Speaking with the river: Confluence and interdisciplinarity in rivers and river systems

Knowing and unknowing: Swampscapes to the sea

As one leaves Lismore and travels south, the Wilsons River opens into floodplains that, having joined with the longer Richmond River, stretch to the Pacific Ocean at Ballina. The first Europeans to the North Coast quickly found that behind the dense forested riparian zone, stretched a vast and fecund system of wetlands. The first colonial surveyor to the area, Clement Hodgkinson, described the typical scene of each river north of Sydney:

These borders of alluvial brushland on the banks of the river, are generally half a mile, or a mile wide, and are then backed by extensive swamps of many thousand acres in extent, whose verdant sea, of high waving reeds and sedge, stretches away to the base of the distant forest ranges. (Hodgkinson, 1845: 9)

From the moment of colonial settlement, these unpredictable swampscapes were imagined and then engineered into spaces of containment. In many ways what the current state of Australia's rivers represents is a crisis of understanding, 200 years of failure to appreciate swamps and river systems in their fullness and richness as multi-dimensional eco-cultural phenomena, a simplification of riverine complexity akin to the separation of humans and nonhumans that Bruno Latour describes as ‘purification’ and attributes to modernity (1993: 10). Building on Latour's insights, Jessica Weir notes that the ‘modern’ conception of nature as resource, imposed upon Australia's environmental forms during the settler-colonial period, renders a given river as an ‘externally constituted water resource that is moved and allocated by human ingenuity through engineering works’ (Weir, 2009: 9). In contrast to this she outlines Indigenous perspectives that ‘describe how respecting and understanding the life and agency of the river country is important for the continuation of all life’ (2009: 13). She quotes Indigenous academic Steve Kinnane who argues that a concept of Country does include land as a resource for human use but ‘in a way that is restricted by overarching spiritual and cultural imperatives’, and goes on to argue that ‘the concept of country does not allow for a separation of people, land and waters’ (Kinnane, in Weir, 2009: 13).

Flowing out of Widjabul Wyabul country of the Bundjalung Nation, in its lower reaches the Richmond moves into the country of the Nyangbul people. An early colonial observer of the region declared that the Clarence and Richmond rivers had ‘possibly more swamps, creeks, and marches [sic] than all the other rivers of the east coast of Australia put together’ (Queenslander, 21 October 1876, 14). He regarded swamps with dread, as places oozing with potential disease. Neither strictly land nor water, but both land and water, the lack of permanence and definition has been problematic within western perceptions of wetlands. The idea of instability, where in places ‘there is no bottom’, resonates with a long history of seeing swamps as ‘unfaithful ground’ and ‘useless’ (Di Palma, 2014). They were feared as contaminated and contaminating places, their unknowability was precisely their danger.

Indigenous conceptions of wetlands are very different. The distinctions between land and water are not absolute but instead viewed as entwined cultural phenomena whose characteristics are determined both by the sacred past and current lives. The work of Yaegl artist Frances Belle Parker is a rich example of this understanding. Parker's work across painting, installation, public art and commercial design has featured in major forums including winning the Blake Prize in 2000. She grew up in Maclean NSW on Biirinba, the Clarence River, and a great deal of her work reflects on the significance of the river and the islands within it, both for her and her family and for all the Indigenous groups whose country the Clarence flows through – the Bundjalung, Yaegl and Gumbaynggirr peoples. As in the painting below, Biirrinba Ngarrangiya, her work frequently mixes perspectives on country – a classical view of the land from the ground, and an aerial perspective that invokes mapping processes as well as Indigenous knowledge of landforms as if seen from the air.

