The Richmond River has its source on the southern slope of Mount Lindesay in the McPherson Range on the Queensland – New South Wales border. From here the river flows south-east through Kyogle, Casino, Coraki and Woodburn before turning north-east and reaching the sea at Ballina. Over its course of 237 kilometres it descends 256 metres. Twelve major creeks or rivers enter the Richmond River system along with numerous smaller watercourses. The river’s catchment area is estimated at 6,862 square kilometres.
In early 2016 I came to live in Kyogle. This is part of an area known as ‘The Northern Rivers,’ an unofficial region proudly used for building local identity and tourism promotion. But when I look at the river, drawing on my personal and professional background, I sense something amiss, seriously amiss. Bare and slumping river banks, trees covered in smothering vines, ground weeds and always muddy water are the obvious signs.
I know that in thinking about wise use and management of a river you can’t separate it from its catchment. Riparian vegetation and surrounding land uses are major influences on the river. I also have some direct experience of the politics of the rivers.[ii] My curiosity had been prodded and I started paying attention, looking on a casual basis for information. I soon discovered an Ecohealth report, produced by a university research group. This rated the health of the entire Richmond River system very poorly.[iii]
My area of interest is the upper Richmond, from the headwaters to the area of tidal influence, a few kilometres east of Casino. In this essay I explore what has changed and why from different perspectives. I interpret historical texts and documentary reports and respond to conversations I have had. The causes of, and solutions to, river woes are well known, if not universally accepted.
Inherent in any response to river management will be questions of private rights and public costs. Regarding water and land use specifically, this amounts to a long-standing and widespread practice of privatising (or internalising) the profits and socialising (or externalising) the costs. This is about how people experience the river.
Wattchow (2008) articulates a lens to that experience in his writing on wounded rivers. He describes two common tendencies.
First is towards a romantic representation of the river and tensions that arise with realist or critical interpretations that challenge the desire for a return to nature. Second is for those dependent on the rivers for their daily life to interpret it as a commodified water resource.
Wattchow also suggest that writing (and I would say any consideration) of the river as a “place” will support a more sensitive response and a broader interpretation than either the romantic or the economic. He argues that a “poetics of place,” which acknowledges and encompasses the affects of a place on the mind, body and overall well-being, will foster a closer experience of the wounded river.[iv]
Figure 1: Richmond River Catchment.
Aboriginal occupation and use of the area by clans within the Bundjalung nation is extensive and well documented. Before the arrival of Europeans:
“Bundjalung people shared a distinctive pattern of life – seasonal food gathering from the rainforest to the sea, the use of regional bush medicines, cycles of ceremonial events and belief in an ancient and strict customary Law… the spiritual power of the budheram (budjeram), the sacred dimension of all life, was universally respected and its secrets protected.”[v]
In the upper Richmond details of five bora rings or former bora rings have been recorded with many others in the Kyogle region being destroyed. A burial cave, several art sites and numerous djuerbil (sacred sites) have also been recorded.[vi]
There is no known Aboriginal name for the river. A Bundjalung elder from Kyogle says they have just called the river “nyabay,” which means water.[vii]
European “discovery” of the area came in the late 1820s. At that time the colony of New South Wales was in some despair owing to extended drought and economic depression. A need was seen for new pasture lands and interest turned both inland and to the north.
