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Homilies by Rev. Andrew Collis unless indicated otherwise.

River Sunday
South Sydney Uniting Church
September 24, 2017

Matthew 28:1-10; Revelation 22:1-5

Over the last four years I have had the privilege of coming to know something about life in the Murray-Darling Basin.

The Basin is an immense region of south-eastern Australia, with thousands of interconnected creeks and rivers, and with a system of aquifers and groundwater beneath the surface.  Most of the waterways of the Basin eventually connect to the River Murray. However, the volume of water that flows into the Murray from its tributaries, and out to the Southern Ocean, is highly variable.

Australia’s three longest rivers (the Murray, the Darling and the Murrumbidgee) run through the Basin. However, in the driest inhabited continent on earth, less than 6 per cent of rainfall makes it into these slow flowing rivers.  The Murray-Darling system carries one of the world’s smallest flow volumes for its size – many creeks and wetlands receive water only in times of above-average rainfall.  By comparison, the average yearly flow of the Murray is less than the daily flow of Brazil’s Amazon river.

More than two million people call the Basin home, including people from many Aboriginal nations, descendants of convicts and European settlers, and recent migrants from all over the world.  Agriculture and associated industries helped to create, and continue to support, the Basin’s towns and diverse communities.

As well as sustaining rivers and floodplains, the water of the Basin is essential for households and communities, in and outside the Basin; it is culturally significant to Aboriginal people; and it is economically important for agricultural, food processing and manufacturing industries, and for tourism.  The Basin is Australia’s most important agricultural region, producing around one-third of our food and billions of dollars for the national economy.

The Basin supports diverse ecosystems.  Sixteen of its more than 30,000 wetlands are Ramsar-listed as internationally-important habitats.  But many plant and animal species are declining and at least 95 species are threatened.  

The great challenge for communities and governments of the Basin is to share the water for the wellbeing of Basin communities while respecting Aboriginal cultures and the environment, and protecting the health of the river system, upon which all depend.1

In early 2013, on the back of the Millennium Drought and at a tumultuous time in the Basin because of government plans to return water to the rivers, I was part of a diverse gathering of people – farmers, pastors, scientists, environmentalists – that met to talk about the challenges facing the Basin.  It was a first of a series of gatherings that aimed to provide a safe and inclusive forum for Uniting Church members and friends from various interest groups of the Murray Darling Basin to progress the church’s vision to be a transforming presence for the common good in the Basin. From these early gatherings other initiatives have followed – including four week-long bus tours in the Basin so far.2  As well as what we might consider to be the more usual tourist experiences, these tours have included meals, meetings and public forums at churches; farm and industry visits; and time with aboriginal elders.  The aim has been to facilitate a holistic experience for participants, where they can learn about life and its challenges in these places (including the challenges of water reform), reflect on who we are in Creation and witness the mission of God in the Murray Darling Basin.

I have been on all four of these tours (one a year), and River Sunday is a good time for me to share something about them with you.  These tours have included the Upper Murray, from its headwaters in the Snowy Mountains to the Murray-Darling Junction at Wentworth; the Darling River – from Bourke to the Murray-Darling Junction; the Murrumbidgee River – from Tumut to Balranald; and the Lower Murray – to the Lower Lakes (lakes Alexandrina and Albert), the Coorong (a narrow lagoon system that extends from the Murray mouth 130 kilometres south-east along the coastline) and the Southern Ocean.

I returned from the Lower Murray trip a couple of weeks ago.  My reflection today is some first thoughts on my encounters in the Lower Murray particularly, prompted by reflecting on the River Sunday readings from Revelation and Matthew.

John’s apocalyptic vision in the book of Revelation is of a river of life-giving water flowing from God.  It is a compelling image, yet also dangerous.  

A vision of clear, crystal water which heals the nations is compelling in the context of the driest inhabited continent on Earth – where brown streams run intermittently and livelihoods are at the mercy of the extremes of drought and also flood.  When our group visited Mildura three years ago, we were told of the ordeals of early white settlement in the area in the late 1800s.  The better agricultural areas in Victoria had been taken by the wealthy, those coming to Mildura struggled amidst adverse climatic conditions and a lack of infrastructure.  How they would have thirsted after an abundance of life-giving water.  Indeed, the vines and fruit trees that we now see in otherwise arid places like Mildura and parts of South Australia are possible only because of the heavy regulation of the river that is present today – dams, weirs, locks, networks of irrigation channels and pipelines.