One of the recurring motifs in Parker's work is the shape of Ulgundahi Island near Maclean, an island in the river where her Mother's family lived. Now Heritage-listed and owned by the Yaegl Local Aboriginal Land Council, in 1904 the island was gazetted as an Aboriginal Reserve and Mission and many Yaegl families were forcibly relocated there. The name of the island, Ulgundahi, translates as ‘shape of an ear’, a clear signal of the way Yaegl relations with country incorporates aerial perspectives and knowledges; appropriately, the title of the work below translates as ‘Clarence River Deep Listening’. Parker uses Ulgundahi as an adaptable figure for reflecting on both Indigenous dispossession as well as the strength of family and connection to place; the strength of her Nan who daily rowed the waters of the Clarence to take kids to school and men to the cane fields, and to go to work as a domestic in the houses of the very landowners responsible for her family's dispossession. The island, though, is also a form within the river, in dialogue with the river, sometimes an ear, sometimes a kidney, sometimes an ovary, always changing shape as the forces of erosion and deposition massage its borders (Museums & Galleries NSW, 2014). Most importantly, the interaction between Birrinba and Ulgundahi signal Parker's sense of reciprocity with the river and Indigenous cultural connection to environmental forms: ‘I paint what I am most familiar with, my river, my Biirrinba. I see the river as a life-giving vein that pumps through our body enabling us to be. When the river is healthy and flowing, so are its people’ (Parker, 2019) (Figures 3 and 4).

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Figure 3.

Frances Belle Parker Biirrinba Ngarrangiya (clarence river deep listening) (2019). Acrylic on linen, 100 × 120 cm.

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Figure 4.

Frances Belle Parker Mapping Biirinba (2010), part of the ‘Badu Gili’ night-time projection programme at the Sydney Opera House, curated by Rhoda Roberts.

The largest of the Richmond River wetlands, and one of the largest north of Sydney, was the Tuckean Swamp. As a vast water place within this landscape, often teeming with life, the Tuckean was a significant place to each of the clan groups of the region. Ridgelines were important travelling routes, from which people went down into water places to access food, medicine and maintain cultural places. They camped above the swamps, away from the insects and terror of snakes. The Moonem ridge and plateau country ringing the Tuckean from southeast to the northwest had many camp sites, middens and places of significance. Nyangbul historian Marcus Ferguson provides this as evidence of the ‘high cultural sensitivity’ of the whole Tuckean Swamp area: ‘It's a dead set indicator of what went on in that place’ (Ferguson, in Kijas, 2019).

The Tuckean's history since the arrival of Europeans is a global story – of the settler-colonial drive to bring order and demarcation to a place of exuberant chaos and fluctuation; of the need to vanquish the original owners; of colonial land policy that promised an independent livelihood to families in a place deeply unsuited to farming; of an early large-scale drainage system installed through ignorance of the environmental consequences and costs; and of the 1960s optimism and enthusiasm for heroic engineering feats that might at last bring predictability, knowability and control over an intransigent environment. Its history is also set firmly within its locale of the New South Wales North Coast; its geography and seasons, its local politics, the general lack of interest until more recent times in regional and semi-tropical histories and a lag in government funding. Here the stories of individuals, families and communities reside between local, national and global contexts.

As we grapple with unknowing, both in the sense of living with and as a part of the natural world, and living within the Anthropocene where an unceasing demand for energy and growth has forever changed the human future, one of the largest issues faced is that of grief for what is lost. We have a term for this now, solastalgia, an emotional distress caused by environmental change. Addressing and learning from this grief, involving competing and contested groupings and individual stakeholders, is one of the many challenges in speaking with the river. Indeed, it calls for a way of seeking legal redress for the wrong-headedness of human civilisation's impacts on the more-than-human world. In essence, it asks that natural phenomena such as rivers and the systems they incorporate, be given legal personhood, in order that in some way they can ‘speak’ in a context that can have real positive effect upon the world.

Lawscapes and landscapes: The legal personhood of the river

Further building upon Latour's (1993) insights, we note that if the very notion of the river is a modern construct that separates the human from the non-human world, then one of the most crucial questions to ask is how this artefact of separation has been articulated within the political and legal structures that shape human activities and lives. After all, the non-human world is constantly reconstituted within a comprehensive and all-encompassing legal cosmology, for which any observable thing, any object, any landscape, is always, inherently, and inevitably a ‘lawscape’, as noted by Nicole Graham (2011). For Graham, the relationship ‘between the abstractness of property law and the physical materiality of place’ (Graham, 2011: xiii) highlights the agentic power of law, particularly of property law regimes, and its capacity to define the boundaries of the observable by virtue of its normative authority in determining individual and collective behaviour. The legal definition of the natural world not only perpetuates, and further solidifies, a separation between the human and the non-human, but also determines the fate of the non-human by leveraging the collective efforts of the human (Harari, 2011).

