Living Data:
Cooperation

2019 Conversations

"Mother Earth births everything for us.
Father sky carries the water and oxygen for us to breathe."

Yuin Elder Max Dulumunmun Harrison, 2009

A Living Data Arena is convened to explore ways to compose a message to Antarctic Treaty nationals at the conference Antarctic Connections at the End of the World: Understanding the past and shaping the future.

25th January 2019
Scientist Rene Delmastells a story about disruption of the Murray Darling.

MURRAY DARLING DISRUPTION

Sixty million years ago the Murray Darling basin was still young.

Boom and bust conditions have preserved it as it was.

Six thousand kilometres square, the catchment spans wide.

Fourteen hundred kilometre muddy thread of life blood.

Sixty thousand years of Aboriginal people have existed here.

Cultivating the land in harmony with natural cycles.

Two hundred years of European presence, farming practices, and a world away.

The value of the flood plains drawing settlements to remote places.

Crops and livestock sustained by the river's flow.

Paddlesteamers ladened with the land's bounty carried downstream.

This exploitation of the system, growing prosperity while the river still flowed.

Fifty years since the cotton was grown, a demanding and thirsty crop.

The industry's demands growing beyond that for which the Darling could offer.

Normal flows nolonger enough to sustain agricultural needs alone.

An assurance of water is now seen by changing these flows.

Storing of water in weirs and dams fragmenting the rivers and the pools.

Natural cycles are halted. Landscapes dramatically transformed.

This critical resource of which both community and all life depends.

Without seasonal floods, the plains nolonger provide energy to the river.

Without continuous flow, algae blooms our of control.

Without a connected habitat, fish are unable to travel to spawn.

Without water given its true value, it will belong to the highest bidder.

With retrospect and understanding of how the land was used in the past...

rivers can return to how they were.