In July and August 1828 botanist Allan Cunningham explored an area nearby the source of the Richmond.[viii] In late August the same year, Captain Henry Rous, while sailing south from Moreton Bay, explored and mapped the mouth and lower reaches of the river.[ix]
Shortly after Cunningham and Rous reported on their observations the drought broke and the depression ended. The urgent need for fresh lands abated. It was 1840 before a couple of squatters came over the Richmond Range from the west to take up 30,000 acres on the left bank of the Richmond River. George Stapleton and Henry Clay called their station Cassino, later Casino. For a year they were the only squatters in the valley but within five years all Crown land in the upper Richmond was occupied.[x]
One of those later squatters was Wellinton Cochrane Bundock, who came from the Hunter in 1842. We learn much from his daughter Mary Bundock, who made an extensive collection of Aboriginal artefacts. These were meticulously archived and later donated to the Australian Museum in Sydney. We can have confidence in the accuracy of her observations and her record keeping.[xi]
In her memoirs Mary Bundock recounts a story her father must have told her :
… one afternoon [he] rode over the low gap which leads to the lovely Wyangarie plain [north of Kyogle]. He thought it the most beautiful spot he had ever seen, a smooth open plain with one clump of heavy timber and two or three small lagoons sparkling in the sun … with the river fringed by brushwood …[xii]
Also in the memoirs she comments directly on the Richmond River:
… The Upper Richmond was then a beautiful stream of clear water, running over clean sand and pebbles, an ideal of beauty and purity not to be surpassed anywhere, with steeply shelving banks either of clean grass or shaded by beautiful trees of many kinds …
And of the surrounding country side she said:
The term Scrub for the great forests, which, in the early days, covered the banks of the Richmond, Tweed and Brunswick Rivers and which stretched back unbroken over the ranges to the top of the McPherson range, was a decided misnomer and gives no idea of what was really a semi-tropical jungle. It was a mass of splendid trees, running up to 60 feet without a branch before forming a head growing so closely that the sunshine was completely cut off …[xiii]
Bundock also made notes on the Aboriginal people of Wyangarie, who had:
… a good deal of fish in summer and large mussels from lagoons … They caught fish with lines all through the warm weather and before Christmas, when the streams were low, they entered the shallow water and drove the shoals into nets fixed across the stream, at the lower end of a deep pool, where the water again shoaled. I have seen a 50 lb. cod caught in this manner. [xiv]
Other historical sources[xv] and pre-European vegetation reconstructions confirm these descriptions of the upper Richmond: a band of rainforest along the river and creeks with adjacent grassy river flats and lightly wooded sclerophyll forest beyond.[xvi]
Extensive timber clearing started in the upper Richmond from the early 1880s, as noted by Daley (2011).[xvii]
“… The squatters on the upper river were only too glad to clear their land for pasturage and to sell the great stands of rare timber … In a short time the forest country at Unumgar and Roseberry and around Kyogle was invaded by an army of workers … long processions of bullock teams hauling great logs of cedar and pine could be seen making their way slowly towards Casino.”
At Irvington, a few kilometres east of Casino, the logs were dumped into the river to float down to Coraki. A wharf, built at Irvington in 1898, was later abandoned due to river shoaling.[xviii]
Figure 2: Irvington Wharf, built in 1898, a few kilometres downstream from Casino.
One valuable measure of river health is its fish population. The Eastern Freshwater Cod is the largest fish in the Richmond River system. This slow growing fish was once present in large numbers but is now a threatened species.[xix]
Its population went into decline from the 1920s, coinciding with the construction of the north coast railway which closely follows the river from Casino north. The river was extensively dynamited during railway construction. A NSW Fisheries recovery plan notes most areas of the Richmond River valley are “highly modified compared with their natural state at the time of European settlement.” The plan lists impacts on the river and the cod population as being sedimentation, removal of snags, reduced river flow from water extraction, barriers to fish movement, clearing of riparian vegetation and water pollution.[xx]
In 2017 a fishway was installed adjacent a weir on the river, just to the north of Kyogle, at a cost of $1.37 million. This fishway removes a major barrier to fish migration.[xxi]
In 1964 the Richmond Valley Development Association submitted a plan for full development of the valley, noting the importance of irrigation and the necessity for water storages. “The beginning of the end of most of our problems commences with water control,” it submitted. Agricultural production would be doubled with the availability of irrigation. The plan also noted that “when irrigation plants are running and Kyogle and Casino town water supply pumping plants are in operation … the river almost stops flowing as it passes Casino.”[xxii]
What we know of the Richmond River valley from the historical records is of pristine waters, intact rainforest and grassy sclerophyll forest. We know also of the destruction of the rainforest from the early 1880s, with sedimentation of the river rendering a wharf useless, and being a major contributor to the decline of the largest fish in the river.
From more contemporary times there are distinctly polarised perspectives and some nuanced positions.
