What’s next for Australia’s water management?

ABSTRACT

Australia’s water management futures are again under discussion as drought impacts and bushfires hit communities. Water and ecological system limits are being reached resulting in fish kills and dwindling water levels in storages. Awareness is also rising around the inequities in current water governance regimes for First Peoples across the Australian continent and beyond. Here we provide a brief overview and research on: the ingenuity of Indigenous waterscape and landscape knowledge and practices to care for country and community, including the development of agricultural systems and sophisticated fish and eel trapping systems that are thousands of years old; the devastating impacts of colonisation on First Peoples, their country and ability to maintain some cultural practices; and the ongoing contestation over water governance, right from Federation, including the eight waves of water reforms in the Murray-Darling Basin. Current challenges and needs for reform are also presented including: hydrological scientific uncertainties, such as around return flows and their adjustment due to irrigation infrastructure efficiency increases, and new design methodologies, such as for flood estimation inputs to hydraulic models; adjusting current governance regimes of sustainable diversion limits and water markets to provide alternative value to Australia, beyond economic value drivers, that better respond to the benefit of all basin communities in the face of ongoing extreme climate variability and climate change; and determining positive ways forward for truly valuing and allowing First Peoples’ knowledge, practices, culture and law to provide a basis for developing the next waves of Australia's water management reform journey.

KEYWORDS:

• Water management
• hydrology
• climate change
• variability
• First Peoples
• Indigenous values
• governance
• futures

1. Acknowledgment of Country

Living on the driest inhabited continent in the world has always required ingenuity and determination to survive. Perhaps even more important, it has required a belief that the country is worthy of care and effort and that if treated well, it will provide for its custodians in return. Australia’s First Peoples, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples from all over the continent have developed, for more than 65,000 years, a range of sophisticated ways of identifying and caring for waterscapes, water sources and access to them in order to sustain their populations spiritually, socially and physically (e.g. see Langton 2006). As a central part of life, water and practices around it are present in art, stories and other cultural practices, including weaving (e.g. see Bell 1998). They have been passed on from generation to generation and across groups in intergenerational exchanges, as they were welcomed onto and travelled through each others’ countries (e.g. see Bird-Rose 1996).

In the north of the continent, where there are multiple seasons of varying weather, rainfall and yearly landscape flooding, this meant different patterns of habitation according to seasons. In the drier interior, it meant organising life in ways where springs and other sources of water could be accessed as groups moved through the landscape. And in the more temperate south with more permanent and reliable surface water in rivers and wetlands, it meant the possibility for people to develop sophisticated ways of managing water for easier food production and more highly populated and semi-sedentary life. Examples of this water engineering are the elaborate fish trap structures found in the south-east of Australia, including at Brewarrina (in NSW) (e.g. see Dargin 1976) and Budj Bim (in Victoria) (e.g. Coutts, Frank, and Hughes 1978) that allowed for very large gatherings and feeding of communities, and other carefully developed areas for grain production and yam farming, linked to storage and trade systems, including along the eastern part of the continent (Pascoe 2018).

Many thousands of years old, these structures and the First Peoples who built them are only just starting to be acknowledged for their incredible ingenuity that makes up an important part of the engineering heritage of our continent. These are stories that we need to tell across Australia and the world (Maclean et al. 2012; Engineers Australia 2017). All of this water history of the continent prior to colonisation needs to be acknowledged and celebrated publicly and often. Lessons, where possible, stemming from both the systems that were eventually destroyed through the process of colonisation and those that still persist and support community and culture need to be recognised for their ability to sustain societies across millennia (see also Taylor et al. 2016).

As we learn about this history, we discover that like terra nullius, aqua nullius is a furphy (Marshall 2017). Most of the history we were taught in Australian schools was a result of colonial power and narratives that maintained their legitimacy. Many of us and our relatives have been complicit in destroying land, water, lives and culture, when we brought hooved animals, other ferals and disease, and took land and access to water, like our own relatives who arrived in South Australia in 1836. Working with and alongside First Peoples (since South Australia acknowledged their ownership of the land in its Letters Patent in 1836) we can imagine how hard it was for these new settlers to also make a life in a foreign land. We can assume that sometimes they acted with good intent and know that at other times this was not the case, especially as governments were set up and policy changed much damage was done to First Peoples and their countries (see for example 2010). An apology is needed for us to acknowledge these wrongs. It is necessary as a basis for leaving space to acknowledge the next phases of community development for all who now live on the Australian continent. Our collective future will require further water reforms and landscape-level alterations that will need to contend effectively with a range of very real and important issues including real progress towards reconciliation and justice for Indigenous peoples, addressing climate change, valuing water effectively–beyond purely economic value–and developing effective means for supporting social, cultural and ecological wellbeing. These are not just challenges for the Australian continent but for many other countries and territories around the world and throughout our Australasian region. Many of these will be impossible to address if we do not understand the sources of these challenges, including the legacy of past colonisers, cultural visions of life in our countries, as well as the impacts of infrastructure and governance development that accompanied it (Robison et al. 2018).

