A key characteristic of a healthy aquatic ecosystem is unrestricted fish movement but since the colonisation of Australia, the construction of infrastructure such as dams, weirs and regulators has profoundly disrupted the natural river processes that once sustained healthy rivers. This infrastructure has changed how our rivers flow, altered water quality and reduced river connectivity. This has led to a substantial reduction in native fish population size and distribution in the NSW Murray-Darling Basin, and contributed to mass fish kills on the Lower Darling-Baaka River (LDBR) at Menindee.
Decisions now need to be made about remediating fish passage at key water infrastructure sites. Water management decisions are typically contested by different stakeholders, and communities in particular have felt disconnected and disregarded in decision making processes. Policymakers, on the other hand, have limited means to provide information to communities, to meaningfully hear community perspectives in return, or to enter into policy-relevant dialogues on these issues.
We describe a novel arts-based facilitation method to share knowledge between scientists, cultural knowledge holders and community representatives. The framework will be used to explore threats to native fish recovery and options for fish passage remediation. The aim is to embed cultural considerations and community feedback into the development and implementation of river health and native fish recovery actions with a focus on fish passage activities.
Activities include partnering with the community through workshops for art-making, yarning, interviewing to facilitate conversations and connections centred around the health of native fish. This project partners with socially engaged arts organisation The Cad Factory, NSW Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD) and the Menindee Aboriginal Elder’s Council. The project is also supported by the Local Aboriginal Land Council, West Darling Arts and the University Department of Rural Health (Broken Hill) and will take place over the next three years. It will be composed of several sequential work packages, each centred on a cycle of arts facilitated cultural knowledges-science-policy-community perspective sharing to develop outputs that inform fish recovery actions.