Paper short abstract:

Both colonised Barkandji & settlers have tried to defend the Barka/Darling River bioregion in western NSW against damage caused by unpoliced but lucrative irrigation. I trace these attempts, highlighting the effectiveness of Barkandji creative strategies to build alliances to protect the river.

Paper long abstract:

Major fish-kills have occurred for five years in the Barka/Darling River between Wilcannia and Menindee. These massacres suffocated millions of native fish, leaving them gasping hideously as they died, their rotting bodies poisoning the water. The river’s people, both settler and Barkandji, warned of danger – ethnographic research in 2010 confirmed that Aboriginal residents, fishers and graziers had all been begging the government to intervene in unregulated irrigation and ‘rainwater harvesting’. Some settlers developed affiliation with the river over generations. Fishing – now often catch-and-release – further builds their knowledge. But the Barkandji intensified even deeper traditions as their river contact changed. Locked out of their wider lands by colonial pastoralism, the banks were often the only safe places left. Long hours spent fishing on the river were not only essential for subsistence, but allowed continued teaching about that wider lost Country. Settlers have sustained their appeals to protect the Darling, but Barkandji voices have been raised most powerfully and creatively. Stories, songs and making - always central to traditional learning - have brought Barkandji demands to national attention. Barkandji river advocates have found that their music, visual artwork, museum exhibitions and wonderful sculptures of river creatures are ‘kinder’ than their angry words, so they use their art to defend the river. Most movingly their Sydney exhibition features the river’s mud, imprinted with the footprints of many Barkandji people, young and old, who used that river mud to tell their story because, they explain, ‘we are river people.’