The ‘lawscape’ that the common law imagines for the river is an undeveloped, theoretically nascent, largely peripheral one. The river as an abstract legal entity subsists in a twilight zone, caught between the law's familiarity with land – which is viewed as fixed, stable and tangible – and the ethereal, running nature of water – which slips through human fingers and proves difficult to capture. Equally, the amorphous quality of wetlands – like the Tuckean Swamp – which are neither land nor water demand legal resolution, such that their subsequent draining and ‘improvement’ places the law on firmer, familiar ground. In these murky, porous contexts, the legal river lies at the cusp of jurisdiction, with an almost obsessive concern about locating boundaries, whether through fictions such as the medium filum rule for non-tidal rivers, or the algorithmic alchemy of fixing the mean high-water mark for tidal rivers. To the extent that the law accommodates the non-human world in riverine demarcation, it is to give a nod (or not) to the forces of erosion, accretion and avulsion through doctrinal imprimatur.

As we have noted, to the extent that the river is perceived as an infinite natural resource, the law has been ready and willing to exploit it, with rules around riparian rights, the prior appropriation doctrine, or the ultimate abstraction, the splitting of water from place through the creation of separable, alienable water rights – so disastrous in Australian conditions and so controversial in the Murray-Darling Basin – that facilitate its boundless economic use. Boundaries and exploitation, the twin bases of common law's pre-occupation with the river. As Carol Rose observes, the law has proven stunted in its conceptualisation of the river, hemmed in by the centrality of land to property thinking:

But why is land – immovable, enduring land the symbol for property? Why not say, water? If water were our chief symbol for property, we might think of property rights – and other rights – in a quite different way. We might think of rights as literally and figuratively more fluid and less fenced-in … as entailing less of the Blackstonian power of exclusion, and more of the qualities of flexibility, reasonableness and moderation, attentiveness to others and co-operative solutions to common problems (1996: 351).

Rose's observation and urge to flip the legal focus from fixity to fluidity were prescient: in 2017, a veritable flood of legislative and judicial initiatives around the world ‘appeared to signal a tipping point in the global acceptance of a new evolving legal status for nature’ (Clark et al., 2019: 787). In Aotearoa New Zealand the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui Claims Settlement) Act 2017 (N.Z.) formally granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River (O’Donnell and Macpherson, 2019), while the High Court of Uttarakhand in India equally declared the Ganges and Yamuna rivers and their tributaries (as well as their glaciers, lakes, air, meadows, dales, jungles, forests, wetlands, grasslands, springs and waterfalls) legal persons (O’Donnell, 2018). In the same year, the Constitutional Court of Colombia argued that Constitutionally-enshrined biocultural rights were better served by the recognition of the Atrato river as a legal entity, and thus recognised the river as a subject of rights to be represented by a ‘commission of guardians of the Atrato river’, composed of both a representative of the Colombian government and a representative nominated by the local Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities. And while litigation in the name of the Colorado River Ecosystem initiated by the NGO Deep Green Resistance in the U.S. District Court in Denver, Colorado, proved unsuccessful, the Australian State of Victoria passed the Yarra River Protection (Wilip-gin Birrarung murron) Act 2017 (Vic), declaring the Yarra River (or Birrarung in the Woi-wurrung language) ‘one living and integrated natural entity’ (Clark et al., 2019). Although 2017 appears to be such a momentous year for this legal confluence of similar initiatives around the world, the momentum continues to the present day, with, for example, a growing number of rivers being cast as legal subjects of rights in Colombia, and the Supreme Court of Bangladesh recognising, in 2019, first the Turag river and then all Bangladeshi rivers, as both living entities and legal persons (Islam and O'Donnell, 2020).