2. Colonial and settler legacies in Australian water governance

Water has been contentious since the beginning of colonisation due to preferred settlement sites being those with access to good quality water sources. Many of the documented massacre sites through the colonial period are along rivers (e.g. see the map in Ryan et al. 2017). Maintaining power over access and use of river water was also an important part of the negotiations around Australian Federation between the Murray–Darling Basin States, with the Australian Constitution in 1901 giving most powers over water management to the States. There have since been eight waves of major governance reform to manage interests, environmental issues and social challenges that have appeared over the last century of the river’s development. It is not the purpose of this editorial to highlight them here as this history is available elsewhere (e.g. Connell 2007). However, this history of multiple waves of governance reform, adjustment of management priorities, creation of inter-governmental agreements and development of ‘nation-building’ infrastructure programmes, such as the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, is worth keeping in mind as the legacies and imagined futures linked to these reforms still impact the decisions we are making today. In particular that Australia has the highest water storage capability with respect to its streamflows, designed to average out water availability over long periods of extreme variability (Daniell and Daniell 2006). Dams and water storages of all types, whether large river dams, farm dams or household rainwater tanks have been vital to an ability to live and develop in a country of climate, especially rainfall and run-off extremes.

This variability had long been a challenge to the development of permanent crops in lower rainfall areas. So early on in the Federation, Peake and Venus (2019) outline how in an attempt to manage this, the Chaffey brothers set about developing gravity-fed irrigation technology that allowed the development of the Mildura and Renmark irrigation settlements. New community irrigation governance models also had to be developed – irrigation trusts – that went with them. This in turn allowed the development of fruit and wine industries of settler irrigators. As with all technologies, these irrigation schemes and the land clearing that went with the opening up of agricultural areas have provoked a number of unintended consequences, such as challenges with salinisation and erosion of the fragile Australian soil. In the 1980s, new interministerial agreements and salt interception schemes needed to be developed to manage the increasing salinisation of the River Murray. The situation has been mostly stabilised with ongoing high maintenance costs, but other significant environmental impacts and loss of biodiversity were linked to increasing water withdrawals, mainly for irrigation, and land clearing and habitat loss across the Murray–Darling Basin. From 1995 when the Murray–Darling Basin ‘Cap’ on water withdrawals was put in place, each set of reforms has attempted to claw back water for the environment in an over-allocated river system, and to ensure water is valued appropriately, especially when water scarcity and water allocation conflict is high during droughts. However, fixing the legacies of an overallocated and degraded river system is far from simple and a situation that both Australia and other countries around the world are required to learn over and over again, and in many cases the end result has been ecological and human civilisation collapse or abandonment of settlements (see, for example, Macklin and Lewin 2015). This is obviously not a situation that Australia ever wants to see for one of its most emblematic river basins and important food production areas. Hence, the political, administrative, scientific and personal efforts by many that have been made in recent decades to try to reverse the damage and to find more sustainable futures for the river systems and communities that rely on it.

3. Back to the future: another cycle of drought induced water reform?

As parts of Australia and in particular the North of the Murray–Darling Basin are suffering through one of the worst recorded droughts in history, it is again time for all of us to reflect on and review how our most recent wave of Federal water policy reforms are serving us now and may do so in the longer term. Firstly looking back, it is now over 10 years since the end of the millennium drought where the then Prime Minister John Howard (2007) declared ‘ … the current trajectory of water use and management in Australia is not sustainable. In a projected drought, and with the prospect of long-term climate change, we need radical and permanent change.’ In particular, he noted that ‘ … we need to confront head-on the overallocation of water in the Murray Darling Basin. We must strike a sustainable balance between the demands of agriculture, industry and towns on the one hand and the needs of the environment on the other.’ This led to some particularly important and significant reforms including the States agreeing to refer their powers over water to the Federal Government, the setting up of the Federal Murray–Darling Basin Authority (taking over and extending the role of the previous intergovernmental Murray–Darling Basin Commission), the division of water rights from land rights and the creation of the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder to buy back water from the over-allocated system for the environment, all under the Water Act 2007 (Cth).

