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

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.