The 2022-23 flood, like the flood of 1956, was primarily seen in the media as being destructive of people, property and infrastructure along the river by both local communities and the various centralized state and federal water management bureaucracies. The latter are still primarily concerned with the hydrology of the river channel ie., storing and distributing water for human purposes (for townships and irrigators). The flood was seen as the river being out of human control — a natural disaster.
It’s more complex than this media account. Floods are important to graziers in semi-arid areas because they rejuvenate pastures, but are viewed as destructive by cotton growers residents of towns and owners of holiday shacks on the river. The river was primarily seen as a controlled resource (dams and weirs) for the production of agricultural commodities as opposed to people living in a flood country with its complex ecology of floodplains and wetlands.
From an ecological perspective the 2022-23 flood in the Anthropocene has provided much-needed water to areas of the river and floodplains for the first time in more than 60 years — since the 1956 flood.
This will improve the water quality by flushing hundreds of millions of tonnes of salt out of the river system while also recharging the ground water and filling the soil profile. This will result in a boom in vegetation growth, improve tree health and the quality of the understorey vegetation. Insects, frogs and fish will breed, and then birds will congregate to feed on them resulting in more successful breeding conditions for birds.
Living in the flood country of Murray-Darling Basin means living with droughts and floods, with rivers that move and floodplains that change and with no two floods being the same. With climate change those in the river country will face rivers and floodplains changing substantially whilst those living in the river country in the northern basin will face more severe and possibly more frequent floods.
With the 2022-23 flood I realized that the world will not, and should not, return to normal. This raised a question for me: can photography as “the art of noticing” pay attention to the unfolding climate heating is affecting not only humans, but more-than-human ecological. So to paraphrase Heidegger, ‘What are photographers for’?
Nourishing Terrains 
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