After significant community and Government anguish in the early years of drafting the Murray–Darling Basin Plan around conflict over the setting of sustainable diversion limits across the basin – and how much water was to be reallocated back to the environment – a plan finally passed the Australian Parliament in 2012 and is slowly being implemented. Implementation has not been without its challenges and adjustments in approach have been made in recent years, in particular, to favour water efficiency projects such as irrigation upgrades over direct water buybacks. There have also been claims of water thefts and a lack of compliance with the plan that has led to a number of investigative journalism exposés and formal inquiries, as well as significant scientific, consulting and Government work. Three of the articles in this issue add to this body of knowledge by investigating different aspects of water governance and hydrology challenges and controversies in the Murray–Darling Basin.

The first by Williams and Grafton (2019) looks at the possible effects of water recovery from water infrastructure subsidies, specifically questioning and providing insights into the assumed levels of ‘return flows’ to the river system. These results are compared with the other recent study by Wang, Walker, and Horne (2018) and indicate that if their own assumptions are found to hold, then net contributions to stream and river flows in the MDB may have resulted in smaller increases than estimated by the Australian Government, or may have actually reduced the net stream and river flows. This could obviously have important policy implications and further hydrological research is required to investigate and empirically test the range of current assumptions both in Australia and abroad where similar issues are being raised (e.g. FAO 2017; Grafton et al. 2018).

The second article by Colloff and Pittock (2019) contributes to our understanding of why there is so much controversy and disagreement over the directions put forward in the Murray–Darling Basin Plan. It analyses three different discourses of contestation around water accounting and availability, perspectives on ecological change, as well as issues of trust and the management of environmental water. These are unpacked looking at issues of engagement and communication between different parties with an interest in the basin: scientists, government officials and communities. Considering the differences in discourses, the authors suggest that within the planning process used there was an inability to effectively include some world views and knowledge systems that do not match those of the decision-makers and that there are some process changes that could be made to support a more inclusive consideration of these different perspectives.

The third article by Alexandra (2019) then considers the recent spate of media investigations and formal inquiries into the adequacy and integrity of the MDB’s governance arrangements, and what this means for the future reforms of such arrangements. He considers that the appearance of these investigations as indicative of a crisis of trust and public confidence, which threaten the legitimacy and authority of current institutional arrangements that are required to govern the basin. His proposed response is to pose the question of what new forms of institutional architecture might be needed for a reorganisation of governance that is more cooperative and can better address the social, environmental and climate change challenges at play in the basin. The principles, practices and features of MDB governance he outlines form a useful basis for further discussion on potential institutional architecture reform. Specifically he notes that: ‘The need for institutions with capacity for strategic navigation, goal seeking and the cultural co-construction of authority are suggested in the interests of cultivating debate about prospective reorganisation’ (Alexandra, 2019). We would certainly welcome further discussion in this journal and beyond on these propositions.

4. Breaking old assumptions: facing alternative and uncomfortable futures

Following on from Alexandra (2019), one of the questions we need to ask ourselves around what might come next for Australia’s water management links to both climate change and variability. In recent years, climate scientist Sophie Lewis has been suggesting that we will need to plan for an Australian climate future that includes 50-degree temperatures (Lewis, King, and Mitchell 2017; Davey 2017). At the time many of us laughed that such extremes might be a way off, but with a few capital cities and rural towns hitting temperatures between 45 and 50 degrees, including large swaths of the Murray–Darling Basin in the summer (2018–19), and others being exposed to increasingly long extreme-temperature heatwaves, it is becoming no longer a distant reality, but a state that will require a new level of concerted planning and decision-making. Such temperatures, that were previously much rarer or unheard-of (e.g. 50.7 degrees in Oodnadatta, South Australia in 1960), and Marble Bar’s infamous records in Western Australia, where this summer there were 24 consecutive days over 40 degrees (Brook, 2019), may become situations that other regions of Australia will need to prepare for in the not so distant future.

