For tens of thousands of years, First Nations people have cared for Country and depended on healthy and flowing rivers – rivers that lived and breathed according to natural cycles. Colonisation and decades of mismanagement and overextraction have left Australia’s...
First Nations group proposes changes to Australia’s water law
The Water Act is ‘substantially inconsistent’ with Australia’s commitments to international conventions, a Traditional Owner group has told the South Australian Royal Commission into the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. The Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations...
Uluru Statement from the Heart: a response from EJA
EJA's response to the landmark Uluru Statement from the Heart. On 26 May 2017 delegates representing First Nations from all over Australia concluded and published the Uluru Statement from the Heart. The Statement was the outcome of deliberations of more than 250...
Aboriginal water rights: Legal Analysis of submissions to Review of the Water Act
Rivers, wetlands, waterways, springs and estuaries play important and powerful roles in the ancient places and cultures of Australia. They are frequently central to creation stories and to Aboriginal law/lore. Not only was this knowledge and law profoundly affected by...