This is a dance for the river. It calls on our ancestors to put the spirit back into
the land and into the water and heal it. My name's Tyrone and I'm Ngarrindjeri.
For tens of thousands of years my people have lived at the Coorong, where the river meets the
sea. We call it Marunde and you know it as the Murray. But Ngarrindjeri people like my
Grandfather have seen the river change.
MAJOR SUMNER, NGARRINDJERI ELDER: We'd go out on a boat and you'd be able to
see the fish swimming into the nets. The Coorong was like looking through clear water.
You can't see them now. The water was changing
a different colour. You know, everything was getting bad. The fish were dying, the birds,
the river, the lakes, the Coorong. It was dying.
TYRONE: And that's why we dance for the river
because it's not just important to us, it's important
to all Australians. Come with me and I'll take you on a journey along Australia's longest
and most developed river. We'll meet some of the kids that live along it and depend
on it for all different reasons and find out why we all need to work together to heal the Murray.
My name's Jock MacKenzie, I'm 15 years old and I live in Manangatang. I've been fishing
in the Murray River for as long as I can remember. My Dad used to bring me down when I was little
all the time, every weekend and I loved it. My Dad is a professional fishing and photography journalist.
Jock's dad: "In he goes! What a beauty! What an absolute ripper!"
He travels around some of Australia catching giant Murray Cod and obviously photographing
them, writing about them for magazines and newspapers. Murray River Cod are a big green,
slimy fish. They're one of the largest growing fish that's in the Murray River. They're the
greatest fish in all honesty, I don't think of, I can't think of any other fish I'd rather
catch. It gives you the adrenalin rush, they're good fun. When we catch giant Murray Cod we
release them so that they can grow and re-populate the river.
Threats that Cod face are being overpopulated by Carp and Red Fin so introduced species.
Carp are a really big problem in the river.
You can eat Carp but they taste like mud because that's basically, they bury
themselves in the mud and yes they taste like mud. The fact that we keep dropping and rising
the river and removing snags is another big one because that's where they live and where
they breed. Snags are basically when a tree falls in the river and when they've been in
the river for a long time, all the leaves and stuff will blow off it and that's where
the Cod live, they live in between the snags. I think in future years, Cod are going to
come back in an increased number as more rules are being set. The river to me, it's home.
It's, I'd rather be here than at home, this is my home. I'll be fishing forever.
Aboriginal people fished the river from canoes they made from the bark of the red gum trees.
If you travel along the river you can still see canoe trees, some of them are hundreds
of years old. There are also reminders of the river's more recent history when river
boats turned the water in to a highway and reshaped inland Australia.
Hello I'm Jackson and I'm a deck hand on the PS Industry. Well I've been interested in
the Industry or in all paddle steamers on the Murray River since I was about three years
old when we'd come down here to feed the ducks. I wasn't interested in the ducks, just the
PS Industry. Oh I don't know, you don't find too many kids that are interested in paddle
boats. There's a few kids at my school that are fairly interested but most of them
think it's pretty good.
Captian: "He should stay on his starboard, and we'll give one long toot to warn him
and a short one for starboard that we're going to pass on that side - when we get closer."
Yeah the river boats helped open up inland Australia. They'd carry wheat
and wool and general items that people would use along the river from the stations and
also back up to the stations and everything. In the 1920s, they built the railways and
road transport became more viable to everyone and these days there're used mostly for tourism.
I don't know, I just like paddle steamers. Yeah I wanna be a shipwright captain engineer
at The Port of Echuca when I grow up.
I think I'll be interested in paddle steamers 'til I die.
TYRONE: The locks and the weirs along the river were built for the paddleboats to make sure the
water was always deep enough to travel through and they still operate today.
My name is Kasey and I live at Renmark at Lock 5 with my Mum and Dad and my three brothers.
I like living near the river because I get to wake up and see the river every morning.
My Poppa was a lockmaster at Lock 5 and then my Dad became a lockmaster after him.
Kasey's Dad: "A'right so here we go Kase, I'll, a, start it up"
A lockmaster's job involves letting boats run up and down the river and helping the river run. A boat
enters the lock and the gates close behind them. It takes about 5 minutes for the water
to lower to the same level as the water downsteam.
Kasey's Dad: "So what I'm doing now Kase is I'm actually opening the valves, you'll see the water start
to come out, see it? Here it comes. Look at that, plenty of water coming out! So it's
four million litres of water Kasey in five and a half minutes."
The locks were built in the 1920s. In the old days, they didn't worry about the affect
that it was having on the environment. But now they do, so they let extra water flow
through. The fish need to swim upstream to have babies but when the weir came, they couldn't
swim upstream anymore so they needed to have a fishway so they could swim upstream and have babies.
