Paper short abstract:

Seeking to recover lost or silenced voices of places and peoples, the paper meditates on re-connecting alternative epistemologies with histories and ecologies for two Australian rivers: the Yarra (Birrarung) River in Victoria, and the Fitzroy (Martuwarra) River in West Australia.

Paper long abstract:

Can we recover the ‘lost’, ‘forgotten’, and ‘invisible’ voices of rivers and other ecosystems? And what of the silences of the dispossessed and colonised Indigenous peoples who are the custodians of these ecologies? Many of their voices and stories have been lost, and must be recovered and listened to in a reconnected ecology of care and justice.

Epistemological colonialism calls for a re-orientation to encourage southern, subaltern and Indigenous and other non-Western knowledges and epistemologies to be recovered, and placed as central to a reconnecting of humans and non-humans in decolonising histories.

This paper explores interconnecting vulnerable, and lost or destroyed ‘Southern’, and Indigenous epistemologies and histories, with ecologies and communities, to encourage sustainable ethical, dialogical engagement around place, people and region.

The paper places into their environmental historical contexts legal, policy and resource management developments that recognise rivers as ‘living systems’. The two Australian rivers that form the empirical focus for the paper are the Yarra (Birrarung) River in Victoria, and the Fitzroy (Martuwarra) River in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. The Yarra River Protection (Wilip-gin Birrarung murron) Act 2017 (Vic) establishes a Burrarung Council to ‘represent’ the river, a body that includes Victorian First Nations people. In the Kimberley, the Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council Native Title group governs the Fitzroy/Martuwarra as a single, living entity on the foundations of First Law and ancestral knowledge.

This textual reading of jostling narratives, epistemologies and histories of these rivers engages inter-disciplinary conversations that gesture towards developing alternative environmental histories.