While rivers seem to have captured the legal imagination of judges, legislators and activists alike across the planet, the recent explosion of claims and declarations about rivers as living and legal entities is, in fact, neither limited to rivers, nor is it this recent. Almost 50 years ago, Professor Christopher Stone famously concluded a property law lecture at the University of Southern California by asking whether trees ‘should have standing’, only to be met with silence by most theoreticians and practitioners alike (Stone, 1972). That notwithstanding, Stone's argument challenged a host of normative assumptions about the non-human world, and was followed, over two decades later, by eco-theologian and self-described ‘earth scholar’ Thomas Berry first, and by South-African activist and environmental lawyer Cormac Cullinan immediately after, who articulated a novel ‘Earth Jurisprudence’, a ‘philosophy of law and human governance … based on the idea that humans are only one part of a wider community of beings and that the welfare of each member of that community is dependent on the welfare of the Earth as a whole’. From this perspective, Cullinan concluded, ‘human societies will only be viable and flourish if they regulate themselves as part of this wider Earth community and do so in a way that is consistent with the fundamental laws or principles that govern how the Universe functions’ (Cullinan, 2011: 13).

The legal world, this time, answered the invitation to include Nature, both as a whole and as its individual components, within the realm of legal subjects. Following the work of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund in the United States, which included local ecosystems as legal subjects within municipal ordinances as early as 2006, the Ecuadorian Constitution of 2008 was the first legal document to officially and unequivocally grant Nature intrinsic rights. The Ecuadorian example was promptly followed by the Plurinational State of Bolivia – first in its 2009 Constitution, and then with two dedicated pieces of legislation in 2010 and 2011 – and then, not long thereafter, by a host of initiatives that seem to have been growing exponentially ever since. David Boyd, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, has described the global emergence of rights of nature legislation and judicial decisions ‘a legal revolution that could save the world’ (Boyd, 2017).

While a nuanced analysis of the emergence of an ‘ecological jurisprudence’ (Pelizzon, 2014) is beyond the scope of this paper, it is important to note that rivers are particularly emblematic of the ontological shift that underpins the emergence of rights of nature initiatives around the world. After all, as Justice Douglas articulated in 1972, ‘[t]he river … is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes …. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it. Those people who have a meaningful relation to that body of water … must be able to speak for the values which the river represents, and which are threatened with destruction’ (Douglas, in case: Sierra Club vs Morton, 1972). In the present day, where the scale of destruction appears to have grown well beyond the capacity of rivers to sustain themselves, the sentiment remains the same. Although ‘we have desecrated [our rivers] in every conceivable way’, they remain ‘the arteries of the earth, and lifelines for humanity and millions of other animals and plants. It's no wonder they have been venerated, considered as ancestors or mothers, and held up as sacred symbols’ (Margil, 2017).

It is this almost tactile awareness of interconnectedness that aligns an emerging ecological jurisprudence with First Law, as a recent proposal of recognising a river not only as a living and, or, legal entity, but as a veritable ‘ancestral’ person shows (Martuwarra RiverOfLife et al., 2020). Once legally reconceived as more than objects, thus, rivers become participants in an extended and ongoing legal and inter-normative dialogue with the more-than-human world, upending the artificial boundaries between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ that have, over the past few centuries, contributed to the atomistic fragmentation experienced by Western societies (Descola, 2013).

Creative acts: Speaking with the river requires river listening

In their exploration of the Indo-European roots of the name of the Danube River, artists and researchers Maya and Reuben Fowkes identify how the modern conception and exploitation of the river obscures an older and more holistic view, noting that the ancient name of the river ‘bore the meaning of primeval cosmic river’ (Fowkes and Fowkes, 2016: 1). Prior to the modern forces that have rendered the river as ‘an accessory of imperialist aggrandisement, a component of the nationalist imaginary and a subject of modernist rationality’ (2016: 2), the Danube was venerated both for its local life-giving power and for its broader connection to ‘planetary processes that reach beyond human history and concerns’ (2016: 1). This ancient European conception and understanding of rivers is clearly cognate with both Australian Indigenous conceptions of rivers and with the recent determinations of legal personhood for rivers, a confluence of culture and spirituality bridging thousands of years of human association with rivers and river systems.

