People of Three Rivers: Rematriating Wiradjuri Living Waters

Wiradjuri are freshwater people whose identity is constituted through relationships with three interconnected rivers: Wambuul (Macquarie), Galari (Lachlan) and Marrambidya (Murrumbidgee), with Milawa (Murray) marking the Nation’s southern boundary. A companion article develops the freshwater ontology through which Wiradjuri understand themselves as the people of three rivers; this article extends that work by examining rematriation as the return of ancestral relationships, responsibilities and authority between Wiradjuri peoples and living waters. Situating rematriation against the lineage of concepts through which settler law and scholarship have sought to accommodate Indigenous water relations: recognition, rights of Nature, river personhood, ontological pluralism, cultural flows and Living Waters, the article argues that each operates along an axis of recognition, asking settler systems to acknowledge, include or grant, whereas rematriation shifts the axis to responsibility, returning Indigenous peoples to obligations already held within First Law and carried through the maternal line. Read through the Murray–Darling Basin, rematriation reorients water governance from rights over water toward responsibilities to water, with Wiradjuri-led governance and cultural flows as its practical enactment.