READ PhD seminar: Constructing a sacrifice zone: the systematic dewatering of the Baaka-Darling River & Menindee Lakes and its consequences for river communities

This seminar will examine the dewatering of the Baaka-Darling River, Australia’s third-longest river, through a critical analysis of the political, cultural, economic, and discursive systems that have normalised ecosystem decline within the region. Dewatering is defined as an ongoing process of severing water from its ecological and cultural networks and restructuring it as a tool of agricultural development. Focusing on the Murray-Darling Basin, one of the most contested and complex river systems globally, the study traces how colonial hydrology and resource logics have shaped policy frameworks that render regions like the Baaka-Darling River, invisible to regulatory institutions.

Repeated ecological disasters, including water quality crises and mass fish kills since the 1990s, mark an ongoing collapse of ecocultural networks in the region, and are normalised by state institutions as ‘natural’ events. For the Barkindji, the First Peoples of this region, this collapse constitutes cultural genocide, as the river is a living ancestor and inseparable from identity, law, and life.

Despite major water reforms and billions of dollars in public investment to address water inequalities, water governance in the Basin remains captured by irrigator networks and institutional logics that privilege extractive development, even as progressive water reforms claim to advance equity and environmental sustainability. Using a political ecology lens, the seminar reveals how state and corporate actors throughout the history of Australian water policy development have co-constructed the Baaka-Darling as a ‘sacrifice zone,’ where water is systematically transferred from ‘low value’ areas to ‘high value’ areas, where that value is defined by networks of power which privilege particular economies. These processes have led to the formation of the Baaka-Darling Water Justice Movement, a coalition of forces working to challenge the marginalisation of the Baaka-Darling River and Menindee Lakes within the wider Basin and restore ecocultural networks. By mapping the development of the Baaka-Darling Water Justice Movement from 1990-2019 this research delves into the profound knowledge and value differences between institutional and local actors and looks to alternative framings of the crisis by local actors as a source of critique, knowledge and transformative action.

Speaker: 

Dan Schulz is a PhD candidate at the ANU Crawford School of Public Policy, Institute for Water Futures and member of the Water Justice Hub. They are a resident of Broken Hill, Wilyakali Country, in Far Western, NSW, and is exploring issues of water injustice in the Murray-Darling Basin. Dan is also a visual artist, filmmaker, and co-creator of Water Watch Radio; a weekly radio show about water management, broadcast on the Community Radio Network.