Thesis Introduction - Version 2 (Kerry)

The Role of Art in Imagining Sustainable Futures: The Barmah Forest

Introduction

My proposal is that by understanding and coming to terms with the current degradation of the Murray River and the Barmah Forest , the key aspects of the sustainability of the forest may be identified and, through the medium of art, Australians may begin to imagine a sustainable future for the river and its environment.

Since European settlement the nature of the Murray River has changed substantially with the construction of weirs and dams and the widespread use of its water for irrigation purposes. This has meant that the natural propensity for the river to flood has been curtailed. The Barmah Forest has also been harvested extensively for wharves, railway sleepers and charcoal since the late 1880s. Throughout the twentieth century, the forest had been used for the agistment of cattle, leading to the annual Barmah Muster where the cattle were rounded up for identification and sale.

A community of Indigenous people, the Yorta Yorta, is connected to these lands. The Cummeragunja Mission was set up on the New South Wales side of the river to relocate these people in 1881. Perhaps due to particular interest taken in the Indigenous people by one of the local British settlers, Daniel Matthews, and because of the play-off between the governments of Victoria and New South Wales given that the Murray River formed the border between the two states, the Yorta Yorta people became highly politicised and Cummeragunja became a breeding ground for Aboriginal activism into the twentieth century. In 1975, 1983 and again following the Mabo decision in 1994 and in 2002, claims by the Yorta Yorta for the Barmah/Moira Forest area and their surrounding traditional lands were rejected.

The intention of the research is to illuminate the history of this part of the Murray River and to enable Australians to understand what has been lost in terms of the cultural and natural environment. As a consequence of understanding the loss, it is intended that a new imagining of a sustainable future for this environment, particularly for the Barmah Forest, will emerge.

Personal Involvement

I am the daughter of a dairy farmer, a soldier settler who was in the pioneering group of returning soldiers from the second World War to be allocated newly-constructed irrigation properties in the Nathalia district of the Murray Valley, Victoria, thirty kilometres east of the river port of Echuca. My father’s father had a mixed farming property southwest of Echuca. At the end of the war, after he made the decision that he wanted to be his own boss and not be employed by the Victorian Department of Education as a schoolteacher, my father returned to this property to share the running of the farm with his father and another brother. He built a house for his growing family down the road from his childhood home. It was not until the early 1950’s that we moved to Nathalia and the new farm.

Twenty kilometres from our farm, whether you travelled north or west, was the Barmah Forest. It is still part of the largest river red gum forest in the world. It was formed thousands of years ago when the earth was uplifted along the Cadell Fault and the flow of the Murray River was re-directed from its westerly flow in a great curve to the south. As a result a huge flood plain was formed. This is where the forest is located. The river red gums depend on regular flooding at specific times to regenerate. The entire eco-system is dependent on the river’s ebb and flow over the seasons.

This is an important area of research because of the current malaise of the Murray River and the potential demise of the Barmah Forest. However this research is also important for me at a personal level as the Barmah Forest is on the land of my childhood and has a mythic quality to it. I remember school excursions to the area but particularly recall a night car rally around the forest in which my family participated. We drove with ‘Fortune Favours the Bold’ writ large on the car. I am interested in investigating my connection to the place and in untangling my family’s role as settler farmers and irrigators in the Murray-Darling River system.

The artwork that I will produce as part of this study will be an expression of my relationship with the area in terms of a shared connection to the land with the Indigenous people and an interpretation of the cultural colonisation that has taken place since European settlement. The artwork is essential as the means of imagining the possibility of hope for the sustainable future of the forest. It will be a vehicle for implicitly communicating the knowledge gathered from the study.

Irrigation History

After more than sixty years of irrigating this country, the balance has moved. The climate has changed. There are concerns about the water table rising; there are issues with salt damage to irrigated country; there is not enough water to quench the demand from irrigators; the environment is suffering. Also as a consequence of the widespread use of water for irrigation and the regulation of the rivers, the Barmah Forest is in decline. Perhaps the forest can be seen as a barometer for the health of the environment.

With the new twentieth century regulation of the river, the natural river flow was interrupted. Water was directed to areas that had previously only experienced annual rainfall and possible occasional flooding and, as a result, was directed away from areas such as the forest. The irrigation schemes were set up along the entire length of the Murray from Albury in Victoria through to South Australia.

The system of irrigation channels, drains and bays had been constructed on the understanding that water would be available as required by the irrigators from the Murray River. This was part of a major economic development that was taking place across central northern Victoria. With the construction of the Hume Weir, the Yarrawonga Weir and numerous other smaller weirs along the Murray River and its tributaries, the regulation of the flow of water was maintained for the benefit of farmers. At the same time the construction of the Snowy Mountain Scheme for the generation of electricity was taking place. The combination of these two huge infrastructure schemes was to have an immense effect on Australia’s economy. The catch-cry of the time was ‘Water into gold’.

