The Moorabool River system is a workhorse.
It carves a tortuous path from the headwaters at the Wombat State Forest near Ballarat, down to its confluence with the Barwon River in Geelong.
It provides critical habitat to rare fish, birds, and plants, feeds urban water supplies for Geelong and Ballarat along with private dams on thousands of hectares of farm land in between.
But it's also in crisis, one that environmental advocates say is deepening.
"It's now regarded as one of the most flow stressed, if not the most flow stressed in Victoria, and we, year by year, see a river that really is struggling to maintain itself," Golden Plains shire resident Cameron Steele said.
The 62 -year-old web designer is the coordinator of a community group, People for A Living Moorabool (PALM), which has advocated for the Moorabool River for over a decade.
Its volunteer members have delved into water authority government data and Google Earth to produce a report which claims about 200 new private farm dams have appeared in the catchment since 2012.
"We had volunteers looking at different parts of the catchment and then using a slider, which was available on Google Earth, to go back and look at earlier satellite images," Mr Steele said.
"We were able to pick up probably 90 per cent of the dams that have been put into the catchment over the last 10 years."
The group cross-checked these dams with an anonymised spreadsheet of dams in the catchment they obtained from the regulator, Southern Rural Water.
The group says dozens of the dams appear to have been built on watercourses, which by law requires a licence.
"We knew that it was happening within the catchment. But we weren't aware of the extent," he said.
The ABC, with the help of ANU water scientist Matthew Colloff, has verified that several of the biggest dams flagged by the PALM group appear to be operating either outside their licence or without one.
One dam, south-east of Ballarat, held almost double the amount of water the property was licensed for.
Another further north cropped up in the last two years and appears to have no licence at all.
Neither of the property owners were available to provide comment on the dams' licensing arrangements.
And another dam, near Buninyong, appeared to hold triple what government records show it should.
When asked, the owners could not produce a licence for the ABC.
The farm manager told the ABC the owners of this dam took the concerns "very seriously" and were "deeply concerned about any potential environmental impact associated with [their] operations".
"We understand the importance of transparency and accountability, which is why we have promptly initiated an investigation into the concerns raised," the farm manager said in a statement.
Together, the three dams alone hold close to 1,000 megalitres of water — equivalent to almost 400 Olympic swimming pools.
Unlicensed dams can 'severely compromise the environment'
Australian National University researcher Dr Colloff has researched unauthorised water use on private dams in the Murray Darling Basin in New South Wales and said he has seen similar issues to the problems identified in the Victorian report.
"What it did was alert me to the fact that the growth in small to medium farm dams has not abated since farm dams were identified by the Murray Darling Basin Authority back in 2006 as a major risk to inflows to river systems," he said.
Dr Colloff said what was happening in Victoria had a cumulative effect.
"It's not that an individual is causing a problem, but where you get a proliferation of unlicensed dams across the catchment that can severely compromise the environment," he said.
He said there were moral and legal obligations around water take.
"Water is a public good, and so if you have what is essentially a free for all … then it's going against the public good," Dr Colloff said.
"And in the case of unlicensed or unregulated farm dams it's also unlawful."
Regulator's funding model does not support compliance
Southern Rural Water regulates farm dams across 8.8 million hectares of Victoria, from the South Australian border to NSW and everything south of the Great Dividing Range, including the Moorabool River catchment.
It confirmed it was investigating all of the private dams identified in the PALM report and was conducting site inspections.
In a statement, a spokeswoman said: "If possible breaches of the Act are identified, evidence is gathered, and enforcement action is considered in line with established compliance and enforcement processes."
"This may include issuing orders to remove illegal dams and potentially prosecution for breaches of the Water Act," the spokeswoman said.
Bruce Lindsay, a senior lawyer at Environmental Justice Australia, said the government should be embarrassed it took a volunteer community group to expose such a vast problem.
"It is somewhat extraordinary that a community organisation can use public access digital data sets to show… purportedly widespread [non-compliance]," Dr Lindsay said.
Farmers are allowed to construct small dams on their property for stock and domestic purposes, but any dam on a waterway must be licensed by the regulator.
Last year, Southern Rural Water found 64 breaches of the Act, but there were zero prosecutions.
Dr Lindsay said there was a crisis of will and effectiveness in the regulators' design, and emphasised the need for proper law enforcement.
"You can't have all carrot and no stick," he said.
Dr Colloff said Victoria's entire compliance system, whereby individual water authorities manage licensing and compliance, was in need of reform.
