Interregional Environmental Policy in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin

Abstract

The Murray-Darling Basin encompasses several ‘old’ settlement frontiers in Australia’s semi-arid, sub-humid and temperate zones, roughly equivalent in area to France and Spain combined. Running from subtropical areas of the state of Queensland through New South Wales and Victoria to ‘Mediterranean’ South Australia, and taking in cool and wet high country and great plains fringing the interior deserts, this enormous region is not too badly described as Australia’s heartland. Certainly, its story goes to the very center of a national experience in which communities of immigrants have engaged in a massive geographical experiment. Increasingly, the territorial gains of the pioneering years were threatened by environmental degradation, principally but not only in the drier sectors, until decisions were made to promote a ‘bioregional’ perspective in which the newest frontier is, in fact, the very concept of the natural unit itself. Bioregionalism offers a timely and motivating challenge for a young nation currently confronting the multifaceted challenge of ecological sustainability in the driest of the inhabited continents.