The CRC is bringing together state government agencies, farm lobbies, universities, research scientists, and First Nations communities to build a formidable new coalition seeking to tackle ecological collapse, economic exclusion, and social trauma across the Basin’s most disadvantaged communities

Written by Ralph Johnstone

Most of us have at some time felt the rejuvenating power of Nature, the way that staying or working in the countryside lifts your mood, drains stresses, and soothes the soul. More recently, rigorous clinical studies have shown that exposure to nature – especially over prolonged periods – can be a powerful antidote to chronic mental illness, and a potent medicine for recovering from serious trauma.

So it makes perfect sense, according to Professor Fatima Nasrallah, Senior Scientist at the Queensland Brain Institute, that struggling young First Nations Australians – with their visceral connections to Country, and often devastating life stories – have more to gain from returning to a life of purpose on their ancestral lands. “If your roots and connection to the land are the most important thing to you, that’s what will facilitate your recovery from trauma,” she says.

Professor Nasrallah is the latest in a long line of scientists, conservationists, and landowners to throw their weight behind One Basin CRC’s River Recovery and Futures Alliance Project – colloquially known as ‘the Billabong project’ – a multifaceted social and ecological program that aims to combine scientifically-driven wetland restoration works with the personal rehabilitation of Indigenous young people through on-Country training and land management work.

Launched in November, the project has already attracted considerable support across the political, commercial, and academic spectrums – with government agencies and universities joining conservation groups, farmers’ lobbies, and Aboriginal Corporations to formally back One Basin’s push for federal funding.

Among the most compelling – and surprising – of these early supporters are two of the country’s largest farming peak bodies: the National Farmers’ Federation, representing over 30 agricultural organisations, and the NSW Irrigators’ Council, representing 12,000 farmers and water access licence holders. Malcolm Holm, who chairs the NFF’s Water Committee, described the project as a “no-brainer”, saying: “Bringing farmers, researchers and communities together around billabong restoration will deliver better outcomes for us all… if First Nations knowledge is there, we should be using it.”

The Billabong project is based on an award-winning restoration methodology developed by Ngemba elder Uncle Feli McHughes, who’s been working with hydrologists from CSIRO and various universities to prove up his wetland regeneration techniques since he successfully brought a parched billabong back to life at his home in Brewarrina in 1997 – by pouring half his 900-megalitre water licence into it.

In the intervening years, Uncle Feli’s methods have attracted varying levels of support, including from the NSW Department of Primary Industries and the Corangamite Catchment Management Authority, which used his approach to rehabilitate a second billabong on the Barwon River, while simultaneously putting 15 young people through ecosystem management training. Feli says that project delivered “significant improvements in the young men’s lives” – so much so that, in 2009, it was runner-up for Landcare Australia’s Indigenous Award.

“As First Nations people, we know the importance of healthy billabongs, where fish breed and frogs spawn, where nutrients are absorbed and pollutants flushed out,” says Uncle Feli. “But despite their incredible importance, there are so few personnel looking after our rivers. We have permanent maintenance forces caring for our roads and railways, our telecommunications and energy infrastructure – but not our rivers… First Nations people have the knowledge and the science to look after our rivers.”

“It’s so important for us white fellas to do some listening now.”

– Carolyn Hall, CEO, Mulloon Institute

Replicable restoration

Like all One Basin’s projects, the young men and women who get jobs with the Billabong project will be part of a rigorous research program that uses precise data gathering and tracking to monitor the efficacy and replicability of its activities.

With rapid advances in neurochemical monitoring, Professor Nasrallah says the team of neuroscientists and clinicians that form the Queensland Brain Injury Centre will be able to bring comprehensive neuroimaging to even the most remote communities – using a combination of portable MRI and EEG scanners, biomarker testing, and behavioural assessments. “We can provide all the expertise of our labs and an extended network of basic scientists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and allied health professionals to help the project precisely measure the neurological impacts of its work,” she says.

“After a traumatic brain injury, we see injured brains forming new neural pathways to get around damaged areas and reactivate old functions through the amazing restorative processes of neuroplasticity. Scientists are discovering that the natural world can help heal a damaged brain, and with modern equipment, we can monitor an individual’s functional connectivity – how different regions of their brain are behaving and talking to each other. Put simply, we can see people’s brains reconnecting and recovering over time.”