To acknowledge rivers as legal agents is to ascribe them a voice, to acknowledge that a dialogue or multi-lateral conversation is under way within a specific legal context – but it is also to seek to speak for them, to interpret their states and signs through whatever practices of sampling, observation, measuring, record-keeping, legal argument, story-telling, ancestral dreaming and imagining we can formulate. Teasing out the unknowability of river voices is a necessarily interdisciplinary process and necessarily requires a complex and reflexive act of translation – and the fact that this act of translation is always partial, provisional and temporary and involves a leap into a kind of cross-phenomenal ventriloquism, is no argument for not doing it. Speaking with the river is a conversation that is both ongoing and that starts again in every halting moment, it is (im)possible in Jacques Derrida's sense – it cannot be done and we must do it (Derrida, 2005).

It is also a conversation that occurs with a great deal of cross-talk. The Fowkes’ inclusion of ‘the nationalist imaginary’ in the list of forces that have brought the Danube to its current state is apposite. Jessica Weir likewise notes how the exploitation of the Murray-Darling waters has linked the region's productivity to national imaginaries, the Murray-Darling basin as the ‘food basket’ of Australia (Weir, 2009: 31). Similar settler-colonial narratives have driven the conversion of the Tuckean from ‘useless’ swampland to productive farmland (Kijas, 2019: 27). As we noted earlier, the audibility and spatio-temporal reproducibility of river voices is difficult. The voices that link economic rationalist arguments about rivers as resources, to cultural and ideological narratives that feed concepts of national identity, are very loud and immediate and frequently drown out ways of speaking that are quieter and slower, that do not operate according to the exigencies of election cycles and seasonal cropping.

National imaginaries, however, are underpinned by systems of representation and material memory (Cooke and Reichelt-Brushett, 2015: 11). Imaginaries are rooted in images – by which we mean images not as purely visual phenomena but as figures and configurations of meaning wrought through sensual and cognitive experience – and concomitantly can be countered by image and sound strategies that setup and promulgate new ways of sensing, feeling and knowing (Cooke, 2017). The Fowkes’ interdisciplinary ‘River School’ for example, is premised on this observation. A multi-year curatorial programme with artists and environmental scientists from the Central European University, the project draws attention to the forces modernity has brought to bear on the river, using multiple strategies such as public performance, media art and social media interventions to ‘evade the tendency to objectify and instrumentalise the river's flows’ (Fowkes and Fowkes, 2016: 2).

New imaginaries for rivers are required. In Australia, one of the most prominent and promising initiatives in this vein lies at the confluence of the scientific fields of bioacoustics and ecoacoustics, and the musical field of acoustic ecology. Bioacoustics is a field of study concerned with the use of sound by animals, including humans. It investigates sonic communication within and across species for a range of purposes, and investigates the effect of the transmissive medium on sonic communication (Laiolo, 2010: 1635). Ecoacoustics is a related field looking at the acoustic qualities and sonic behaviours of animals in different environments – terrestrial, freshwater and marine – to determine habitat health and biodiversity (Farina, 2018). As Bernard Krause, one of the field's founding researchers explains, ‘It is based on the premise that every location on Earth has a unique acoustical bio-spectrum (assuming the presence of biological life) that provides information as to the dynamics of the ecosystem in that place’ (Krause, 1987: 15). As the spectrogram below demonstrates, ecoacoustics investigates the interrelationships between sonic emitters in a soundscape, identifying the spectral signatures of four specific sound sources that intermingle and can, in turn, drive animal behaviour:

- Biophonic sound, produced by organisms.

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Figure 5.

Spectrogram from a hydrophone recording at the downstream entrance to the Tuckean Swamp near the Baggotville Barrage, northern NSW. Distinct bands of communication between species can be discerned, including a distinctly quiet zone centred around 2165 kHz. The bright areas between 10.5 and 13.5 seconds are the grunts and drumming of fish. (Recorded by Rob Garbutt, 23 January 2020 using Aquarian Audio H2a hydrophones; spectrogram created from Raven Lite.).