Already, our knowledge on temperature and linked climate change impacts is increasing as it appears that decreases in soil moisture are having negative impacts on flood magnitudes (Wasko and Nathan 2019).

Another paper in this issue by Scorah, Stephens, and Nathan (2019) examines the assumptions linked to the aforementioned flood-influencing patterns, specifically the one that the probability of rainfall directly corresponds to the probability of flood levels. They look at these assumptions in relation to how hydrologic model results are used as inputs to 2D hydraulic models, and what decisions on ‘representative floods’ may be made by practitioners where there are computational constraints on using the more comprehensive application of Monte Carlo and ensemble approaches that are expected under the Australian Rainfall and Runoff (2016) guidelines (Ball et al. 2019). Through their study–using probability neutral estimates of flood depths that had been constructed through Monte Carlo application of a 2D hydraulic model – they found that the hydrographs that were probability neutral with regards to peak outflows did not always result in probability neutral estimates of flood depths. This is an important result as it means practitioners cannot just choose one ‘representative flood’ and instead need to run a greater selection of events in order to avoid generating biassed hydraulic model results (Scorah, Stephens, and Nathan 2019).

Examining assumptions in flood modelling and associated flood management practice are not the only assumptions we need to be checking. We can question similar assumptions used to understand drought risk, bushfire risk and associated water security and environmental impact questions, although these are again becoming rapidly politicised as we in Australia are again experiencing a challenging period for many drought and bushfire affected farmers and communities in Australia, in particular in the north of the Murray–Darling Basin, along the eastern coast of Australia and in parts of Western Australia. With water storage at only 7% in the northern basin, which is lower than at any time in the Millenium drought (MDBA 2019), inflows at fractions of the long-term averages (BOM 2019a), and the climate drivers signalling the likelihood of a continued dry phase according to IOD, -ve Southern Annular Mode (SAM) and ENSO phases (BOM 2019b), water management, policy and governance are again front and center of the public and political consciousness. Last summer brought devastating fish kills in the Darling river and Menindee Lakes, and recent reports and photos show there are more happening and to come this summer. Concern is such that a ‘Noah’s Ark’ operation is underway to move fish by truck into more protected areas to avoid whole populations perishing (Tomevska and Sas 2019). This may end up just being a band-aid short-term solution, but it shows the gravity of measures ecologists are willing to go to to try to give some fish species a chance to survive another summer.

Town water supplies in New South Wales are also nearly exhausted in a number of places with ‘Day Zero’ plans being developed (Molloy 2019). There is even concern that Sydney will need to significantly adjust its water management if it to avoid a massive water crisis, since Warragamba, its main water supply dam is only at 47.3% (on 17 November 2019). Flying over it just recently, its parched sides give an ominous warning to the green and sprawling metropolis just north. Sydney Water is already revving up the desalination plant built at the end of the last drought, but we need to ask if a proactive integrated response, including on population demand management is ready to be rolled out before they reach more extreme challenges. Research, including Lucas and Cordery (2019) with an exploratory study in Sydney, shows that concerted and consistent efforts are required to both induce and sustain behavioural change around water efficient behaviours. Even with very strong price signals to incite behaviour change, both education and ongoing communication are also required to maintain domestic water consumption at reduced levels. Should we pre-emptively be ramping up this education and communication now?

The unfortunate recent bushfires across Australia are another signal to remind us that, yes, we should be more proactive with our water and risk management practices with our populations. We now have increasing evidence that patterns of fire weather in Australia are also changing, linked not only to typical soil moisture and fuel load indices, but the increased number of Pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) wildfires, examples of which were experienced in Canberra in 2003 and the Victorian Black Saturday bushfires in 2009 (Di Virgilio et al. 2019). The sheer strength of such fires and widespread nature of other bushfires create many real dilemmas for Australian firefighters and planners and managers of all varieties, including those responsible for water management. Reducing levels in water storages, dried up farm dams and emptied swimming pools are just as problematic for our ability to fight fires–since they can often be used for last-ditch attempts to save life and property by firefighting helicopters–as they are for all our other human and environmental uses. How we manage declining storages over multiple years thus may need to be rethought, before there are no longer options of reasonable choices available.