The healing properties of life on Country have long been known to First Nations peoples, but like so many initiatives to promote social justice in remote communities, there’s been little political appetite to tie ecological projects to psychosocial support for the long-term marginalised or unemployed.

Bill Wilson, CEO of the Ngarrindjeri Aboriginal Corporation, is one of several Indigenous elders who’ve pledged in-kind support and resources to the Billabong Project. The Ngarrindjeri Corporation runs a celebrated Indigenous Rangers program, which has around 25 young people working full time among the endangered wetlands on South Australia’s Fleurieu Peninsula. A former counsellor, Uncle Bill is also acutely aware of the healing properties of being on Country.

“Everyone needs to work and generate income for their families, but there are so many unresolved issues in most First Nations people’s lives – issues of grief, loss, alcohol, racism, and especially intergenerational trauma,” he says. “No one who’s grown up on Country hasn’t faced some of these issues… We see so many kids struggling in child protection and juvenile justice – they get stuck in these punitive systems and never come out. But put them back on Country with their mob and their elders, talk to them about their culture and their role in it, and kids that people have almost given up on have a new purpose.

“This project is the first I’ve seen for a long time that’s trying to resolve issues that are so often left for people to suffer in silence. We’d love to be one of the potential sites where this support is offered to young men and women. We see the benefits every day of our young fellas being on Country caring for Country. We have so many young people who are not happy within their own skin – but if we can get them back on Country, learning from their elders, caring for their ngaitji (totems), it will help them focus on something bigger than themselves.”

“The window is closing for the climate, but the window is also closing for our people.”

– Professor Troy Meston, First Nations Research Lead, One Basin CRC

A five-year plan

The Billabong project was formally launched in November, at a webinar attended by more than 200 One Basin members and their colleagues and supporters. The project is currently seeking financial and in-kind support for an initial five years – in the first year, establishing the sites and resources for three regional hubs and training centres in the Coorong region of the lower Murray River, near Deniliquin on the Edward River, and in the rapidly-drying middle reaches of the Darling River.

The hubs will be governed by First Nations-led advisory councils, and supported by local Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations, TAFE colleges, and One Basin’s university and industry partners, who will help co-design programs of revegetation, riverbank stabilisation, groundwater rehabilitation, and fish passage upgrades – which will commence in the second and third years. An additional six sites will be rolled out in years four and five.

Professor Troy Meston, One Basin’s First Nations Research Lead, says the project has the potential to significantly lift many of the Closing the Gap targets in remote Indigenous communities, where recent data confirms critical targets like suicide prevention, adult imprisonment, and children in out-of-home care have continued to deteriorate.

“There are basin communities that have suffered generations of dispossession and trauma, where they saw some of the highest No votes in the referendum, and where shrinking water resources are threatened by catastrophic climate change,” says Troy. “We have an existential crisis of climate and a rapidly closing window in which to address it – it’s more critical than ever to find shared solutions, to strategise a way forward together.”

“There are two things dying in our basin right now – our rivers and our people. If we can put the two together, they will heal each other.”

– Uncle Feli McHughes, Chair,
First Nations Applied Management Advisory Committee (FNAMAC), One Basin CRC

Through its 90 partners, and links to a growing number of Indigenous Ranger programs, One Basin’s network will provide the Billabong project with a weight of technical and ecological expertise to train and mentor its young recruits. As well as training in wetland regeneration, water and biodiversity monitoring, and data collection, the project’s leads are examining other areas with local enterprise potential – from cultural tourism to fish restocking, native food cultivation, and ‘bush medicine’ production.

Culturally attuned training

Many of One Basin’s partners have been involving the knowledge and expertise of First Nations elders in their river restoration work for years, if not decades. In NSW’s Southern Tablelands, the Mulloon Institute has a long history of collaborating with members of the Yuin Nation to learn about Country-centred water stewardship.

CEO Carolyn Hall is keen to involve the Billabong team in the Mulloon Institute’s First Nations Water Stewardship Certificate program, co-designed with five First Nations groups from across Australia to deliver “culturally attuned water management training” to local irrigators. “We’re very keen to support this work, particularly with the technical and hydrological skills to restore billabongs and reconnect them to the main Murray channel,” says Carolyn. “We’ve gotten to know Uncle Feli, and I’m utterly in awe of his dogged determination to improve the life of his community.

