Compared to other regions in Australia, freshwater systems remain relatively intact and healthy in the lower Gulf of Carpentaria. However, looming mining and agricultural developments, changes to long-standing pastoral practices and recent monsoonal shifts have sparked concern among Traditional Owners and local community who depend on a healthy freshwater environment for food and drinking water supply. Many freshwater areas carry heavy cultural importance, especially the large number of freshwater springs scattered across the Gulf country that feed river systems and places where freshwater meets the salt, many of which are significant sites and hold high meaning in creation stories. Protection of freshwater areas is paramount for Traditional Owners to ensure not only health of the community and environment, but preservation of their cultural values.
Scientific knowledge and baseline data for these freshwater systems is greatly lacking, and Traditional Owners are concerned development is forging ahead before the knowledge and safeguards are in place to ensure their systems can withstand the impacts. Consequences of reckless water allocations and extractions, contamination from surface pesticides and other applied chemicals, increased nutrient runoff and erosion, impacts of increased levels of livestock and feral animals, and ongoing climate change effects are priority concerns, not only within the mainland freshwater systems, but for the flow-on effects that changes will bring to other connected environments and habitats, including saltwater country and fauna of the region.
Rangers from the Carpentaria Land Council and Wellesley Islands, together with researchers from Griffith University, have commenced an independent comprehensive freshwater monitoring program, which focusses on data that can be relatively easily collected (e.g. salinity, temperature, dissolved oxygen, nutrients), and provides information about long-term trends and immediate water quality issues. To date, this has identified locations with poor water quality, either for human uses or ecosystem effects. This combined with local knowledge from Traditional Owners provides an assessment of risk and the likelihood that this is based on human impacts. Collecting critical baseline data and building an understanding of the lower Gulf's freshwater systems is the first stage of this regional approach to help conserve and protect these significant areas.