basin (2011) was released. The review team, with lead author Dr. Bill Young, CSIRO, noted important caveats on the comprehensiveness of their work: documentation was incomplete and specific modeling results were not available for consideration (1). Further limitations included consideration of the social and economic dimensions of ESLT [EnvironmentallySustainable Level of Take] being outside the terms of reference of the review (2) and;the method for determining KEF [Key eco-system functions] not being 'fully defensible because the KEF classification is scientifically weak, the links between KEF and hydrologic variability are poorly described and there is a lack of scientific evidence to justify the hydrologic targets adopted' (3). A robust starting point?

Critiques of the scientific basis of the Draft proliferate and calls for a further independent and comprehensive review constitute considerable roadblocks for the Draft Plan that purports to follow a track constructed by 'best available scientific knowledge'. My reading of and reflecting on this material will extend beyond summer but here we are in week 5 of the 20 week consultation period. A course correction is possible but I am left wondering: Is science possible in this highly politicised context? The Review Team is clear that many of their finding reflect policy decisions.

Adaptive Management: The Philosopher's Stone?

The three questions of sufficiency addressed by the Review Team all turn on the adequacy of the adaptive management framework. Defined by Knowles as a mix of common sense and local knowledge and deployed in amove away from the numbers game to a focus on outcomes, adaptive management appears to be the new elixir of the quest, the philosopher's stone that will transform the highly contested mode of calculation of the ELST, deliver the outcomes required by the Act, and achieve a journey's end consistent with the Water Act.

At its best, strategic adaptive management mirrors the scientific method as it learns from mistakes, draws on diverse knowledges, is nimble and flexible. To succeed it must be resourced and monitoring must be open to scrutiny. To date the MDBA has not demonstrated openness to critique. Adaptive management has never been tried on the scale of the MDB. There has been no unflinching analysis of previous failures of local management. Will the very agencies that helped created the crisis now be deemed 'adaptive managers'.

Localism, the other key tool in the kit, is, Knowles assures stakeholders, 'built into the Plan'. But the Draft merely requires consultation and regard for local views, a report in 2012 and then every 3 years. This is hardly the feedback loop of an evolving adaptive management program. As it stands in the Draft Plan (s 7.4) adaptive management has no strategic dimension. It is a principle, not yet a practice.

Indigenous knowledge is surely the local knowledge with the greatest depth and accommodation to the rhymes and rhythms of this dry continent. Today Indigenous nations within the MDB have begun to articulate the concept of 'cultural flows', their complex spiritual, economic, social and cultural web of inter-relationships of people, land, water and story. How is the journey to be informed by Indigenous knowledge? I begin to mine the 'mountain of science' that might exhibit the 'support and respect' being asserted, but I find only a skimpy literature review summary, and it has no bibliography of the materials reviewed. It recommends further research. Of the second report for which I search, I read: 'The MDBA is in the process of finalising the resource for public release.'

State Rights

The journey of Burke and Wills would have been immeasurably simpler and safer had Burke not spurned Steamboat Captain Francis Cadell's offer to ship the supplies, free of charge, via Adelaide to Menindee on the Darling River. Burke was not about to cede potential territories or yet to be 'discovered' resources to SA. Instead the 750 kms trip to Menindee, a 10 days' ride for a horseman, took Burke 55 days.

State rivalries continue to bedevil projects that require cross border collaboration and planning. Individual basin states cling to their rights to use the water and resist changes to their allocations. All states are eager for a slice of the infrastructure budget but it falls to SA to argue for sufficient flows down the river and out through the Murray Mouth to flush from the Basin the two millions tonnes of salt that accumulate each year.

Journeys

My summer reading has set me thinking about the nature of 'the journey', real and metaphoric: when is the idea of the journey evoked; who tells the story; to whom; why and how? Indigenous pioneering heroes laid down the law of the land, created the social order, language, ceremonies, systems of kinship and marriage. People, land, story and the inherent dangers of severing those relationships enmeshes teller and listener in the web of abiding connectivity. On the other hand, in its classic western form, 'the journey' has a starting point when the goal of the quest is announced; travel where the hero is required to overcome obstacle and finally; the triumphant return home with new knowledge.

Non-indigenous Australian journeys have a different dynamic. We have, it seems, a propensity to celebrate failure: a national holiday for defeat at Gallipoli; a glorious spectacle for the funerals of Burke and Wills. 'Necronationalism', a nationalism based on death, writes Cathcart. 'A defeat culture' says Peter Carey (2000). 'All my narratives can only end in failure.' Hammer depicts the River that fails to reach the sea as metaphor: 'I fear what it may come to represent to future Australians'. The MDBA mantra is that we have to start somewhere.

Neither Burke and Wills nor the MDBA offer a compelling narrative for their journey: science, Indigenous knowledge, state rivalries, inadequate resourcing and conflicting goals remain problematic for them. Who will send out the rescue party for the MDBA? Alfred Howitt did an excellent job 150 years ago but his journeys to Menindee is not celebrated any more than are those of the three other rescue parties who lost nary one man.

We cannot afford the MDBA journey to be become another glorious failure.This is not a tug of war between opposing forces. There is $10 billion of taxpayers' money on the table and it must be invested in our future, not thrown at failed and failing enterprises. There is the Water Act 2007, carried by the Australian Parliament that sets out the objects of the reforms. There is peer-reviewed science to inform our journey.

Let us recast the journey as one for the Australian nation and focus on the society in which we might imagine ourselves living, a society that must comes to terms with the erratic pulse of our river; that must honour its international commitments and must plan for the impacts of climate change; a story of a healthy river, healthy communities and healthy economies.