Murray River Country: An Ecological Dialogue with Traditional Owners

A new book by Jessica K. Weir, entitled Murray River Country, will be launched tomorrow. In this book, which is based on her extensive research with the Traditional Owners of Australia's Murray River, Weir moves 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. By engaging with the Murray–Darling Basin, Australia’s agricultural heartland, Murray River Country goes to the core of our national understandings of who we are and how we can live in this country.

Weir brings new insights to these issues by focusing our attention on what Indigenous people from along the Murray are experiencing, saying, and doing. These experiences bring a fresh narrative to contemporary water debates about 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.

Find out more about Murray River Country here.

Book Launch

Murray River Country will be launched tomorrow, Wednesday 30th September at 1:00pm, in the Manning Clark Centre Foyer of the Australian National University in Canberra. More details are available here.