Murray River Country: An Ecological Dialogue with Traditional Owners

Description

Murray River Country discusses the water crisis from a unique perspective - the intimate stories of love and loss from the perspectives of Aboriginal people who know the inland rivers as their traditional country. These experiences bring a fresh narrative to contemporary water debates about living in the Murray-Darling Basin, and how we should look to more sustainable ways to live in Australia, as our approach to water is changing in the face of water scarcity, drought, climate change, and water mismanagement. This book brings new insights to these issues by focusing our attention on what Indigenous people from along the Murray are experiencing, saying, and doing. Weir wants to move readers beyond questions of how much water will be 'returned' to the rivers, to understand that our economy, and our lives, are dependent on river health. She uses different knowledge traditions to reveal unacknowledged assumptions that trap our thinking and disable us from acting.

Jessica K. Weir is a research fellow at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. She is a human geographer whose research focuses on ecological and social issues in Australia.

"Place, country, and care are at the heart of this wise book, which is so astutely responsive to the diverse, active Aboriginal individuals and nations of the Murray-Darling Basin . . . Weir's book gives me hope that these blasted places and the lives of so many species, human and not, might again be whole, in new ways and old." --Donna Haraway, professor, University of California-Santa Cruz "This is a really positive book with some original and creative suggestions for ways forward." --Dr. Libby Robin, Australian National University and the National Museum of Australia "Weir demonstrates that there is only one narrative and it encompasses both the claims of the water managers and their critics; both the settler and Indigenous narratives." --Richie Howitt, professor, Macquarie University "Weir's originality is innovative and inspirational. She captures the MRC Indigenous people's holistic approach in reading the ecological statements of managing water and the benefits of this for everyone and the MRC's ecology." --Dr. Payi-Linda Ford, senior lecturer, Charles Darwin University