This is a narrative of environmental decline due to a regime of land management centred on the expansion of irrigation and the increasing numbers of irrigation infrastructure such as weirs and barrages supported by governments that was geared towards radically altering the water regimes of the Basin to create an agricultural utopia. The River Murray, as a result , is a system of still pools, which the irrigators depend on.
This regime is based on mastery of nature— that is an understanding, an attitude, in which one feels entitled to order the world (to the extent that it is possible) to suit one’s designs and purposes with respect to agriculture. What does not fit into this ordering (eg., pests) is an obstacle, and obstacles are to be transformed into use or eradicated.
It is only in the past few decades that wetlands have been widely recognized as worth preserving though it is conservation based on the centrality of water bird conservation in the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands. The Coorong in South Australia is a good example of this version of the more-than-human world.
Nourishing Terrains 
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