Death comes for us all. We are outlived, as Barkandji man Woddy Harris would have it, by Mother Nature, who holds us in something that I think he would liken to ‘eternity’.
By what logic, then, must Mother Nature also die?
The Barkandji in Wilcannia and nearby Menindee had been protesting and putting their effort into protecting what they feared might be a dying river – the Barka, their mother – for years when in 2018 the first horrors of mass fish kills hit the news.
Millions of native bony bream fish died in what we air-breathing types would think of as ‘gasping’. Golden Perch. That pesky Carp. And century-old Murray Cod. Hardy fish – too hardy, perhaps, in the case of the Carp. Nature too has agency, as the more-than-human scholars remind us, and it is this agency that strikes at our hearts.[i] Native fish, whose strategies for survival ensured individual fish outlasted drought after drought, and flood after flood, now floated on the surface of what their deaths turned into a stinky, polluted waterway.
The first shock was in 2018-19, at what might have been the peak of that awful drought and was certainly the peak of Barkandji anxiety about their mother, the Barka River. An even worse fish kill hit in 2023 after three years of rain. This shows that it was not just seasonal. There were no natural cycles of death at work here. It was about the river.
In the sickly river, fish ran out of oxygen. Too much water, an expert panel found, over too many years, was diverted for agricultural profit. The Barka became too weak to nourish life.[ii] The logic of exploitation was not confined to the drought that united all farmers in the desperate search for water. It was a long-term problem. Under capitalism, water was not for nourishment, it was extracted for profit, even to death.
When the river is sick unto death, Mother Nature herself looks far less eternal than the faith in its eternity that Woddy Harris expressed. The battles over water during our last awful drought have exposed a relationship to nature that is not dissimilar to the deadly working conditions and system of exploitation faced by mine workers in Broken Hill, beginning more than a century ago.
With every new cataclysmic weather event we feel death loom. Mass extinction is possible, beyond those beautiful fish. That which seemed so eternal now looks as mortal as the rest of us. Certainly, nature is as subjected to the same capitalist exploitation.
To quote from Professor of Aboriginal Politics, Heidi Norman, in a piece written with John Janson-Moore: ‘Television images of cod fish cradled as if slain children in the arms of grieving farmers reverberated with a concerned public. But for Barkandji people, this underscored their powerlessness in the debate over their river.’[i]
That powerlessness has evidently been engineered, since First Nations sovereignty presents an existential threat to the order imposed by colonial capitalism. Disunity too is actively sustained, falsely dividing those humans performing labour in mines from fish murdered by too little oxygen in their only environment, both for a certain kind of profit.
The logic of capitalism is to kill – and as things are going, it may kill even itself.
[i] Norman, Heidi and John Janson-Moore (2019) ‘Friday essay: death on the Darling, colonialism’s final encounter with the Barkandji’ The Conversation https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-death-on-the-darling-colonialisms-final-encounter-with-the-barkandji-114275 Retrieved 12 January 2024.
[i] O’Gorman, Emily, and Andrea Gaynor (2020) ‘More-than-human histories’ Environmental History 25, 711–735
[ii] Kingsford, Richard (2023) ‘How Did Millions of Fish Die Gasping in the Darling – After Three Years of Rain?’ https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/how-did-millions-fish-die-gasping-darling-%E2%80%93-after-three-years-rain Retrieved 12 January 2024.
{ 0 comments… add one now }