Aboriginal connection to country: a rich well of traditional knowledge of water systems

Australia’s environmental laws have been thrust into the spotlight recently. A new government promising to reform the country’s feeble environmental laws and seeking to amend the calamitous findings of a long overdue national report on the state of the environment has ignited conversations about how to rectify the multitude of problems at hand.

Another damning and long-awaited report, published in August, was scathing in its review of the decade-old Murray-Darling Basin Plan, which, it found, had no chance of returning the 450 billion litres of water it had promised to redirect back into the interstate river system by 2024. Extracted and traded by irrigators and landholders, little water is left for the river.

And yet there is a rich well of traditional Indigenous knowledge of water systems that persists as it has for millennia in the driest inhabited continent on Earth. Aboriginal peoples’ long-held connections to Country reveal a deep understanding how, when and where water flows, and how it should be managed for generations to come – knowledge that could reinvigorate our water laws.


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