Beginning with the smallest of soaks atop Mount Baw Baw high in the Victorian Alps, the Yarra River flows through pristine forests, national park, farming land and residential areas before famously winding through the city of Melbourne and into the mudflats of Port Phillip Bay, some 242km from its genesis.
The river provides Melbourne with 70 per cent of its drinking water and supports productive agriculture. Dotted throughout the river’s 4078sq.km catchment and 24 tributaries are popular recreational spots for some of Australia’s favourite pastimes including boating, rowing, fishing, birdwatching, swimming, rope swinging and picnicking. The Yarra catchment is also home to about two million people and one-third of Victoria’s animal species.
Flowing through the Kulin nation, the river was an important meeting place for First Nations peoples for tens of thousands of years. Ceremonies were held on its shores, with dancing and singing by firelight. Throughout the catchment there were countless important birthplace, ceremonial and burial grounds.
Two Traditional Owner groups hold custodianship: the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung are the people of the vast majority of the river and its lands, and the Bunurong are the people of the mouth of the river. The river is central to the identity of both groups, but it’s the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people who named it ‘Birrarung’, meaning ‘a place of mists and shadows’. The name paints a very different picture of the river than we know today.
The river was once a complex network of streams, channels, tributaries, wetlands, billabongs and mudflats. All manner of flora lined its banks, from towering paperbarks to delicate ferns. The water teemed with river blackfish, yabbies, eels and platypuses, while noisy water birds gathered in flocks above. Ancient lava once flowed through areas where skyscrapers now stand. In the river’s lower section, thousands of years of sediment deposited from the upper catchment formed a sprawling delta.
But with European settlement in the 1830s came disastrous changes to Birrarung. Used for the growing colony’s sewage and waste disposal, by the 1890s its water was squalid. In 1893 the Scottish traveller James Goudie described it as “the filthiest piece of water I ever had the misfortune to be afloat on”.
European settlers built dams in the mountains, cleared eucalypt forests and shrublands, and drained wetlands and billabongs. They used explosives to deepen and widen the river – both improving its accessibility for larger ships and reducing flooding in nearby townships – and lined its banks with stone and timber (later replaced with cement and asphalt). Parts of the river were diverted to allow for goldmining and the development of ports and docks.
As the decades ticked over, bridges crossed the river and factories and slaughterhouses lined its banks, their noxious waste polluting the intricate ecosystem of interconnecting parts that had thrived for thousands of years.
Today, ‘the Yarra’ is arguably the most celebrated and well-known river in modern Australia. Central to the identity of Melburnians, the river is no longer treated as a resource to be pillaged, or as a dumping ground for waste. It’s now something the community is proud of. By the latter half of the 20th century, the polluting industries along its banks had closed or relocated. National parks, nature reserves, recreational areas and sacred First Nations sites now take pride of place, patronised by millions.
Popular pressure through the 1970s and 1980s also sparked massive clean-up efforts throughout the catchment. Meanwhile, as colonial and modern society’s attitudes and connections to the river evolved, one thing remained constant: the Traditional Owners’ commitment to Birrarung. In the 2000s, Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung leaders were still passionately fighting for the health and spirit of their river. In 2012 they joined forces with other community groups and began lobbying for Birrarung to receive the same standing in modern law as it has in First Nations law: legal recognition as a living being.
The Yarra Riverkeeper Association was one of the groups advocating for this legislation alongside Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung leaders. The team took politicians out onto the river and asked them to imagine the river from the river’s perspective. They wanted the politicians to see it holistically,
and to convince them that this holistic approach to the river’s care and management needed to be embedded in law.
It was a long campaign, but they won. In 2017, Birrarung and its surrounding lands were granted legal status as a ‘living entity’.
Made law by the Victorian Government as part of the Yarra River Protection (Wilip-gin Birrarung murron) Act 2017, the Act was also the first in Australia to be co-titled in traditional language. ‘Wilip-gin Birrarung murron’ means ‘keep the Birrarung alive’ in Woi wurrung, the traditional language of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people.
But what does ‘living entity’ actually mean?
“It’s complicated,” says water law and policy expert Dr Erin O’Donnell. Erin is a senior lecturer and ARC research fellow at The University of Melbourne Law School. She’s also a member of the Birrarung Council, a group that champions the river’s interests and provides advice to the Victorian Government about how to best protect and preserve it.
“The ‘living entity’ is a formal acknowledgement in law that the river and its lands are alive,” Erin says. She offers a helpful analogy: “It’s like recognising that animals are alive and sentient for the purposes of animal welfare protection. When that was recognised, we stopped treating them just as resources to be exploited. We acknowledge that they have needs and feelings and agency. So we’re acknowledging the same thing with the river.
“But where that analogy breaks down is that animal welfare places a lot of obligations on people to do specific things, whereas the Birrarung legislation at the moment is a little bit obtuse about the specific obligations that relate to the status as a ‘living entity’.
“[While] you can’t go to court and necessarily enforce the idea, the ‘living entity’ status does something much more profound. Understanding the river as a living entity is a really big, transformative idea. It says the river is not just a resource for human domination and exploitation. It’s inspiring people to think very differently about what the river is and what it should be, and ask, ‘What kind of relationship do we want to have with this river?’”