There were parallels to the mid-nineteenth century gold-rush days in Victoria when there was an influx of immigrants into the country coming to make their fortunes, lured by the magic of gold. Now, following the end of the war, there was an influx of immigrants, refugees from Europe on the whole, and returned soldiers looking for work and a new way of life. They were boom days for agriculture, the golden years. In the 1950s, wool prices were high. Australia was riding on the sheep’s back. Other agricultural commodities were in high demand as Australia’s population soared. The dry country in northern Victoria thrived on the ready supply of water and the bountiful application of fertilizer.

By the 1980s it was apparent that the water resources and the environment of the Murray-Darling Basin were degraded. The Murray-Darling Basin Commission became the first official agency to co-ordinate the interests of the five states within the Murray-Darling Basin system. In 2008, the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, an independent expert-based federal government body, was established in place of the Commission to manage the water resources of the Murray-Darling river system in the national interest. The Authority has implemented various monitoring programs and developmental strategies to restore the health of the river system. These include programs such as the Native Fish Strategy to restore native fish populations in the system back to pre-settlement levels within 50 years, the Living Murray program to restore the health of the Murray River system and the Sustainable Rivers Audit to monitor the long-term health of the Basin’s rivers. In October 2010 the Murray-Darling Basin Authority published its draft guide to a plan for the allocation of water resources in the Basin.

European and Indigenous History

The search for water had always been a primary concern for the European settlers in Australia. Charles Sturt had specifically sought the inland sea in the early nineteenth century. In 1829 Sturt and his party set out from Sydney to travel down the Murrumbidgee River and along the Murray in the hope that it would lead them inland to the mythical sea. They were to be disappointed. Sturt continued his exploration of central Australia but to no avail. He had established that the rivers flowing westward in New South Wales were all tributaries of the Murray River that eventually flowed into the sea in South Australia.

The early story of contact between European and Indigenous people in the Barmah Forest and surrounding areas is documented in the diaries of Daniel Matthews who came to Australia with his family in 1851 and selected land on the New South Wales side of the Murray, the Moira Run, in 1865. Matthews was the founder of the Maloga Mission and later was instrumental in forming the Cummeragunja settlement, which still exists today, for the local Indigenous people. He has been acknowledged for providing a school for the community, which ensured them a good education and subsequently the means to work independently in the European economy as farmers. In turn, this is where the seeds were sown for the Indigenous political movement throughout Australia leading up to the 1967 referendum.

Social History

Paul Sinclair has undertaken a major sociological study of the Murray River and its people, particularly since the time of European settlement. He documents the stories of people who have grown up along the Murray as a way of telling the story of the river itself. He uses the decline of the Murray cod as a metaphor for the degradation of the river and the land in its floodplain. He concludes that “settler Australians need to understand and mourn the immense losses they have inflicted on the river” in order to then be able to imagine a sustainable future for themselves and the river.

Sinclair tells of an excursion made by artist John Davis to the Barmah Forest in 1979 when he responded to the place by constructing a work around some tree stumps in situ on the banks of the river. Davis had grown up along the river and this was a way for him to make sense of his connection to the river and the forest and as part of a “questioning of the cultural and development imperatives which had driven efforts to regulate the river since the 1880s.”

Rather than take a scientific approach to understanding the decline of the forest, my intention is to wonder about ways of imagining its sustainable future through the medium of art. The sustainability of the forest is intricately linked with the community of people who live and work in its vicinity, including the Yorta Yorta Indigenous people. It is also part of a delicate web of living organisms that sustain and nurture each other. By tapping into this rhizomic system and expressing something of its nature through art, the intention is to find a relationship between the art and the community’s ability to imagine a sustainable future for itself, for the river and for the forest.

Concluding Remarks

The just and equitable allocation of water resources is possibly one of the prime struggles facing Australia in the twenty-first century as issues of climate change aggravate concerns about environmental degradation and agricultural productivity as well as community survival. The intention of this research is to examine the possibility of art playing a role in the adjustment of communities to changing circumstances by allowing them to imagine the possibility of sustainable futures.

It is clear that science plays a major part in understanding the workings of the ecosystem, however there may be a role for art in rupturing the accepted knowledge about the environment and in providing a conduit for a new way of thinking about sustainability. By understanding the historical and social background of a particular environment and its community, in this case, the Barmah Forest, it is intended that this research may uncover just such a role for art.