Protect the Martuwarra Fitzroy River before it becomes another Murray-Darling

I’ve watched what happens when governments let water extraction get ahead of science, enforcement and common sense.

It doesn’t end in prosperity. It ends with communities staring at a dying river, asking how it was allowed to happen.

Western Australia faces a choice about its own Martuwarra Fitzroy River.

The decisions set through the Fitzroy-Derby water plan will determine whether this extraordinary Kimberley river remains healthy – or becomes the next Australian system we try to fix only after we’ve broken it.

In 2019, on the Darling (Barka) river in NSW, I stood knee-deep in a shrinking pool and held a dead Murray cod in my arms. Around me, thousands more fish died in the mud and heat.

Millions of Australians saw the images. Many were shocked. Those of us on the river weren’t surprised – we’d been warning for years that the system was being pushed too far.

That disaster wasn’t just drought. It was the foreseeable result of over-allocation, weak rules and weaker compliance.

When monitoring is patchy and enforcement is optional, extraction ratchets up quietly – until a bad season arrives, and the river has nothing left to give.

The Martuwarra is one of the country’s largest and most intact river systems and is National Heritage listed for its Indigenous cultural values.

For the Kimberley, it underpins wetlands, wildlife and the health of the coast. Its most vulnerable season is the long dry, when groundwater keeps deep pools, springs and wetlands alive – refuges that carry fish, birds and other wildlife through to the next wet.

Those dry-season refuges are not just pretty waterholes; they are essential habitat. Species people associate so closely with the Kimberley – barramundi and cherabin (freshwater prawn) – depend on persistent pools.

Critically endangered freshwater sawfish also rely on these habitats, and the best available science warns that pumping groundwater could cause those refuge pools to shrink, warm and fail.

The collapse might not look dramatic at first. Then one year it will.

I’ve heard the sales pitch: sustainable take, extraction caps, local jobs. On the Darling, those words were used to justify decisions that proved impossible to unwind.

The fine print mattered more than the slogans – discretionary rules, political pressure, and a murky compliance system that couldn’t keep up.

Supporters of larger water takes talk about jobs and growing the north. I’m not against development – as a fifth-generation wool farmer, I understand the need for profitable operations.

But I am against repeating a disastrous model where a handful of well-resourced interests capture more water, and everyone else wears the risk.

A strong plan should back locally led economic opportunity, including Indigenous enterprise, in ways that don’t depend on draining the river system it relies on.

Once groundwater rules are written to accommodate industrial-scale irrigation, it’s the river and local communities that lose leverage.

Any water plan for the Martuwarra should be a shield, not a doorway.

At a minimum, it should lock in no new surface water extraction, embed Traditional Owners as genuine decision-makers and write stringent groundwater rules that focus on the river’s health – not for the biggest pump that might one day apply for a licence.

Australia has spent decades arguing over how to repair the Murray-Darling because we didn’t protect it when we had the chance.

If Western Australia writes strong rules now, the Martuwarra can remain a living river that sustains culture, communities and fishing for generations. A legacy all Australians can be proud of.

If we write weak ones, we’ll learn the same lesson the hard way, with a different river name on the headlines.