Finally, the field of acoustic ecology reflects these same impulses to investigate the sonic qualities of our environments and the influence of anthropophony on animal behaviour, but it does so within the discipline of musical composition and sound art. It uses environmental recordings and electroacoustic composition to draw attention to the sonic environment and our impact upon it. In his founding 1977 text on the subject, The Tuning of the World, Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer outlined a theory of the soundscape in which the world could be understood as a ‘macrocosmic musical composition’ (Shafer, 1994: 5), a composition that we all have the capacity to contribute to, learn from, and change.

The work of sound artist Leah Barclay draws these fields together, using hydrophone recordings of riverine environments, and a community engagement strategy involving citizen science workshops and activities, to enhance public knowledge of the biological and acoustic life of rivers around the world. Funded as part of the Synapse art/science initiative by the Australian Network for Art and Technology, ‘River Listening’ was an interdisciplinary project bringing community members together with freshwater ecologists from the Australian Rivers Institute at Griffith University to explore the soundscapes of the Brisbane, Mary, Noosa and Logan rivers in Queensland (Barclay, 2017: 148–149). In this and other projects, Barclay orchestrates activities such as citizen science workshops, sound walks, and field-recording sessions to engage community members in monitoring river soundscapes over time, broadening awareness and understanding of the biodiversity of riverine environments and how they are affected by anthropogenic activity. At the same time, the recordings and their analysis by citizen scientists feed both scientific activities examining river health, and musical and sound compositions that circulate within gallery and festival contexts. Together, these multiple activities and outcomes represent Barclay's ‘Sonic Ecologies’ framework, which employs ‘(1) site-specific subject matter, (2) multi-platform dissemination, (3) community education and engagement tools, (4) interdisciplinary partnerships and collaborations, and (5) long-term strategic vision’, to foster both lasting and meaningful awareness of environmental change, and changes in behaviour that may ameliorate our effects on riverine and other environments (Barclay, 2013: 30).

Media artist Grayson Cooke and environmental scientist Amanda Reichelt-Brushett are working on a visual project that employs a similar interdisciplinary framework. For over 16 months, spanning from August 2012 to December 2013, Reichelt-Brushett worked with environmental managers from Rous County Council (who manage the region's water supply, flood mitigation and weed biosecurity) to monitor a range of water quality indicators on a weekly basis across five sites on the Richmond River. As noted above, the Richmond is a degraded river system, with large volumes of suspended sediment flushed downstream during periods of high rainfall. Measurements of turbidity, dissolved oxygen, pH, electrical conductivity and temperature were combined with suspended sediment samples to capture snapshots of inter-related phenomena acting in the river over time. High rainfall events result in blooms of dark brown clay sediment through the system, and a concomitant reduction in dissolved oxygen, one of the factors that cause fish kills in our waterways.

The image below uses information visualisation to figure out this water quality data in a dynamic fashion. Using photographs of the weekly filtered water samples, parameters of scale and opacity are used to translate the data into visual form. The mandala-like arrangement is an aesthetic choice yet reflects the round filter papers used for determining the total suspended sediment load in water quality assessment. The variances in scale of the circles in the mandala, however, reflect real and dramatic change. In the image we see the whole river system pulse with brown clay and soils during high rainfall events, and we can divine the ripple effects of this sediment load through looking at measures of acidity and dissolved oxygen (Figure 6).

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Figure 6.

Grayson Cooke and Amanda Reichelt-Brushett In Suspension (detail) (2021).

The projects of Barclay and Cooke and Reichelt-Brushett speak with the river using different figures but in similar ways. They divine insight into the state of Australia's waterways through chemical and biological, visual and acoustic indicators, and they translate these insights into unique expressions that resonate in scientific, artistic and community contexts. To some extent the river becomes ‘knowable’ through these processes, as it must if we are to look honestly and with clear sight at the state of the country, learn from past mistakes, and provide a solid evidence base for decisions that prioritise river health. But at the same time each of these expressions is partial, local, a series of snapshots in space and time; rivers are poly-vocal, and it is vital that decision-making regarding rivers is mindful of the complexity that transpires when all their voices are acknowledged.