Melbourne has treated the Yarra River terribly – but it doesn’t have to stay that way

‘Scooping up handfuls of fresh, clean water, I splashed them over my head,’ Harry Saddler writes in an edited extract from A Clear Flowing Yarra. Photograph: Jackson Gallagher/The Guardian

In 2017, on a hot March day, I went looking for azure kingfishers. Tiny, elusive and even bluer than their name suggests, they’d been seen several times on the Yarra River in the outer north-eastern suburbs of Melbourne.

I rode to the river from Lilydale station along the busy roads that pulled like taut wire between the paddocks and empty lots out there, nearly crashing at the bottom of a fast, steep hill while cars and trucks whooshed past me.