5. Old pathways, new steps forward?

Managing for water scarcity and extremes (e.g. floods, droughts, fires) is nothing new in Australia. But the stakes are growing as there are likely to be more acute scarcities, and even more and greater extreme events, including heatwaves, catastrophic fire weather and devastating storms (e.g. cyclones, hail storms, dust storms, coastal inundation). These events in themselves can stress Australian ecologies, but when they are coupled with more people and more infrastructure at risk, there is a higher potential for impacts on humans (e.g. loss of life, injury, ongoing mental health impacts, community and cultural breakdown), environmental devastation (e.g. habitat loss, extinctions, and loss of ecosystem functionality and service provision), economic impacts (e.g. higher insurance premiums and severe economic loss/bankruptcy, budget impacts).

In terms of changes, we now have more data on the state of our environment, and human and economic activity than ever before. With computational advances, these sensing and monitoring systems, as well as the predictive models and decision-making processes they feed, represent both an enormous opportunity and immense challenge. Specifically, as the capability to access and use them remains unequal with information systems remaining fragmented and unintegrated across governance systems (e.g. governments, insurance companies, scientific groups and other large and small businesses and community groups). The streams of data that can be pooled, from satellite imagery and remote sensing, radars, gauging and metering networks, individuals’ smartphones and other tracking systems, financial transactions, social media and much more, mean that many choices need to be made and information cross-referenced to build richer pictures and stories of what is happening. The objectives that are set for management information systems, what we choose to monitor and the way we construct indicators and scales to measure these are not value neutral, with each potentially having significant impacts on different parts of the community and actors in our governance systems. This is why water management and development (sustainable or otherwise) are so politically contested. With multiple streams of media and ‘evidence’ available to us, each with variable processes for quality assurance, and the ability for individuals and groups to self publish with little oversight but have many followers, this contestation and societal conflict is not going to go away. So taking these new states and trends as givens – some ‘new’ assumptions on our future pathways – where can we go from here?

First of all, we need to summon the courage to use the current and looming set of water and climate instability challenges as an opportunity for leadership and action. We then need to figure out what we really value and how we can collectively invest in maintaining and protecting this where feasible. In this, we need to move away from the emotion of fear that paralyses us, towards more positive and proactive approaches that can bring us together to support each other and be more responsible custodians of the past, present and future worlds we seek to acknowledge and create. Specifically in Australia and the Murray–Darling Basin trading areas, that means examining whether the balance we have currently put on the value of water as being one driven by monetary exchange and ability to pay within ‘sustainable diversion limits’ is the most reasonable one, or whether there are other values such as Indigenous water values, local food production, firefighting capability or urban/rural greening and restoration to reduce land surface temperatures and erosion, that may need to be better worked into future Australian water reforms. The current inquiries and assessments in the basin, including those by the ACCC (2019) and Independent assessment of social and economic conditions in the Basin requested by the Australian Government (2019) should provide some more useful insights into past impacts of water reform decisions, although these have not been set up to imagine a range of possible futures and water and connected system designs. For these futures, there are multiple perspectives that could be focussed on, but here we want to emphasise just three: climate; human-ecological-technological approaches; and Indigenous values.

Incorporating climate variability, periodicity and change into planning and governance regimes

Recent hydrological and climate science findings, as well as ongoing community observations of change in their land and waterscapes, means high priority investment in anticipatory governance needs to be put into planning for floods, droughts and extreme weather in a non-stationary world (Alexandra 2017). As discussed in McMahon and Kiem (2018a, 2018b), French and Jones (2019a, 2019b) and our editorial from last year (Daniell and Daniell 2018), we need to move beyond considering averages and statistical models that assume stationarity of flood and other risks (i.e. that every year there is the same risk of having a big flood). It is increasingly obvious that there are instead periods in time when risks of (larger) flooding and drought are heightened due to a periodicity of climate drivers around Australia (Kiem and McMahon 2019), and that these need to be coupled with the underlying trends of climate change and global temperature increases. It is not sufficient for only the world’s (re-)insurance companies, the largest agricultural production companies and places like the World Bank to be estimating climate-induced risks and the economic losses both associated with past and future predicted events. Our governments, water managers, farmers and others in our community also need to find new ways of creating, trusting and using such insights in their decision-making.