An inaugural meeting in February 2017 of a group calling itself Richmond River Recue reportedly heard that farming activities over the last century were the largest cause of river degradation. Some at the meeting claimed farmers needed to make reparations for their impact. Others, however, “did not want to see unnecessary laws such as mandatory fencing along river banks or other run off initiatives imposed on farmers whose land adjoins the river.”[xxiii]
We know things can change quickly. Soon after settlement, early in the 20th century, much of the headwaters had been cleared, with any standing trees ringbarked. A trained eye may look at the heavily forested banks of the river and creeks and see a same age-ness but to the casual observer it’s hard to imagine that level of clearing had taken place.[xxiv]
Bob Jarman has been active in Landcare for many years. He recalls weed control work he undertook as a private contractor around 2008-2010. This was funded by the federal government and worked on private properties along many of the creeks in the upper Richmond. The only commitment from the property owners was that they maintain the areas into the future. Some did, many didn’t. “And now,” Bob says, “you’d struggle to know that work was done.”[xxv]
A North Coast Local Land Services officer says that fencing river banks is preferable but restricted “laneway” access to water can be acceptable when cattle do not have permanent access. This can also help with weed control. Funding for fencing and pumping water to troughs is becoming harder to access and now generally targets only strategic high conservation value areas. Another problem is a high turnover of landholders with properties changing hands.[xxvi]
A regional Landcare coordinator tells of increasing interest from landholders in fencing their river and creek banks, taking more active steps towards better environmental management. The interest is mainly from those who are not fully reliant on agricultural production for their livelihoods. But this is difficult in an area of rapid weed growth, with weeds that can smother and kill remnant mature trees. “Sometimes they want to fence off a couple of kilometres of creek bank,” Emma Stone says. “I encourage them to do half a kilometre first and work out how to manage that before taking on too big an area.”[xxvii]
Kevin Clark was born at Coraki in 1945. He’s lived almost his entire life on or around the Richmond or Clarence Rivers. By the time he was five he was fishing with his parents. “My dad taught me if you understand nature you’ll never want to hurt it,” he says. “and I’ve always loved watching fish and nature. It’s calming.”[xxviii]
He worked as a technical assistant with the Department of Fisheries for many years. In 1988 Eastern Cod were released, with some success, into the Clarence and Richmond River systems. A total ban on catching the fish was introduced at that time. Back then, and for some years after, Kevin says, many fishers ignored the ban, but this has changed. “People are a lot more responsible now,” he says.
The river has changed dramatically in Kevin’s life-time. “Areas that used to be 16 or 18 feet deep are now less than a metre.” This means a loss of in-stream habitat. “Rocks and fallen timber are covered in sediment.” And he’s seen many floods: “The water would get dirty but it would come clean quickly. Now it’s always dirty and after a flood when it gets even dirtier it stays dirtier for much longer.”
Kevin says there were very few river oaks (Casuarina cunninghamiana) on the river before the 1954 flood and these are now a problem. “They fall over in a flood but keep growing, water swirls around their branches and you get more erosion.” Cattle too are more of a problem, with larger and heavier breeds causing more damage on slopes.
“It used to be a beautiful river,” Kevin says. “A lot of people don’t have any feeling for it. They haven’t been here long enough to know what it was like and they’re making bad decisions.”
Not everyone wants to go on the record. Anecdotally, or informally, there are a range of views to support the primacy of the landholder.
“The river’s never been healthier,” I’ve heard it said, “although carp are a problem.”
As for trees, “they’re are a problem on river banks. They cause water to eddy and the banks erode.” That is not an uncommon response. Nor is “I’ve been here all my life [which might be 70 plus years] and there have never been (m)any trees on the river or creeks.”
Weed growth is vigorous in this district for much of the year. So “you need to keep cattle on the river bank to keep the weeds down.”
In a general broadside against environmentalists: “The whole countryside has a lot more trees now than there ever used to be.”
And a response to the Ecohealth research on river health? “Well they have to justify themselves somehow.”
Bundjalung elder Wayne Walker says “the river is getting smaller. It’s shallower. There’s lots of places we used to swim but you can’t now.” The Kyogle local says with cattle in the river and creeks banks are collapsing and trees are falling in. “A lot of farmers use sprays that end up in the river,” he says. “There’s less fish and turtles than there used to be. It’s a bit sad, but I don’t know what you can do.”