Yet apocalyptic visions of rivers – abundant and perennial – can be dangerous if transposed over the top of the ecological realities of an “ancient, flat, salty continent set in a dry, highly variable climate zone”3.  

The regulation of the rivers and agricultural development in the Basin has indeed fed and contributed to the wellbeing of not just the nation but the nations, but at great cost.  John Williams (chairperson of the Canberra Region Presbytery, and a member of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists) writes that these goods have been achieved “by exploiting the region’s natural resources beyond their rates of replenishment ... [resulting in] altered river flow regimes, rising salinity and acidity, loss of soil structure, increased loads of nutrients and sediments to rivers, and large-scale degradation of the rangelands ... the invasion of environmental weeds and feral animals, the loss of flora and fauna species, and the breakdown of ecosystems.”4  By the mid 1990s, about 80 per cent of the average annual water flow to the ocean was being extracted from the river system for human uses.  Drought-like flows which would have been experienced 1 in 20 years prior to white agricultural settlement were now happening in 6 out of 10 years.  Activities upstream impact downstream, with the impacts accumulating to the end of the river.

The ecological horrors of the Millennium Drought (2000-2010) showed just how stressed the river system was.  And what happened at the mouth of the Murray still looms large for those who live there.  Our Lower Murray tour group heard from local people about how Lakes Alexandrina and Albert started to dry up, exposing toxic soils.  Children from Raukkan, an aboriginal community on the shores of Lake Albert with connections to the Uniting Church, got sick.  The remaining water was too salty for crops and for animals to drink – and this was even though barrages between the Coorong and the Lower Lakes prevent the intrusion of seawater into the lakes.  Of the more than 30 dairies in the area, only one was able to operate for the duration of the drought, and only a handful survive today.  The mouth of the river closed – it had to be dredged continuously.  Parts of the Coorong became five times or more saltier than the sea – fatal to many plants and animals.

Over the last five years the implementation of the Murray Darling Basin Plan – a historic agreement between the federal and state governments – has aimed to return water to the rivers.  The target is to reduce extractions from the river system by about a quarter.  This a massive adjustment for those who have relied upon these extractions.  The challenge to the social fabric of communities shouldn’t be underestimated.  Communities need help and support to adjust, and the level of trust needed is profound.  The target is being achieved by buying back water from irrigators (buy-back has now ceased), and increasingly, by the government paying for improvements to irrigation infrastructure – so that water can be used more efficiently.  Over $5 billion of federal money has been spent on water recovery so far, and the Australian Government says it is more than halfway toward achieving the water target.  And while we see environmental watering events improving some wetlands in some parts of the Basin, others such as John Williams say – for reasons that are too complex for me to go into here but are to do with hydrological issues and the problems of relying on technological fixes – that on the whole diversions of water from the Basin have not decreased.  A “huge failure in public policy” is the expression John uses.5

Water is back again in lakes Alexandrina and Albert.  But all is not well.  The recovery of the system has been poor.

Uncle Darrell Sumner, a Ngarrindjeri elder, generously spent a morning with us, showing us the Coorong.  The Ngarrindjeri are the people of the lower Murray, the Coorong, Lower Lakes and surrounds.

Uncle Darrell said of the Coorong, “You might think it looks lovely, but all I see is misery”.  He spoke of the death of pelicans in their thousands.  He showed us rock fish traps not used for decades.  He pointed out a Mallee Fowl mound, whose fowl have disappeared.  And he shared stories from his childhood of waters and land abundant with life.  Today the Coorong supports nothing like the biodiversity that it once did.  “The river is like the blood in our bodies.  If there is a blockage, country gets sick.”  It is more than a simile.  Uncle Darrell is only one of very few Ngarrinderi over 70 – with most of the others having passed before their time.  “But we will keep on fighting for country,” he said.  Later this year, 20 years after they began the native title claim process, Ngarrindjeri native title will be officially recognised.

After a morning at the Coorong we visited the community of Raukkan.  There we heard from Uncle Clyde and Auntie Rose Rigney about the history of the place and its people.  With dignity and pride they told us stories of colonisation and resistance, and of the establishment and development of the mission.  They spoke with love and respect for their ancestors.  They expressed their deep faith and their sense of responsibility to speak to groups like ours that we all may know our shared history and move forward together.   

The next day we travelled the other way around the lakes and made a boat trip to the Murray Mouth.  It was being dredged when we were there, its flow so underwhelming, after all that I had seen, all the miles covered in the four Basin tours, that I was overwhelmed.  