Developing more holistic approaches to governing human-ecological-technological systems

Governing Australia’s water and waterscapes today, like many other systems in 21st century society, means understanding and being able to manage new technologies and systems of cyber-physical systems (WEF 2016). This means systems of humans, connected technologies able to transmit information, and their environments, that are all connected and feeding back into one another. Our water markets, our river operation systems, our cities’ water utility systems, our climate monitoring systems-many connected to our smartphones, our farming and irrigation systems, and our increasingly smarter homes, plus the electricity and telecommunications networks required to power them, are all just small parts of an interconnected whole made up of a range of sensors, data systems, and models interfaced with both human and machine controllers. Such complex systems of systems present many challenges and opportunities for knowledge building through big data and computational learning systems, as well as issues of security and reliance on their functioning. Power is likely to rapidly shift into the hands of those who (think they) can understand and control these systems, and who can make money from their management (i.e. financial traders, big businesses, big data and system scientists). As previously described earlier in this section, in one of our journal’s papers last year (Barry and Coombes 2018) and other places (e.g. Nabavi, Daniell, and Najafi 2017), there is an enormous art to the development of complex system models that can meet objectives under a range of boundary conditions and assumptions. Those that can be opened up to allow community participation in model development, with the feedback loops and adjustments to model structure and parameters made explainable, will likely garner greater administrative support over time, even if political opponents continue to create alternative models and interpretations of desirable future options. We could do well to re-imagine cybernetics (e.g. Wiener 1948), an approach to governing responding to feedback and charting a course – that sees social/cultural and biophysical relationships as intimately connected and responding to technology (Ison, Alexandra, and Wallis 2018) – in an applicable form to guide our new water management practitioners of tomorrow. Here they will need to be able to comprehend and ask questions of these cyber-physical systems, in order to determine the presence of negative (potentially unintended) feedback loops and how the systems can be modified and steered to transform these into more positive ones.

This might sound like a pipe dream in the middle of Australia’s current buffeting by drought, fires and water insecurity, as it may seem that our current ecologies, agricultural practices and settlement designs may not be able to continue to cope with such extremes. However, it might be worth observing how some countries are transforming their human-ecology-technology systems and making very bold moves to attempt to deal with rising temperatures and the effects of degraded landscapes and pollution (of air, land and waters) on their populations and downstream environments. For example, China has been undertaking massive river management conservancy actions including pilot projects – one the size of Belgium in the Loess Plateau of the dry Yellow River Basin–to renegotiate and restore ecological function to the landscape, to reduce temperatures, modify local climate patterns and to reduce erosion, dust storms and excessive sedimentation of the Yellow River (e.g. see Liu 2009; Sun 2019). Although there is still a long way to restore this ‘Mother River’ of China, as President Xi Jinping recently outlined (18 September 2019), the Government is aware that without connecting people, culture, ecology and technology through green development, they will not be able to transform China into a harmonious ‘Ecological Civilisation’ that they are seeking. For our own beleaguered Murray–Darling Basin, we might be able to learn from these convictions, vision and actions in the Yellow River Basin and others around the world for building national and global futures based on alternative forms of river development.

Respecting First Peoples’ water values, laws and leadership in water governance systems: first steps to overcoming colonial legacies

The final point that allows us to run full circle is that Australia and other countries in our region and across the world still have a long way to go to begin to right the wrongs of colonisation and dispossession of First Peoples that partially or fully cut them off from culture and the land, water, sea and skyscapes of which they are an integral part. With a number of countries around the world making clear decisions to think differently about waterscapes, such as rivers, and their inherent value as living entities, granting them personhood (Eckstein et al. 2019). One of the latest is Bangladesh, which granted all of its rivers legal standing through its high court in July 2019 (AFP 2019). However, there are paradoxes and contestation over this approach, as Virginia Marshall points out in Eckstein et al. (2019), as this can elevate rivers and ‘Mother Earth’ above Indigenous people in a hierarchical way that does not match relationships of First Peoples to country and can be ‘counterintuitive from an Aboriginal perspective, and essentially counterproductive.’ Western legal systems can also continue to be used, representing an effective dismissal of Aboriginal norms, laws and practices, rather than elevating these laws above mainstream colonial governance (Marshall in Eckstein et al. 2019). The arguments of many past scholars and Indigenous elders add further weight to this perspective considering the incommensurability of colonial economies based on the exploitation of land and water (e.g. Cronon 1983) rather than Indigenous economies and cultures based on responsibilities to and living in harmony with country (e.g. Hemming and Trevorrow 2005). However, in her 2019 Peter Cullen Trust lecture on 20 November at the Australian Academy of Sciences, Dr Anne Poelina suggested that despite the challenges of the Western legal systems and concept of ‘personhood’ in relation to an entity that is already living, it may still provide powerful means for First Nations people to remain on and carry out their responsibilities to country, as well as to develop more sustainable, culturally appropriate and viable economic development. It thus creates the necessity for us to figure out, on less biassed terms, how to develop an effective two-ways governance system (e.g. Muller 2012), and provide room for real First Peoples’ agency and leadership (e.g. Hemming et al., 2017; Poelina, Taylor, and Perdrisat 2019). This latter approach is the one we are seeking to take in some small part, as next year, two Indigenous water leaders and scholars from Australia and New Zealand, Bradley Moggridge and Gail Tipa, will bring together an issue of the Australasian Journal of Water Resources on Indigenous water values in the Australasian region, where all papers will either be authored or co-authored by First Nations people. This is our chance to listen, learn and lend support to the next wave of Indigenous-proposed water reforms to try to restore some balance and a positive future for what is left of our regional waterscapes.