So how to explain the change? In the opening of this essay Wattchow talked of tendencies to a romantic or an economic view of a damaged river. We have seen those tendencies in a number of the texts or conversations I have reviewed.
Mary Bundock wrote of “an ideal of beauty and purity not to be surpassed anywhere.” But she was on a property dedicated to cattle with some cropping. And her memoir was titled “Early Days.” The river will have changed during her time at Wyangarie and later days may have offered a different view. By the 1880s the timber-getters were hard at it and squatters were “only too glad to clear their land.”
And then there was the Irvington wharf, built in 1898, later abandoned as the river had become too shallow from the deposition of sediment washed off cleared land. How was that met? A shrug of the shoulders? “Oh well, we’ve made a pretty quid.” Profits were privatised and costs were socialised – to future generations. That was the dominant ethos of development at that time. The Eastern Freshwater Cod another casualty.
Some nuance may be missing from the position taken in the early 1960s, but lobbying for increased irrigation and water storage while noting that, on occasions when irrigation and town water pumps are operating, “the river almost stops flowing,” is more than just commodification of water. This is a deliberate “will to ignorance.” The intent to ignore the inconvenient, “a divine desire for wanton leaps and wrong inferences.”[xxix]
The “will to ignorance” has a support base.
Focusing on water as a commodity impedes an ability or willingness to think of the river as a whole system, integrated with its catchment. So trees on river banks causing erosion becomes a plausible position. When you see it happen – as it may with a single isolated tree on the bank of a river acting as little more than a drain – it becomes logical, demonstrable. A vegetated river bank, mimicing the natural condition, will not. But that’s not so readily observable. And restoration back to that position requires a concerted effort.
Short term views of landholders who don’t have a long connection to the land, or the river, are noted, where a focus on the returns for agricultural production hold sway, with an eye to fluctuating property values. This is the commodity lens again, with enhanced susceptibility to a “will to ignorance.”
There are landholders who have been here all there lives, who have love of the land and immense pride in their achievements. But, and I say this reservedly, the river is primarily about water supply, their economic survival. It’s a commodity.
The way ahead will depend on building bridges, acknowledging not denigrating people’s work, their lives. It needs a recognition that, just as schools and hospitals are a public good, deserving of government support, so a healthy river is a public good, deserving of government support.
Kevin Clarke understands the science without being scientifically trained. His view is both poetic and hopeful.
The worldview of the Aboriginal people, the Bundjalung, was through neither an economic or romantic lens. They just saw, they used, they respected..
The Richmond River doesn’t have to be sad. It will never be what it once was but we can better understand it, respect it. And maybe even, one day, love it. To do this we need enquiring and open minds and to think of it as place. A place to which we can locate and articulate our feelings of it.
Wendell Berry, an American novelist, poet, environmental activist and farmer said it well:
“People exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love, and to defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.”[xxx]
Figures
Front cover: Richmond River at Kyogle: Photo supplied by author.
Figure 1: Richmond River Catchment. Map from NSW Environment Protection Authority.
Figure 2: Irvington Wharf, built in 1898, a few kilometres downstream from Casino. Photo from Casino and District Historical Society.
References and footnotes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richmond_River
[ii] In 1998 a small business I and my partner operated was contracted by the Murray
Darling Basin Commission for the development of an adult education program. The subject, and title, of the project was “Sustainable Rivers.” In thinking about a river it’s not possible to isolate the river from its catchment so this program took a holistic view. It also took the view that while science has a lot to offer it doesn’t have all the answers. Broad community engagement was needed through a social and cultural lens. Science “not having all the answers” proved unacceptable to MDBC, who ultimately sacked the water scientist and communications director who oversaw the project and cancelled the contract.
[iii] Ryder, D., Mika, S., Richardson, M., Schmidt, J., and Fitzgibbon, B. (2015), Richmond Ecohealth Project 2014: Assessment of River and Estuarine Condition. Final Technical Report. University of New England, Armidale.
The research focused on four indicators of aquatic ecosystem health: Water quality; Riparian vegetation; Geomorphic condition; Macroinvertebrates. On a scale of A (excellent), B (good), C (fair), D (poor) and F (very poor), with testing at 48 individual sites over 17 waterways in the Richmond River system, an overall condition of D+ was calculated. In Kyogle the rating was D–.
