Current podcast
Podcast 48: Remaking wetlands: a tale of rice, ducks and
floods in the Murrumbidgee River region
Wednesday, 5 December 2012
Australia is a dry continent and as a result Australian
ecologies can generally be characterised as "boom and bust" and
are significantly driven by intermittent and unpredictable wet
"booms" and dry "busts". The populations and movements of many
animals are considerably influenced by these wet and dry
periods. Birds tend to be “nomadic” and go where the water is.
Native Australian ducks are no exception.
Before the arrival of Europeans and their agriculture, ducks
only had to compete with other native birds and animals, as well
as Aboriginal hunters.
However, the introduction of water intensive agricultural activity
by Europeans changed all this and in particular rice cultivation
has been implicated in altering the Murrumbidgee river system in
Australia, and as a result the habitat for ducks The guest on this
episode of the podcast is Emily O’Gorman, an Associate Research
Fellow at the Australian Centre for Cultural Environmental
Research of the University of Wollongong. She is an expert on
Australian flooding and river history and examines on this podcast
the ways in which ducks as well as people negotiated the changing
water landscapes of the Murrumbidgee River caused by the creation
of rice paddies.
Information on Emily O'Gorman's book
Flood Country: An Environmental History of the
Murray-Darling Basin - Info from the Publisher.