Sean Weetra, who grew up at Raukkan and who speaks and teaches Ngarrindjeri, was with us these few days.  Sean is an intern with the South Australian Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress, and is part of a new Congress church in the south of Adelaide.  Sean, Jordan Sumner (CEO at Raukkan), Jordan’s sister Melissa and brother Justin and their mother Aunty Shelley, and Aunty Kathy, all from the Lower Murray and Lower Lakes, welcomed and shared with us so generously.  The Uniting Church is privileged to be in covenant with Congress, and we are privileged to have hosted a group from the South Australian Congress here at South Sydney in January.  

My encounters with the Murray-Darling Basin began because I was invited by the Moderator of the Uniting Church in NSW/ACT as an environmentalist living in Sydney (where the resources of the church are very concentrated) to hear from people from our churches inside the Basin.  These encounters continued throughout the time that I was employed in an environmental role with the Synod (state body of the Uniting Church).  I am no longer in that role but I have continued to be a part of Uniting Church conversation about the Murray-Darling with a conviction that we are all connected together, all part of the one church.

To return to Revelation, this vision of a restored, transformed Eden, where there is no curse, where the faithful are free to serve in the presence of their God, was an encouragement to early Christians living under occupation and oppression.  I have learned over these last four or so years, in this epic Murray-Darling adventure that has engaged all my ways of learning and experiencing, that I need to attend to voices from the river that have been supressed or silenced – however uncomfortable that is.  To listen, in what ways that I can, for the disappearing and disappeared creatures of the Murray-Darling.  To seek out those people who know the river most intimately – in various ways, locally and system-wide.  To give special attention to those whose voices are largely absent in the public debate.  And to treat with suspicion the words of actions of those who, from a position of power, insist only on positivity, resist critique and insist that all is well with the implementation of the Basin Plan – or worse, that water does not need to be returned to the river in the first place.  I would ask people who might claim – however limited – that some sort of Eden is already here: which Eden and from whose perspective?  For the nurture of which nations, communities and ecosystems?  What sort of abundant life?  An abundance of technological complexity, but what about abundant biodiversity, and what about an abundance of caring for country?  

In Matthew’s resurrection account, it was the women present at the tomb who first had news of the resurrection and to whom Jesus first appeared.  This is no small thing in a patriarchal context.  The women are elevated in the story and it is from their testimony that the disciples go to Galilee.  For people like me who lead a life of relative privilege it is important to listen for experiences of resurrection from those who are most sidelined – and in the absence of such experiences, to lament.

On our final morning at the Lower Murray on the shores of Lake Albert, a fellow Sydney-sider, Margaret, was asked to share some thoughts with our group.  She began to speak, choked up and through tears said that she was so sorry for what we have done to the river, its ecosystems and to the Aboriginal people, and she didn’t know if we could fix it.

For people like me who lead a life of relative privilege it is important to listen for experiences of resurrection from those who are most sidelined – and in the absence of such experiences, to lament.  Otherwise, instead of being a vision of abundance that is the kin-dom of God, claims to Eden become another oppression.  

The Ngarrindjeri Nation Sea Country Plan says:

“Kungun Ngarrindjeri Yunnan (Listen to what Ngarrindjeri people have to say).

“Our Lands, Our Waters, Our People, All Living Things are connected. We implore people to respect our Ruwe (Country) as it was created in the Kaldowinyeri (the Creation). We long for sparkling, clean waters, healthy land and people and all living things. We long for the Yarluwar-Ruwe (Sea Country) of our ancestors. Our vision is all people Caring, Sharing, Knowing and Respecting the lands, the waters and all living things.”6

Dr Miriam Pepper

1. The introductory paragraphs to this talk are adapted from https://www.mdba.gov.au/discover-basin and Murray-Darling Basin Map, MDBA publication number 07/17, https://www.mdba.gov.au/publications/products/murray-darling-basin-map-poster-2013.

2. See http://unitingearthweb.org.au/murray-darling.html for further information on the Uniting Church’s Murray-Darling Basin Group.

3. John Williams (2017) Water reform in the Murray–Darling Basin: a challenge in complexity in balancing social, economic and environmental perspectives: Journal & Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, vol. 150, part 1, 2017, p. 68.

4. ibid., p. 68.

5. ibid., p. 87.

6. Ngarrindjeri Nation Sea Country Plan, 2007, available http://www.ngarrindjeri.org.au/publications.

 

Homily by Dr Miriam Pepper