[iv] Wattchow, Brian (2008), “River songs: A poetic response to Australia’s wounded rivers,” in Vanclay, F., Higgins, M. and Blackshaw, A. (eds) Making Sense of Place, National Museum of Australia Press, Canberra.
[v] Hoff, Jennifer (2006), Bundjalung Jugun: Bundjalung Country, Richmond River Historical Society, Lismore. Pg. 1.
[vi] Steele, J.G. (1984), Aboriginal Pathways in Southeast Queensland and Richmond River, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia Qld. Pgs. 26-34.
[vii] Wayne Walker, personal communication.
Dawson, Robert Leycester (1922) “Australian Aboriginal Words and Names”, in Rediscovering Indigenous Languages, available at:
The State Library of NSW notes these “words and names are from the dialect of the Richmond River Blacks, Northern New South Wales’, with a supplement of Port Stephens and Tilba Tilba words.” This should give more confidence these names are of local origin than Dawson’s more general title suggests.
Dawson includes the word “ballun” for river. The Bundjalung – Yuganbeh Dictionary notes a number of words for creek or river from different areas of Bundjalung country:
balun = creek or river from the Gold Coast and Tweed district;
junim = river from the Condamine and Upper Clarence
nyuring = river from the lower Richmond
http://bundjalung.dalang.com.au/plugin_wiki/index.html
[viii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Cunningham_(botanist)
Botanist and explorer Allan Cunningham had left Newcastle in April 1827 to explore land to the west of the Great Dividing Range between the Hunter River and Moreton Bay. He found a vast area of open land which he named the Darling Downs, after Governor Ralph Darling who had commissioned him. He came close to the McPherson Range but did not enter it. The following year Cunningham returned to Moreton Bay and in July and August explored the area around the McPherson Ranges. From a high point in the range he looked over the Richmond River valley but did not come down into it.
[ix] Daley, L.T. 2nd. Ed. (2011), Men and a River: Richmond River District 1828-1895, Richmond River Historical Society, Lismore. Pgs. 10-11.
On 26 August 1828, Admiral Henry Rous anchored at the mouth of a river previously unknown to Europeans, although a few convict escapees from the penal settlement at Moreton Bay were known to be in the area. Rous named the river after the Duke of Richmond. With a few of the ship’s men he spent a couple of days in a small boat exploring the lower reaches of the river, noting, in a business-like manner, water depth and flow and timber suitable for exploitation along with some Aboriginal huts but recorded “no impressions of primeval nature.”
[x] Daley, L.T., Pgs. 24-25.
[xi] Hallam, Sylvia J. “Records of Times Past: ethnohistorical essays on the culture and ecology of the New England Tribes,” in Aboriginal History, Vol. 3, 1979: 156-158. Availability:<https://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=108139486205624;res=IELIND> ISSN: 0314-8769. [cited 15 May 18].
“She represents the persistence into the nineteenth century of an eighteenth century concern with knowledge in all its aspects, and above all, the total study of a landscape and its people.”
[xii]Murray-Prior, T.M., Early Days of Hunter and Richmond Rivers. Memoirs of Mary Bundock of Wyangarie, (Mrs. T.M. Murray-Prior of Maroon). Edited by Robert Leycester Dawson. Publication Unknown. Richmond River Historical Society. Publication Unknown.
[xiii] Prior, Mrs Murray (nee Mary Bundock), “Memoirs of the early days on the Richmond River, Typescript in possession of National Library of Australia, in:
Rolls, Eric (2002) Visions of Australia; Impressions of the Landscape 1642-1910, Lothian, South Melbourne.
[xiv] Bundock, Mary, (1898), Notes on the Richmond River Blacks. Typed from original MS by Robt. L. Dawson, 1940. Copy held in Richmond River Historical Society.
[xv] Nunn, H.W., ‘Hodgkinson, Clement (1818–1893), “Australian Dictionary of Biography,” National Centre of Biography, Australian National University.
http://.adb.anu.edu.au/biography/hodgkinson-clement-3774.text5959, published first in hardcopy 1972, accessed online 27 May 2018.
