The need for healing motivated Quentin Beresford to begin researching his book on the contested politics of the Murray–Darling Basin: Wounded Country. Like many Australians in the summer of 2019, he was shocked by the images of mass fish kills downstream from Menindee in far-west New South Wales. Politicians had been promising to ‘fix’ the system for decades. The rollout of the multi-billion-dollar Murray–Darling Basin Plan was mired in controversy, with little to show for its cost – if anything, the rivers appeared to be in worse condition. How had things gone so wrong?

Beresford argues that to understand today’s disastrous state of the rivers we must turn to the past. The topic would seem a natural fit for Beresford, given his most recent books on environmental politics, The Rise and Fall of Gunns Ltd (2015) and Adani and the War Over Coal (2018). His new book begins with colonial surveyors Charles Sturt and Thomas Mitchell, the men charged with mapping the interior in preparation for its exploitation in global imperial trade networks. They were among the first Europeans to record accounts of their contact with Aboriginal people of the region. Their journals illustrate dominant ideas of the time – separation between humans and nature, the superiority of European culture – that would set the stage for frontier conflict, the marginalisation of First Nations peoples, and racist political frameworks that still persist.

A third of the book is devoted to the violent and protracted dispossession of the region’s more than forty Aboriginal nations. The treatment of Aboriginal people caused deep political divisions in the colony. The squatters who benefited from violence used their growing wealth and political influence to ensure perpetrators rarely faced consequences. Simultaneously, the settlers waged a ‘war on nature’ backed by the state. Whole communities would join frenzied slaughters that ‘thrilled participants’. One station owner calculated that he had overseen the destruction of 30,000 kangaroos. Hundreds of thousands of dingoes were killed for a government bounty. Frontier violence and the ‘war of extinction [that] was unleashed on native wildlife’ were underpinned by cultural attitudes and a desire to subdue, conquer, and simplify complex social-ecological systems into spaces for commodity production. This is an argument others have made in recent years, and it is valuable to have a thorough exploration of these connections in this book. Australians can only build better future relationships by first acknowledging the truth and consequences of this history as well as the ongoing trauma and ecological disruption it caused.

Beresford makes a persuasive case that those nineteenth- and early twentieth-century experiences ‘established the model of vested interests capturing the political system’. So too did the pattern of ignoring expert and scientific advice for political expediency: he details the repeated pleas from naturalists, scientists, agriculturalists, traditional owners, and some landholders to shift from ecologically destructive policies and practices. As the book charts the ideologies that shaped the region, from yeoman agrarianism to the culture wars under John Howard and Tony Abbott, Beresford enlivens the narrative with telling quotes from Trove’s growing collection of digitised newspapers.

Representing an area as vast and diverse as the Murray– Darling Basin in one book is a challenge. Queensland rain doesn’t flow past the town I grew up in, nor many others in the Basin; life for the community in Wilcannia, for instance, is different from life in Canberra, the Basin’s largest city. After all, the idea of the Murray–Darling Basin itself is largely bureaucratic. Reading Wounded Country, you get the sense that what unites these places is their history of turmoil and heartbreak at the hands of crony capitalists.

Wounded Country is not an environmental history, as the introduction states. Unlike Charles Massey in Call of the Reed Warbler (2017) or Kate Holden in The Winter Road (2021), both of whom read their way into the field and brought their readers with them, Beresford doesn’t engage with the existing environmental history literature except to extract data or stories from a handful of works. There are plenty of pithy quotes from former independent MP Tony Windsor, for example, but not one from historian and farmer Eric Rolls. The chapters list staggering figures of destruction, such as hectares lost to erosion or salinity, but the environment is more often a backdrop to the politics. An author more attentive to place would know Walgett and Brewarrina are upstream from Bourke, not downstream; the Macquarie Marshes aren’t near Bathurst – they’re nearly 400 kilometres inland from there, between the town of Warren and the Barwon River. The Covid-19 pandemic dashed Beresford’s plans to travel along the rivers from Queensland to South Australia. Perhaps this journey would have provided an additional layer of ecological and social intimacy.

Beresford is a political scientist by training, and political analysis is where the book’s strength lies. Wounded Country is an absorbing and lucid account of the catastrophic history of political and bureaucratic mismanagement of one of the world’s great river systems. In particular, the rich sources available for the past decade, demonstrating flagrant and persistent undermining of environmental and social goals for the benefit of a privileged few, sometimes bordering on state corruption, will provoke anger. Perhaps it will help keep up the pressure for reform. Public attention to the plight of the inland is sporadic. It is a story that should be told over and over to give this wounded country a chance to heal.