Acknowledgments

Katherine Daniell notes that part of this article was made possible by the support of the Initiatives of the Future of Great Rivers, supported by the Compagnie Nationale du Rhône (CNR). Many thanks to my colleagues on the IFGR rivers committee for much inspiration. Thank you also to Anne Poelina, Bradley Moggridge, Asmi Wood, Penelope Springham, Hmalan Hunter-Xenie, Aunty Ellen Trevorrow, Aunty Noreen Kartinyeri, Dianne Bell, Genevieve Bell and many more of my colleagues for helping me to explore the history of our continent, our roles in it and our possible futures differently.

This paper is dedicated to Arthur Daniell (18/12/1919 - 12/09/2019), father, grandfather, crossword designer, footy and cricket aficionado, Veteran aircraft mechanic and keen fisherman. Danny worked in the construction industry as a plasterer, builder, tiler, bricklayer and stonemason in South Australia. He constructed scale models of South Australian dams and hydraulic works, e.g. Kangaroo Creek and South Western Drainage scheme, at the University of Adelaide in the Department of Civil Engineering under the guidance of Bob Culver. We acknowledge Arthur for inspiring two generations of family graduates from that same department to work in the water management sphere.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katherine A. Daniell

Katherine A. Daniell is Research Lead at the 3A Institute, and an Associate Professor at the Fenner School of Environment and Society, and in the Australian National University's Institute for Water Futures. Trained in engineering, arts and public policy, her work bridges multiple domains including governance, policy analytics, risk management, politics and cultures of innovation, and international science and technology cooperation. Katherine's research and impact is driven by collaborative approaches to policy, education and action for more sustainable forms of development. Katherine has produced over 100 academic publications including 4 books and a diverse range of book chapters, papers, reports and edited collections. Katherine is a John Monash Scholar and currently serves as a member of the National Committee on Water Engineering (Engineers Australia), Director and Board Member of the Peter Cullen Water and Environment Trust, a member of the Initiatives of the Future of Great Rivers, Editor of the Australasian Journal of Water Resources and President of the Australian-French Association for Research and Innovation (AFRAN) Inc.

Trevor M. Daniell

Trevor M. Daniell holds an Honorary Research Fellow position in the School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering  at the University of Adelaide. He was previously Principle Engineering Hydrologist and Manager within the Australian Government for 18 years, working on water supply design and operations, flood forecasting, flood and drought management, water resource investigations in Australia, Indonesia and the Pacific. His contributions to hydrology and water resources have been acknowledged as Crawford H Munro Orator (2008), “Distinguished Champion in Hydrology for South East Asia and the Pacific in commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of the UNESCO International Hydrological Programme in Asia and the Pacific„ (2015), and with the RJN Franki (1974), GN Alexander (2002) and Warren (2004) medals for best publications. Associate Professor Daniell is a Member of the Australian UNESCO IHP Committee, Past Chairman UNESCO IHP Steering Committee for SE Asia, and Past Chairman of FRIEND Intergroup Coordinating Committee UNESCO IHP. He currently sits on the Board for Stormwater Management Authority in South Australia and is Co-Editor of the Australasian Journal of Water Resources.