[xvi] Mitchell, Annette, Traditional Economy of the Aborigines of the Richmond River, NSW, Thesis Bachelor of Arts with Honours in Anthropology, University of Queensland 1978, Pgs. 92-93.
[xvii] Daley, L.T., Pg. 140.
[xviii] Stubbs, B.J. (2007), Thematic History of Richmond Valley Local Government Area, Richmond Valley Council, Casino. Pg. 16.
[xix] Keats, N.C. (1988), Wollumbin, Self-published, Point Clare NSW. Pg. 510.
[xx] NSW Fisheries, (May 2004), Eastern (Freshwater) Cod (Maccullochella ikei) Recovery Plan, NSW Fisheries, Nelson Bay NSW.
[xxi] Kyogle Council, (October / November 2017), “Kyogle fishway wins a third environmental award,” in Kyogle Council Community Newsletter,
https://www.kyogle.nsw.gov.au/kyogle-fishway-wins-second-environmental-award/
[xxii] Richmond Valley Development Association, “Master Plan for Full Development of the Richmond Valley.” Proposals prepared by the R.D.V.A. and submitted to the Honourable the Minister for Agriculture, Mr. A.G. Enticknap, M.L.A. at Lismore NSW on Wednesday 8th July 1964.
[xxiii] Byron Echo, February 23, 2017, “80 turn out to rescue the Richmond River,” https://www.echo.net.au/2017/02/80-turn-rescue-richmond-river/
[xxiv] Hans and Heidi Tribolet have a 1,000 acre property at Dairy Flat at the base of Mt Lindesay. This was established as a dairy after World War One. Hans says a spring on Mt Lindesay feeds into a number of small gullies which are the source of the Richmond River. The river, and a number of creeks that feed into it are clear, over a rocky or sandy bed. Vegetation is dense along the watercourses. Weedy vines that are so much a problem downstream are absent or in small numbers.
Hans recalls a visitor from around 10 years before, a descendent of the original settler. “I think he was a grandson, he just came up asking to have a look for old time’s sake,” Hans says. “He showed me some photos he had and one of these was of trees along the river. They were all dead. Ringbarked. On the back of that photo the year 1936 was written.”
[xxv] Along with wife Dianna, Bob has had a farm at Cedar Point south of Kyogle since 1988. He’s done some revegetation and fenced the river, controlling cattle access. He tries to practice what he preaches, but self-deprecatingly, says he’s no role model.
[xxvi] Peter Boyd, personal communication.
[xxvii] Emma Stone, personal communication.
[xxviii] Kevin Clark, personal communication.
[xxix] “Will to ignorance, will to truth, and the recognition heuristic,” April 2012, in Philosophy and other thoughts, http://alfanos.org/Blog/?p=52
[xxx] Berry, Wendell, (2000), Life is a Miracle, Counterpoint Press, Berkley. Pg. 41.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richmond_River
[ii] In 1998 a small business I and my partner operated was contracted by the Murray Darling Basin Commission for the development of an adult education program. The subject, and title, of the project was “Sustainable Rivers.” In thinking about a river it’s not possible to isolate the river from its catchment so this program took a holistic view. It also took the view that while science has a lot to offer it doesn’t have all the answers. Broad community engagement was needed through a social and cultural lens. Science “not having all the answers” proved unacceptable to MDBC, who ultimately sacked the water scientist and communications director who oversaw the project and cancelled the contract.
[iii] Ryder, D., Mika, S., Richardson, M., Schmidt, J., and Fitzgibbon, B. (2015), Richmond Ecohealth Project 2014: Assessment of River and Estuarine Condition. Final Technical Report. University of New England, Armidale.
The research focused on four indicators of aquatic ecosystem health: Water quality; Riparian vegetation; Geomorphic condition; Macroinvertebrates. On a scale of A (excellent), B (good), C (fair), D (poor) and F (very poor), with testing at 48 individual sites over 17 waterways in the Richmond River system, an overall condition of D+ was calculated. In Kyogle the rating was D–.
[iv] Wattchow, Brian (2008), “River songs: A poetic response to Australia’s wounded rivers,” in Vanclay, F., Higgins, M. and Blackshaw, A. (eds) Making Sense of Place, National Museum of Australia Press, Canberra.