Mandy Nolan’s Soapbox: A Voice for the River

When I was a kid we used to swim in the river. Local waterways were full of fish and yabbies. We’d grab a giant inner tube from a tractor tyre and eight of us would fight to stay on the slippery surface. It was the closest thing we had to technology.

Living inland, rivers and creeks were our swimming holes. Rivers could be placid or raging or still or fierce. They were places of serenity. Places of contemplation. Places we met for picnics. Places teenagers went to have sex. Or to avoid it.

I never thought about these rivers as wild places because they were part of a broader ecosystem where we lived and they weren’t separate from the bush. Trees ran down to the riverbank, we’d walk a well-worn path to find a grassy bank to lay our towels. These were places where snakes and birds and lizards and koalas lived. Where frogs spawned, where eggs hatched, where life continued in its mundane yet miraculous life-death cycle.

There is something potent about being on the river. It’s humbling to be held on its surface. To softly enter a quieter world. To watch lizards jump from river banks for a morning swim. To observe myself in distorted reflections on the ripples.

Our rivers used to run crystal clear. No more. Our coastal river, the Richmond River is one of the sickest in NSW. Possibly the country. Possibly the world. Yesterday I spent time kayaking on the Richmond with Steve Posselt and Graeme Gibson – two blokes who know this river like an old friend. Albeit, an old sick friend. Last year they headed up the river in a tinnie to report back on how their old friend was going. Not so good. Steve told me of all the rivers he’d been on, including the Thames … the Richmond was the sickest.

The Richmond River begins at the NSW-Queensland border and flows south-east for around 170 kilometres to the ocean at Ballina. And she is dying. This isn’t just what Steve and Graeme say, it comes from the mouths of the fishermen we came across pulling mullet from their nets. They talk about blackwater – where rotting vegetation takes oxygen from the water. In some parts of the river, the oxygenation is less than 1%. They talk about soil run off creating acid sulphate. Fish kills. Skin coming off the hands of a fisherman one day when he forgot his gloves. Who even knows the full extent of what the floods did to the Richmond? These are stories of river users. People who see this river every day. Who know.

They tell me what I am looking at. I see the bruises of our colonised river. The muddy riverbanks that should be flourishing riparian zones. Instead they are heavily populated with vines and the red flowering coral tree, an invasive species that chokes the place where native vegetation should be. The waters look thick and black in parts. Cows graze in unfenced paddocks. Cane is cropped just metres from the water’s edge.

‘It’s about the sponge’ Graeme and Steve both tell me. They tell me that understanding river health is about understanding the impact of the broader systems. The role the wetland, now repurposed for agriculture via some 200 floodgates . Ah, the separation of connected systems for human endeavours never goes well.

The solutions? Repairing and replanting riparian zones. Fencing farmland. And the need to start this important work at the top of the catchment, and work down. A strategy towards river health.

Can our ‘wounded’ river be healed? Yes. But it takes political will. And it takes money. It takes the involvement of the business community. Of farmers. Of scientists. Of river users. And two blokes in a tinnie.

It takes a community to stand for their river. To be a loud voice for a river who can barely breathe. Before it’s too late.

The Echo’s coverage of political issues will remain as comprehensive and fair as it has ever been, outside this opinion column which, as always, contains Mandy’s personal opinions only.