Regulation of the river began in earnest in the 1930s. Wetlands and redgum and black box forests edging the river were suddenly without the floods that were part, not only of their natural cycle, but also of the plants and creatures who relied upon these habitats for feeding and breeding. This meant not only controlling the volume of the flows but also their pathway, so that decisions were taken about what was and was not part of the river. The answer was seen to be regulating the river with dams and weirs. People along the river complained, politicians said this must never happen again. Sinclair's book could be described as the story of all the stories that have shaped how we see the Murray River, from Aboriginal stories, through the stories of the 1890s, which spoke of irrigation as a way of expanding the power of an "all-climate, all-condition embracing British Empire", to 1950s images of the river's water as another form of gold, to the tourist brochures of today.įor millenniums, the Murray ran seasonally, with big floods in winter and spring, until it dried up during a drought in the early 1900s. "People's connection to place is part of what makes them." In Sinclair's way of viewing the world, Bub and his brother were "connected" by the river and the fish. Bub damaged the river, but he loved the river and, in his old age, he mourned for the river." "They fished the buggery out of the river because they thought there was no end to it. He has several photos of Bub in his book, one of Bub and his brother and a huge haul of Murray cod. One of the influential characters in his view of the Murray River was an old fisherman, Bub Sebastian, of Mitta Mitta. In 2001, his doctorate was published as a book, The Murray A River and Its People. They now have two children and Sinclair has Murray cods patterned on his wedding ring. At the end of the trip, they decided to marry. In 1998, he paddled the Murray with a friend, Jen Hocking. What was beautiful about the place I was from was a forest of black box gums and a big, slow river." He found himself irked by the assumptions he encountered "about what was beautiful in nature the wilderness calendar view of the natural world. Like a lot of people, he suspects, it was leaving home that made him appreciate the place he was from. He came to the city when he was 18 to attend Melbourne University to study history. It was very clear what happened to the land if you treated it badly." When he ventured on to his moonscape, "there was nothing there to shoot.
The family farm also had stands of black box eucalypts that were a remnant of a river ecology, but the black box trees ended at their fence. That was his first memory of the river "as a thing with its own way of being". The rain kept drumming on the tin roof and he worried for his father's safety. His first memory of the river is a flood in the early 1970s when he was 12. Sinclair grew up at Kerang, on the Loddon River, a tributary of the Murray. Both, significantly, are products of the places they write about. Both speak to a new centre in their respective debates and, with that, comes the hope of fresh initiatives. He is not unlike Tasmanian historian James Boyce, whose book Van Diemen's Land is the first major history of Tasmania since the Windschuttle controversy.īoth Boyce and Sinclair go beyond the politics of blame. His view of the environment goes way beyond the polarity of greenies versus rednecks. Sinclair, 39, is a new sort of Australian public intellectual. If I come around to your house and drive a bulldozer through it, am I destroying your home or merely changing its form?" He says there are scientists who argue that "dying" is an emotionally laden word. He uses words carefully and with effort, as if he is not expecting to be easily understood. Sinclair's forebears were Scottish, and he has a Scottish reserve. "It's clear that parts of the river are dying," he says. I ask Sinclair if the Murray River is dying. This week, a leaked scientific report said the Coorong wetlands, lakes Albert and Alexandria and the mouth of the Murray could virtually be destroyed by October. He also knows of a place on the Murray, Bottle Bend, outside Mildura, where the remaining pools of water have turned into sulphuric acid, which will be flushed into the river if the billabong ever floods again. Recently, he saw a tortoise from the Coorong entombed in coral that had grown from its back, snaring its head and flippers.
Once it was home to hundreds of thousands of water birds. PAUL Sinclair says the Coorong, the 140-kilometre-long freshwater estuary at the mouth of the Murray River, is now five to six times saltier than the sea. What's also at stake is an intricate system of connectedness between all things. Acidity, salinity, depleted bird life - parts of the Murray are dying, says author and river campaigner Paul Sinclair, even if scientists want to call it "changing form".
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