In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond uses mining as a metaphor to explain Australia's environmental predicament.
Mining in a literal sense - i.e. the mining of coal, iron and so on - is a key to Australia's economy today, providing the largest share of its export earnings. In a metaphorical sense, however, mining is also a key to Australia's environmental history and to its current predicament. That's because the essence of mining is to exploit resources that do not renew themselves with time and hence to deplete those resources....
Australia has been and still is 'mining' its renewable resources as if they were mined minerals. That is, they are being exploited at rates faster than their renewal rates, with the result that they are declining. At present rates, Australia's forests and fisheries will disappear long before its coal and iron reserves, which is ironic in view of the fact that the former are renewable and the latter aren't.
The Murray-Darling Basin is Australia's most extensive river system. It includes a couple of dozen rivers and hundreds of creeks flowing from east to west and from north to south through four States, coming together in the Murray to flow into the ocean through Lake Alexandrina in South Australia. It has been a major population centre and food source for most of the history of human life in Australia, and although us recent European arrivals chose to build all our major cities around sea-ports we still rely on the Basin for a lot of our food.
The various nations who lived there in the millennia before Europeans (and still do) managed their resources sustainably. The system features the most elaborate fishing infrastructure in ancient Australia, and there was also the annual harvesting of perennial grasses and yams and the hunting of various native animals to sustain a substantial population.
But as we know all too well, the European invaders didn't care for any of this. What they wanted was land to graze sheep and cattle, and to grow European crops - wheat, citrus fruit, and so on. This means that although Sturt and Mitchell, the first British officials to find their way along the system, noted some of the richness and complexity of these communities they had no interest in protecting or learning from them. They and their successors embarked on a campaign of raping and pillaging, driving the nations out before them so they could clear trees and graze sheep in peace. We continue to do the same to this day.
Two things stand out about this process.
The first is its massive wastefulness. In their rush to set up pastoral and agricultural enterprises, the invaders of the late 19th and early 20th centuries engaged in wholesale tree clearing and extermination of native animals. These things could have been useful - timber for building, animals for food and skins - and sometimes they were used for these purposes. Some of the timber was used to build homes, or for railway sleepers, but much of it was burned, or left to rot. Same with the animals - they were rarely eaten (the Europeans despised kangaroo or wallaby meat, even though it is just as tasty as cow or sheep and better for us) but the skins were often sold, especially the possum and koala skins. But much of this went to waste too, the animals just burned or buried, seen as nothing more than an impediment to progress. No attempt was made to conserve these resources or manage them sustainably.
This wastage extended to the grasses and even the soil itself. Australia's original lush grasslands were maintained through a system of regular harvesting and cool burning, along with light grazing by marsupials like kangaroos and wallabies. The introduction of sheep and cattle, and the overgrazing practiced by Europeans, resulted in the grasses being torn up at the roots and the soil compacted by hard hooves. The grasses didn't regenerate, and the now denuded soil was washed away in the rain or blown away in dust-storms during drought years.
The second stand-out for me was European-Australians' failure to learn as we went along.
One example of this is the persistence of what Beresford calls the 'agrarian ideal' - the notion, beloved of politicians and newspapers, that Australia could be a land of thriving small farmers growing crops along our great rivers, fed by irrigation. This led to successive waves of land selection - firstly after the population boom generated by the gold rush years, and then through soldier settlement schemes after both World Wars. Aspiring farmers, with little money behind them and often zero farming experience, were allocated plots of a few acres and expected to clear the land, plant crops and build homes. Each time, the result was widespread poverty, debt and disillusionment, along with waves of environmental damage from tree clearing and erosion.
Another example is the recurring environmental crises. We all know about the American dustbowl years of the 1930s, which became a significant cultural moment in American history. But how many Australians know that we have had the same thing here, in the same period and several times since, right down to the present? The causes and consequences are the same in both places, but the difference is that we have refused to learn from our mistakes.
As time has gone on our knowledge of the science of these rivers has become more accurate and sophisticated. It is now clear that we are extracting too much water for irrigation, causing environmental disaster downstream, and that extensive tree clearing is causing widespread salinity that makes land unusable for crops. The Murray Darling Basin Authority, which supposedly manages the system on behalf of the Commonwealth and the four relevant States, has a plan to return to water to the system. But when the nation's leading water management experts criticised the plan as not returning enough water to the system the Authority's Chair responded, out loud and in public, that the plan was 'not a science exercise'. Because we prefer guesswork and hoping for the best.
Just like our efforts on climate change, we go through successive phases - deny the science for as long as we can, then when it is undeniable pretend we are following it even as we actually ignore it and do the bidding of big business. Except whereas on climate it is the big coal and gas companies, in the the Murray Darling it is the big agribusiness companies which grow thirsty crops like cotton and almonds, harvesting floodwaters and buying up the now tradeable water extraction licenses which have become sought-after investments in their own right.
The result is a series of rolling environmental disasters. The one which opens Wounded Country, and which persuaded Beresford to write it, is the 2019 fish kill at Menindee. We all watched our TVs as two local farmers waded into the shallow still water that was the remains of the once mighty Darling River to inspect the thousands of fish floating on the surface. One of the men cried as he held up a gigantic fifty-year-old Murray Cod gasping its life out. Farmers, environmentalists and Traditional Owners added their voices to the call for a solution but the politicians stayed away and talked about drought as if that was the problem, and the major irrigators protested their innocence. Two years later, and at the close of his long tale, Beresford returns our attention to Menindee, where in early 2021 the conditions were building for a repeat episode. Fortunately this time rain and our current La Nina cycle have saved us, but unless we change things there will be a next time.
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At the same time, perhaps not coincidentally, I've been listening to Bruce Cockburn's Nothing But a Burning Light, which includes that lovely song, 'Mighty Trucks of Midnight'.
Wave a flag, wave the bible, wave your sex or your business degree
Whatever you want -- but don't wave that thing at me
The tide of love can leave your prizes scattered
But when you get to the bottom love's the only thing that matters
Mighty trucks of midnight
Moving on
Moving on
I believe it's a sin to try and make things last forever
Everything that exists in time runs out of time some day
Got to let go of the things that keep you tethered
Take your place with grace and then be on your way
As you know, Cockburn is one of my most enduring spiritual teachers, a songwriter with the ability to get to the spiritual and emotional heart of big questions. We all like to treat temporary things as eternal. The serpent told Eve that she and her husband would become like gods and she believed him, but the proposition is absurd. We are not divine, we are frail and mortal. As King Canute shrewdly pointed out, even the most powerful king has no influence over the tide.
Yet the illusion persists. We still think we can control the rivers, that somehow our divine might will prevail against the forces of nature, that we can continue to extract more water, clear more trees and build more dams without destroying the very resources we are exploiting. It's probably too much to expect that big agribusiness companies might care about traditional owners, Murray Cod or even downstream farmers, but surely they care about their own children? Yet they keep taking out more water than the rain puts in, clearing more trees than they plant, as if the earth had no limits. We, and our elected governments, keep on letting them.
Apparently the economist Joseph Schumpeter once said, 'If a trend cannot possibly continue, then it will stop'. This is where we are now. The tide of Love is preparing to leave our prizes scattered. God has told us, many times and in many ways, the Love is the only thing that matters. Will we listen now, or will we wait until we have no choice?
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