“This project is a coat-hanger that we can attach so much to: not just cultural water management, but technical innovation, partnerships with rangers, all sorts of work with mob… It’s so important for us white fellas to do some listening now. This project can be a potent tool for dealing with structural racism through systems-based change. Bringing First Nations knowledge closer to farmers will provide important opportunities for healing. Getting on Country together is a really powerful thing.”

Dr Madeleine Hartley, CEO of the NSW Irrigators’ Council, agrees there’s an urgent need for systemic change to address the inequalities that have held up social development in so many riverine communities – and that change need not be to the detriment of irrigators.

“With the historic tensions between First Nations communities and irrigators, we see this project as an opportunity to provide some long-overdue conversations between industry groups and communities that struggle with access to riverine land,” she says. “Uncle Feli’s unyielding optimism is certainly inspiring to us at the Irrigators’ Council – it’s difficult not to empathise with his efforts to get people back on Country and working through their trauma.

“There’s been a lot of paralysis with this kind of work in the past, a lot of political decisions that have got in the way of funding – but this project shows the strong desire of many organisations to get this kind of work off the ground. We will do everything we can in terms of partnerships and land access, technical advice, and other in-kind support to help get this project going.”

Malcolm Holm is also confident that the Billabong project will find support among the members of the National Farmers’ Federation. A dairy farmer from Blighty in the Riverina, he says the buybacks of water from many of his members’ farms has meant a growing appetite to collaborate with neighbours and basin stakeholders.

“We welcome any incentive to get water back into the landscape, including farms, which doesn’t involve buybacks, and I believe that using First Nations knowledge can help,” he says. “The Billabong project ticks a lot of boxes for us… If farmers and Indigenous groups, the Murray-Darling Basin Authority and CEWH [the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder] are all partners, it will work.

“We’re all custodians of the land and water. For farmers, it’s all about using our soil, our water and farming inputs in ways that don’t ruin the soil or harm the environment. Farmers and communities may come at these things from different angles, but if we have respectful relationships, I think we can make progress together.”

Heightened risks

The 2025 Basin Outlook report, published by the MDBA in November, portends significantly hotter, drier conditions over the next 25 years, with reduced riverflows and more frequent droughts threatening wetlands that are already shrinking and separating from the rivers they serve. The report acknowledges the heightened risks facing wetlands in the Murrumbidgee and Goulburn rivers in the southern basin, where waterflows are declining faster, irrigators facing greater stress, and some communities facing the real prospect of running out of water.

The report – which feeds into this year’s critical Basin Plan Review – acknowledges that First Nations communities are on the frontline of these changes, with the changing climate risking “irreversible damage to First Nations people, Water Country and knowledge systems.”

“Impacts on Water Country are linked to and are felt by First Nations people through poor outcomes related to their health and wellbeing,” the report states. “The nature of impacts on Water Country heightens anxieties for First Nations people, who carry the burden of seeing their ancestral lands, waters and ecosystems degrade in ways that disrupt continuity to the intergenerational care of Country and the passing on of knowledge to future generations.”

“In fact, all the Closing the Gap targets are natural side-effects of river restoration,” says Uncle Feli McHughes. “At the moment, politicians are looking for quick fixes and high commodity returns, while the health of the Basin slides backwards. The water is so toxic people can no longer drink it, and we need ever more fertilisers to grow crops. We’re really in a huge mess.”

“Kids that people say ‘lock ’em up, they’re bad eggs’ – if you surround them with their culture and their elders, and nurture and support them, they’re sponges for this kind of thing. It can literally save their lives.”

– Uncle Bill Wilson, CEO, Ngarrindjeri Aboriginal Corporation

Ultimately, though, it is the potential for healing country and people that provides the greatest impetus for the Billabong project. Professor Fatima Nasrallah, who’s spent nearly 20 years studying brain injuries and serious trauma, is convinced of the overwhelmingly healing power of Nature and people’s connections to the land.

“Despite all the physical healing we do, it so often comes back to what an individual believes in,” she says. “If a patient has gone through a brain injury or trauma and another patient who’s gone through the same journey comes and talks to them, that patient often recovers a lot faster. Where your roots are and what you believe in is always critical to healing. I hugely believe that if your connection to the land is the most important thing to you, that’s what will facilitate your recovery from trauma.”

For more information on the River Recovery & Futures Alliance Project, see our project webpage at: https://onebasin.com.au/project/river-recovery-futures-alliance-billabong-project/

Read the project prospectus at: https://onebasin.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Billabong_Project_Prospectus_v1.2.pdf