Wetlands in a Dry Land: More-Than-Human Histories of Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin

How have people and wetlands shaped each other in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin?  What counts as a wetland, especially in Australia, the driest inhabited continent on earth?

In the name of agriculture, urban growth and disease control, humans have drained, filled or otherwise destroyed nearly 87 percent of the world’s wetlands over the past three centuries. Unintended consequences include biodiversity loss, poor water quality, and the erosion of cultural sites, and only recently have wetlands been widely recognised as worth preserving for their diverse plants, animals, insects, and their human histories. Emily O’Gorman asks: What has counted as a wetland, for whom, and with what consequences?

Using the Murray-Darling Basin – a massive river system in eastern Australia that includes over 30,000 wetland areas – as a case study, and drawing on archival research and original interviews, O’Gorman examines how people and animals have shaped wetlands from the late nineteenth century to today. She illuminates how Aboriginal peoples acted then and now as custodians of the landscape, how the movements of waterbirds affected farmers and how mosquitoes have defied efforts to fully understand, let alone control, them.

Situating Australia’s history within global environmental humanities conversations, O’Gorman argues that we need to understand wetlands as socioecological landscapes that transcend the nature-culture divide and to embrace non-Western ways of knowing and being. Only then can we begin to create sustainable relationships with, and futures for, the wetlands.