I'm proud of the work that my Dad does for the river.
TYRONE: European settlers changed the river. so they can use it as transport and for farming. They
built irrigation pipes and channels to take the water to towns and to farms like this one.
I'm Latara Trigg.
And I'm Brooklyn Trigg.
And we are on a vineyard farm. We grow dried grapes. It gets pretty dry in summer so that's
why we use water to irrigate. Most farmers around here use irrigation.
It comes from the Murray River and you have to pay for the water 'cause if we take too
much, we might end up in a drought again. We use drip irrigation. We used to use flood
irrigation except we've stopped now because it's wasting a lot more water and the water
that does get wasted goes into the lakes. It can sometimes make blue and green algae
which is very poisonous to like fish and yeah (LATARA: All the creatures in there.)
Now what we used to have to do, we had to come here once a week when we had flood irrigation
and we'd have to turn it on like that by hand and it used to just whoosh through here and
it used to take all our fertiliser all the way down here and there would be none left
here and it would evaporate into the sky and cause greenhouse gases, but what we do now
is it's all computerised and we have the drip irrigation system, so what we do is we turn
the water on by the computer and it comes out this little hole here and it goes straight
to the plant's core and they grow much quicker and we get much better crops than we used to.
40 percent of the food grown in Australia comes from the Murray Darling Basin and that's
why irrigation is so important because if we didn't have irrigation then the Murray
Darling Basin wouldn't be irrigated and we didn't have that much water to water the plants
to grow food to go to Australia.
It's everyone's job to look after the river because it's for everyone to enjoy.
TYRONE: People are starting to realise that they can't just take what they want from the river, so
part of that's understanding more about how it works and that's why these guys are doing.
STUDENT: This is Wonga Wetlands and the whole area is recycled water and it stretches over a
huge amount of area and down onto the river.
Teacher: "So what I'll get you guys to do... umm, grab each end of the net
and what we want to do it bring them together.
And the idea is to get this end of the net out of the water so fish won't escape."
Year 11 students from all over the Murray Darling Basin come together to learn about
fresh water ecology and fresh water research.
"It looks about 4cm" "Yep"
From catching the fish we can tell how many
native population there are in the lagoon. This helps to tell us how many exotic versus
native fish there are, so generally the exotic fish are a lot more resistant to harsher water
conditions, so the more native the better the water quality.
Teacher: "Okay, so we're going to use our sweep net and we're going to try and dislodge
any macroinvertebrates that are living in this habitat.
And the way you do it is you get in there and bash around, very vigorously
and then you sweep through the water and collect up and macroinvertebrates that have dislodged."
I think it's very important for everyone to learn about the science of the river because
it's our environment and we're gonna have to look after it 'cause everything we do affects
the environment and the river.
It's good for us to learn about it because it'll be here for us and we need to look after
it, the birds, the wetlands, the river.
TYRONE: Right along the river, people are working together to heal it.
Hello, I'm Bella.
And I'm Pippa and this is Galateah.
Well our grandparents bought this property in 1979.
And they moved here from Holland and they were looking for a rural property preferably
one that was near water.
This is a Grevillea that Pop has propagated. It's one of the two-thousand that he's done
this year. And they also created dams and even a wetlands area to attract other water
birds. There's a lot of different birds. 150 different species of birds pass over the area
throughout the year and at the beginning when they first got this place, there was barely any.
"Hey, what's that bird over there?"
"The white one, see, with the black feathers on top?
"Yeah, see look at this Pippa? Does that match up?"
"Yeah it does."
"Yep, it's an egret then."
Well the connection with the river is, so the water that feeds the river comes through here.
This is Placid Lagoon.
It's so when the weir comes up, the weir joins this Placid Lagoon and fills it up and then
when it goes down like it is now, it just leaves this which is a good refuge for all
the water birds and stuff when there's no weir. Yeah it's great 'cause we can just go
down there in summer and go for a swim and cool down or go for a paddle.
It's also nice sometimes 'cause we have a bonfire or a campfire and we just cook potatoes
and they're really yum!
I think that what they've done is a really good lesson for Australians
because really, they're not even from here, they could've done this in Holland if they'd
wanted to but they decided to it here. It's everyone's job to look after the river. If
we don't look after the river, then we won't be able to drink, we won't be able to eat,
we won't be able to wash, we won't have animals to eat,
we won't really be able to do anything without water.
For some people the river is about family or fun. For some it's a passion or a livelihood,
but it's important for everyone.
MAJOR SUMNER: If you live in this country now, you have to change your way of how you live, of how
you treat the waters, how you treat the land because this earth is not going to last that
long if we don't change.
TYRONE: For Australia, the river's like blood the in our veins. It brings us together and it
brings us life and that's why we need to share it in the good times and in the bad.