"If you want to outsource the control and use of a public good, like water, to private companies, then don't expect a high degree of compliance," Dr Colloff said.
In 2017, after a series of scandals involving water usage in the Murray Darling Basin, NSW established the Environmental Natural Resources Regulator, which prosecutes unlicensed water usage and in the state's Land and Environment Court.
"Victoria needs something like a natural resources access regulator, to ensure that they can look other states in the eye when they sit around the table at ministerial council meetings over the Murray Darling Basin and say, yes, we know we are doing the right thing," he said.
"So I say to the bureaucrats that are responsible for water use and management in Victoria, do your job.
"Don't rely on third parties and private water supply companies to do your job for you."
A spokesman for the Victorian Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action said in a statement: "Water corporations are responsible for the compliance and enforcement of the rules and legislative requirements for the take and use of water and construction of works on a waterway."
"Southern Rural Water is actively engaging with PALM and investigating community concerns about small catchment dam licensing."
Farm dams choking waterway of vital flows
Mr Steele, who was the report's lead author, said movement was critical to the vitality of the Moorabool River, and that the growth in farm dams was slowing it down.
"For the normal farmer who wants to put a small dam in on a paddock, I think that's by right, in a way," he said.
"But … the river is slowly being choked … farm dams, especially after a few dry years, will get the first drink of any water that flows into the catchment."
The community group is also concerned the long-term strategy for the river did not use the most available data — with the growth rate of private dams three times higher than estimated in the Moorabool catchment.
Victoria does not legally protect water
Melbourne University's director of the Centre for Resources, Energy and Environmental Law, Rebecca Nelson, said the PALM community report likely underestimated the risk to the Moorabool's health.
"During a dry year these dams could mean almost nothing runs into the river; no flow in certain parts," Dr Nelson says.
A big part of the problem, she said, was that Victoria's water laws had loopholes that failed to protect waterways from the cumulative effect of dams.
"Water laws in Australia prioritise large-scale water management, neglecting local-level problems and the cumulative effects faced by water systems."
This highlighted a need for legal changes to focus on local impacts, she said.
But Dr Nelson said there were easy ways government authorities could change that, even within the current legal framework.
"The catchment authorities have powers to label something a 'special area plan'; which means it could have a rule stating no more dams in a certain area," she said.
"They haven't done one of those in years. They have a stick and the law gives them a stick and they're not using it.
"It's clear there's a problem — figure it out."
'Out of sight, out of mind'
Peter Stray's farm in She Oaks, north-west of Geelong, lies 600 metres from the Moorabool River.
His family has been farming along the Moorabool River for five generations.
"If somebody wanted water, they dug a dam, and there was no control over what dams were dug across the whole catchment," Mr Stray said.
But according to the community report, that's resulted in up to 24 per cent of inflows, originally intended for the river, being trapped in private farm dams every year.
It's the second-highest proportion of water captured by farm dams in the state.
"If you build another, say 5 megalitre dam, that's another 5 megalitres that doesn't get to the river," Mr Stray said.
"We're talking about an awful lot of water that the river misses out on."
There are eight small-to-medium farm dams on Mr Stray's property that fall within the Moorabool catchment, they are used for stock and domestic purposes and are not on a watercourse and so do not require a licence.
The 55-year-old admitted that all dams are part of the problem including his which, although legal, are doing damage to the river.
He would be willing to consolidate them with better water storage infrastructure, if the department agreed to financial incentives for farmers.
"There really needs to be some sort of a program brought in where farmers can be encouraged, probably financially encouraged, to fill in some of the small dams," he said.
Mr Stray said a lack of flow upstream can also have profound effects on the farmers downstream who do have valid licenses to divert water from the river.
In 2019-20 the state government banned licensed diversions from the Moorabool River for five months because flows had dropped so low.
"The river's the lifeblood really. The health of the river … is very important to us," he says.
Group calls for moratorium on all new dams
Mr Steele, and other members of PALM, fear that without proper intervention, the river will become a trickle of what it once was.
"The Moorabool River is the canary in the coal mine. It's a small but significant river. But really, this is the future of many of the rivers throughout the state if we don't manage to get our regulations properly enforced," Mr Steele says.
The PALM group is calling for a moratorium on all new dams until an investigation into the full impact of all farms dams in the catchment was complete.
"What the government does here really will set up the future for rivers across the state," he said.
"We're asking the government to take that opportunity; step up, be responsible, and really look at the sustainability of rivers like the Moorabool for the future."
