After two wet years, you can jump in a channel on Garry and Leanne Hall’s property on the edge of the Macquarie Marshes in northwestern New South Wales and quickly find yourself surrounded by wildlife.
Magpie geese, spoonbills, whistling kites, swamp harriers: the list ticked off by visiting bird enthusiasts has been extensive in the past season. The Hall’s cattle graze on the marshes, accompanied by the egrets, which pick the insects off their backs as they move through the long grass.
The human community around the wetlands has a similarly symbiotic relationship with the marshes. Landholders – such as the Halls – profit from grazing on and near the marshes.
But they are also fighting to ensure more water goes into the environment to keep the Marshes and rivers healthy and connected.
That interest has seen Macquarie Marshes landholders connect with birdwatchers, environmentalists and academics, which sometimes places them at odds with upstream irrigation communities.
Top to bottom: Ibis in the Macquarie Marshes (Wammerawa); the Macquarie Marshes benefited from the eastern states floods.
An announcement from the Albanese government last week that it would buy back 49 gigalitres of water from “willing sellers” to meet the targets in the Murray-Darling Basin Plan has brought the Murray-Darling debate back to the national stage.
The previous Coalition government had essentially stopped buybacks.
The Victorian and NSW governments immediately opposed more buybacks, with NSW water minister, Kevin Anderson, describing the move as a big blow to Basin communities.
Many rural communities throughout the Basin condemned water minister, Tanya Plibersek’s, decision to restart buybacks, even though the current plans to buy back water do not affect the Macquarie Valley.
The National Irrigator’s Council predicted the price of food and fibre would rise, while saying that people who sold their water were not really willing but, rather, selling under duress.
‘Only looking at the debit side’
As president of the Macquarie Marshes Environmental Landholders Association, Garry Hall welcomed moves to give river systems the best chance of not running dry.
He says the socioeconomic benefits of healthy rivers are rarely mentioned in the debate.
“We’re only looking at the debit side of the balance sheets and not looking at the credit side,” he says.
“There’s been absolutely no benefit measured on the plus side of healthy rivers and having healthy communities and, for us, how healthy marshes and a functioning ecosystem support our businesses.”
For the Halls and other Macquarie Marsh residents, being able to ride the waves of more extreme seasons in a changing climate is critical to surviving and thriving in agriculture.
Garry and Leanne Hall prepare to ride into the marsh on their horses.
If that means more conservative river management to cope with bigger droughts, Hall is in favour of it. He repeatedly called on the NSW government to update their water allocations to consider the 2017-19 drought as the “drought of record” – the benchmark to inform water allocations.
But the NSW government made clear in its 2021 NSW Water Strategy that it had “opted not to take a more conservative approach” on water allocations to improve water security in the event of a future severe drought due to the potential cost to productivity in non-drought years.
“Rather, in the event of the next drought, it was preferred to use other emergency drought mitigation measures to support communities,” the strategy says.
Wildlife explodes but trends down
While human communities in the eastern states have struggled with flooding, the water that has made its way into the Macquarie Marshes has created an explosion of wildlife.
When Guardian Australia visited the Ramsar-listed Macquarie Marshes wetland, over three days birdwatchers counted 76 waterbird species.
The marshland provides habitat and a breeding site for a range of water birds and fish, overlooked by giant stands of red gum woodlands. It houses threatened species such as the Australasian bittern, the Australasian painted snipe and the Murray cod.
There was also large numbers of carp, an invasive species that is thriving in the wet season.
Director of the Centre for Ecosystem Science at UNSW, Richard Kingsford, has been counting birds for the Eastern Australian Waterbird Survey for 40 years, as well as from more recent regular surveys of the wetlands in the Murray-Darling Basin.
Bird enthusiast, Mark Fuller, scouts for wildlife while canoeing through the Marshes.
Clockwise from top left: A swamp harrier, a spoonbill, an ibis taking flight, a lizard hiding in a tree trunk.
Kingsford says this year has seen a big breeding event not only in the Marshes but right across the Basin, but it is still in the context of longer-term decline. In the past 40 years, the waterbird population in the Marshes has declined about 70%. Their survey results do not show the same magnitude of declines in the Lake Eyre basin, where isolation has proved a protective factor against irrigators.
“That’s largely, we think, because of the development that’s occurred in the northern basin, including the Marshes over that period,” Kingsford says. “A lot of the big dams were built in the 70s but it wasn’t until the sort of early 80s that a lot of irrigation took off from the Lachlan upwards.”
In October last year, Kingsford’s team estimated there were 35,000 waterbirds in the top third of the Macquarie Marshes alone, but he likens that breeding boom to throwing a tennis ball: in wet years, bird populations bounce back, but the size of the bounce declines over time.
Rivers are ‘browner and browner’
In Dubbo, Bron Powell works as a project manager for the central Murray-Darling Basin for Ozfish Unlimited, a non-government member organisation of recreational fishers who volunteer to restore habitats along waterways.
Their priority on the Wambuul-Macquarie system is restoring habitat by planting trees to hold banks together and provide fish food via the insects dropping from the canopy.
She believes governments need to provide more resources to stop erosion along the rivers, which she says are getting “browner and browner” due to runoff and large numbers of carp.
Top: Bron Powell, Project Manager for the Central Murray-Darling Basin for Ozfish (a non-government organisation), stands in the Marshes.
Bottom: A gum tree submerged in high water.
“People these days just grow up thinking that’s normal, whereas 60 years ago, the river in Dubbo was clear. People talk about diving under a snag and you’d look up and you can see the Murray cod hanging out, so the way it’s gone, it’s just dreadful.”
She believes while landholders are instituting better management practices, such as tree planting and avoiding overgrazing, “it’s nowhere near enough”.
“You really need every single landholder on board,” she says.
Another regular to the Macquarie Marshes is Dubbo-based Melissa Gray, a potato farmer’s daughter now working as a water campaigner and community organiser for the Nature Conservation Council. She argues the water buybacks are needed to get the Murray-Darling Basin plan on track.
“When [NSW water minister Kevin] Anderson speaks of communities, is he referring to multinational corporates and their very large profits?” she asks.
“Or is he truly concerned about the real communities on the ground who must have living rivers to exist? That’s what is at risk if the rivers don’t have enough water to survive.”
Adrian Langdon worked for Water NSW for 12 years, seven of them as executive manager of operations. He is well acquainted with managing the balance between interests and operators.
“[The Marshes] definitely get the big floods as we have seen [but] because of irrigation, and the way things have changed, they probably don’t get some of the smaller floods that they used to get,” he says. “But with environmental water holders now picking up more of this water, you’re able to maintain those environments a bit more.”
Langdon says environmental changes made by humans means the rivers and waterways will never return to the way they used to be.
“And it wasn’t in a fixed state anyway,” he adds. “The environment is always continuing to slowly change from period to period. I think what we’re really looking at now is: how do we manage water to deliver and sustain the outcomes that we want?”
Last light slips out of the Marshes.
Canoes make their way through the Marshes.
He says it is imperative that all the communities up and down the river work together.
“You’ve got to look for the continuous improvement,” he says. “You’ve got to work together rather than everyone pointing the finger.”
This story was updated on 5 March 2023 to reflect that the name of the current NSW water minister is Kevin Anderson not Kevin Humphries.
