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The Fenner School of Environment
and Society
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Author Jessica Weir
Book launch: 30 November 2009, ANU‘Murray River Country – an Ecological Dialogue with Traditional Owners’ by Jessica Weir was launched on Wednesday at The Australian National University. The genesis of this book was in 2003 when Jessica began her PhD studies at the Fenner School of Environment and Society, and approached traditional owners from the Murray River to see whether they would be interested in a research relationship or not. Since then she has had the truly fortunate experience of working with some of the greatest minds and personalities of the inland river country. In the book Jessica uses different knowledge traditions to reveal unacknowledged assumptions that trap our thinking and disable us from acting. She writes: "In modern thinking, Aboriginal peoples' stories are a narrative that is spiritual or traditional, and the nation-building narrative is one of economic growth or development. From the modern-thinkers' perspective these narratives cannot co-exist: one must be sacrificed for the other.......this way of thinking is false, and, critically, disables our responses to the ecological devastation we now face in the Murray-Darling basin." Jessica wants to move 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. For, as the Elders put it, if you look after the river, the river will look after everything else. It may sound trite, but this straightforward message struggles for priority in a context where water is increasingly scarce, increasingly degraded and of increasing economic value. 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.
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The Australian National University — CRICOS Provider Number 00120C
