COMMENT: From Terania to Bentley and now the Richmond — communities can win
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When I moved to the Northern Rivers in 2014, I was fortunate enough to find a little piece of the place that immediately felt like home.
My then-partner, Philip Terry, and I bought a former dairy farm with more than a kilometre of frontage to the Wilsons River at South Gundurimba, just outside Lismore. It reminded me of growing up on a dairy farm in Kangaroo Valley, where, along with my three brothers, cousins and neighbours, we spent much of our childhoods swimming, exploring and playing around the river.
The Wilsons River I encountered in 2014 was something else. It was brown and discoloured, banks were collapsing and whitegoods, rubbish and occasionally dead animals floated past.
Around the same time, the Northern Rivers was in the grip of the anti-coal seam gas movement and the Bentley blockade, with thousands prepared to stand up because of what unconventional gas development might potentially do to groundwater.
I understood those concerns, but something troubled me: how could we mobilise thousands over a threat to water that might eventuate while one of our greatest waterways was right in front of us, visibly deteriorating?
I wondered whether we were watching a river slowly dying.
Richmond Rivers Rescue was born
Phillip and I joined forces with Professor Caroline Sullivan from Southern Cross University and Richmond Rivers Rescue was born.
We wanted farmers, environmentalists, academics, fishers, businesses, landholders and ordinary residents around the same table, because much of the Richmond catchment is privately owned and you cannot repair it by treating the people who own and work that land as the enemy.
Most importantly, we wanted the movement to be apolitical.
Public meetings in Lismore and Ballina attracted hundreds of people and we talked to fishing and environmental organisations, cane farmers, macadamia growers and others with an interest in the health of the catchment.
Soon after our Ballina meeting, then mayor David Wright invited us into his office to discuss what council could do. That conversation became, as I remember it, the genesis of something that has made a very real difference locally, with Ballina Shire Council subsequently pursuing a Special Rate Variation that provided dedicated funding for its Healthy Waterways Program.
Between 2018 and 2021 alone, council contributed about $2.18 million through the program and attracted another $2 million in grants, with work continuing today on water quality, riverbank stabilisation, riparian habitat and sustainable land management.
Above: A flyer promoting the community action meetings in early 2017 in Ballina and Lismore.
Main image: The author on the cover of the former Ballina Shire Advocate.
I’m proud Richmond Rivers Rescue played a part in starting the conversation that led Ballina Council down that path.
At a later summit at Southern Cross University, one message from the wider community came through particularly strongly: responsibility for the Richmond was fragmented across too many agencies and authorities, and what was needed was an integrated, whole-of-catchment approach.
That is why today’s announcement of a Richmond River Catchment Coordinator matters so much.
The Richmond will become the first catchment in NSW to demonstrate a new Integrated Catchment Management approach and, importantly, Water Minister Rose Jackson has made clear this person won’t simply be another bureaucrat with a title. The coordinator will have a budget and cross-government reach, with the job of getting agencies and organisations working together and ensuring good projects don’t become bogged down or forgotten.
In Ms Jackson’s words, the position will have “teeth”.
This isn’t an idea dreamt up in Sydney in 2026. People across this catchment were asking for it a decade ago.
Richmond Rivers Rescue eventually wound up for personal reasons, but the cause certainly didn’t. Others, including OzFish and more recently the Richmond Riverkeeper movement, continued the fight and ensured the health of the Richmond always remained on the public and political agenda.
Sometimes communities win
There is a long history in the Northern Rivers of communities deciding something is simply too important to lose.
At Terania Creek in 1979, local people stood in the path of bulldozers in Australia’s first direct-action forest blockade, a campaign that helped bring about Nightcap National Park and contributed to the end of rainforest logging across NSW.
More than three decades later came Bentley, when thousands united against coal seam gas and unconventional gas development until the NSW Government recognised the depth of community opposition, stopped the proposed drilling and the Northern Rivers moved on from CSG.
Richmond Rivers Rescue was never on that scale. There were no bulldozers or mass blockade, but perhaps there is a common thread: sometimes communities do win.
Sometimes persistence changes the political conversation and something that once seemed unlikely becomes government policy.
Today’s announcement belongs somewhere in that Northern Rivers tradition, although we should be very clear that we haven’t yet won the battle for the Richmond. The river remains in trouble and there is an enormous amount of work ahead; what we have won is the opportunity to finally tackle it in a coordinated way.
“The only barrier has been political will” – Minister Rose Jackson speaking at the Ballina press conference with Richmond Valley Mayor Robert Mustow and Minister for North Coast Janelle Saffin
Perhaps the most telling comment from today’s media conference came from Rose Jackson herself.
“There’s no legislative barriers here,” she said. “The only barrier has been political will.”
Now make it work
Janelle Saffin deserves credit for her persistence in pursuing action on the Richmond, Rose Jackson for recognising the need for a different approach, and the Minns Government for acting.
Now much will depend on finding the right coordinator, giving that person the authority and resources they need and, crucially, ensuring they can bring together the many interests across this enormous catchment.
One lesson from our campaign a decade ago remains particularly important: keep party politics out of it. We have seen recently how debate over flood mitigation can become caught in political point-scoring when decisions about rivers, flooding and catchment management need to be based on science, evidence and what actually works.
Farmers are not the enemy. Environmentalists are not the enemy. People wanting better flood protection are not the enemy.
A sick river is the problem.
Ten years ago, we described our waterways as the arteries of our environment and, if those arteries are unhealthy, the environment around them cannot be truly healthy either.
A coordinator won’t magically clean up the Richmond, nor will another plan sitting on a government shelf.
Success will be measured in healthier tributaries, restored wetlands, stronger riverbanks, better land-management practices, fewer catastrophic fish kills and, ultimately, a river system beginning to recover.
Ballina has already shown what sustained investment and practical action can achieve locally. Now we have an opportunity to do something much bigger across the entire catchment and, if it works, create a model that could be taken to other troubled rivers across NSW.
Today we haven’t fixed the Richmond River.
But after more than a decade of pushing for a better way, we may finally have made a big step forward.
