'Mother Nature will outlive all of this' - Barkindji man

Hannah Forsyth.

As I left the outback New South Wales town of Wilcannia after some historical research last year, Woddy Harris, a Barkindji man I had interviewed, gestured across the town and said: “Mother Nature will outlive all of this.” He was talking about Aboriginal survival in the Wilcannia area since white settlement in the 1850s.

Wilcannia is on the Darling River, about 200km east of Broken Hill. In Barkindji language, “Barka” means river. They are the “Darling River folk”, to use anthropologists’ terms; “people of the river”, to use their own.

Last week, when I saw a recent photograph of the Darling River – central to Barkindji survival – I feared that perhaps Woddy was wrong. Maybe Mother Nature does need our help after all.

Read the piece on The Conversation by a Lecturer in History at the Australian Catholic University, Hannah Forsyth - “The Barkindji people are losing their ‘mother’, the drying Darling River.”