Wetlands in a Dry Land: More-than-Human Histories of Australia's Murray-Darling Basin by Emily O'Gorman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Wetlands in a Dry Land: More-than-Human Histories of Australia's Murray-Darling Basin by Emily O'Gorman Ria Mukerji Wetlands in a Dry Land: More-than-Human Histories of Australia's Murray-Darling Basin. Emily O'Gorman. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021. Pp. ix–296, black & white illustrations, footnotes, map. $95.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-0-2957-4903-7. $30.00, paperback, ISBN 978-0-2957-4915-0. Emily O'Gorman beautifully weaves a tale of human and more-than-human existence in her book detailing the histories of Australia's [End Page 121] Murray-Darling Basin. The basin consists of thirty thousand wetland areas, and she lays out an easy-to-follow history of how different stakeholders (of the human and nonhuman variety) have developed in conjunction with one another and with the land. She situates the region's history within the context of greater global environmental issues and ultimately argues that wetlands must be viewed holistically—that their unique human-environment existence must be considered in order to create new ecological futures for the continued preservation of these landscapes. One of the book's greatest strengths comes in the form of its masterful storytelling. The decades-long history of the Murray-Darling Basin is laid out in graceful fashion, aided in part by chapter titles that help evoke the more-than-human relationships that take place in each one: Weaving, Leaking, Infecting, Crossing, Enclosing, Migrating, Rippling. Each chapter introduces a different piece of the Murray-Darling puzzle, ranging from mosquitos and people to indigenous practices and sedges to pelicans and policy change. The seemingly disconnected jumble of tales is all brought together by their reliance on the sacred wetland and, more so, by their connections to a larger sense of rootedness and dependence on people and place. O'Gorman begins by introducing the reader to the basics of how humans utilize wetland landscape in her discussion surrounding the "politics of plants (23)." She discusses how "weaving" (also the chapter title) not only keeps communities rooted to place but also puts the messy water politics of the Coorong Basin on display. Governance issues are complex across the globe, as she implies in her discussion of how the occurrences in the Coorong are not isolated and her commitment to situating the Murray-Darling Basin as a smaller part of the worldwide whole. This connection to people and place is seen starkly in "Enclosing," a chapter that focuses on the Coorong Pelican Slaughter of 1911. Here we see the relationship between people, place, and animal fall apart. This chapter is critical in demonstrating the intricate ways in which places, and their human and nonhuman inhabitants, have played a role in shaping spaces but have also been altered by laws and regulations (122). It shows how people have lived in landscapes with conflicting values—here, the divergence comes between the ornithologists to whom the government wished to lease the land and the Ngarrindjeri people who [End Page 122] were being limited from collecting waterfowl eggs—and the often uneven consequences of the outcomes of such clashes. On the broader scale, this chapter touches on issues of vulnerability and a need for more critical analysis of land conservation and management conflicts, something that the broader literature has seen a move toward in recent years. O'Gorman helps add to this with her nuanced look at a devasting event in the history of the Murray-Darling Basin. Perhaps one of the most convincing arguments O'Gorman makes is that wetlands are historical markers and "have been shaped by specific values that have helped to cocreate imagined ecologies" (142) over long stretches of time. "Imagined ecologies" alludes to the importance that various actors place on wetlands, from the pelicans to the Ngarrindjeri people to the policy makers that exist a world away from the swamps. They are all invested, and more so, they all have shaped the physical ecology and geographies of the Murray-Darling Basin. Particularly indicative of this is the last chapter, which brings together the many ideas that O'Gorman discusses throughout the book and places them in the context of the capitalism machine. She muses on...