Indigenous Australians Fight for Water Rights
For millennia, Brendan Kennedy's people, the Tati Tati and Wadi Wadi Traditional Owners, have stewarded Margooya Lagoon in Australia's inland river system. However, since European settlement, their ancestral rights to the land and water have dwindled.
"Europeans are cutting down the trees and digging up our mother earth, killing our kangaroos and killing our water right before our eyes," Kennedy lamented to Victoria's Yoorrook inquiry into colonisation.
Margooya Lagoon, once naturally replenished by peak rainfall events, now rarely floods due to the introduction of locks and weirs on the nearby Murray River. Kennedy likened the network of rivers and creeks to veins in a human body, vital to the health and survival of First Nations people.
Despite holding native title claims to 40% of Australian land, First Nations groups own and control less than 0.2% of water. Kennedy highlighted the unfulfilled promises of water allocation to revive Margooya Lagoon.
"Under the western water system, we [the Tati Tati people] own 0.00 per cent," he said. "We're being dispossessed as we sit here."
Victoria's Yoorrook Justice Commission is investigating the exclusion of First Nations people from water management. Water Minister Harriet Shing acknowledged the ongoing impact of colonisation on Aboriginal Victorians.
"Emphasis was placed on the economic value of water," Shing said, referring to the adoption of British legal systems.
Revenues from water trusts and other sources amounted to $83 billion from 2010-2023. However, lawyers assisting the inquiry questioned how much of this reached First Nations people directly.
The term "aqua nullius" describes the dispossession of water rights during colonisation, similar to "terra nullius" for land. Legal academics highlighted how native title cases won land but not water rights, and how First Nations groups were priced out of the water market.
Dr. Erin O'Donnell, a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne Law School, emphasized that aqua nullius is not just history, but the foundation of the legal system.
"The multiple waves of dispossession, the ongoing exclusion of Aboriginal people in their interests from water has resulted in significant economic loss," she said.
Dr. O'Donnell believes that Treaty negotiations between Victoria and its First Peoples could include the return of water rights. Unlike neighboring nations, Australia has never formalized a treaty with its traditional owners.
"You can return water rights whilst also appointing Traditional Owners to boards of water authorities or other mechanisms that enable them to exert authority," she said.
The fight for water rights is a crucial step towards recognizing and restoring the rights of Indigenous Australians to their ancestral lands and waters.