Evaluating Australian fresh waters for nature conservation

Australia is the driest inhabited continent, with its population of around 20 million people mostly concentrated on the well-watered eastern seaboard. Despite only 200 years of European occupation, water quality and native freshwater ecosystems have deteriorated seriously owing to over-extraction, flow regulation, pollution (especially salinization and eutrophication), urbanization and exotic pest invasion (reviews in Boulton & Brock, 1999; Schofield et al., 2000; Arthington & Pusey, 2003). Although European settlement in Australia has been largely limited to the coastal cities (and nearby regions) of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide (Figure 10.1), inland waters have also been heavily exploited and regulated. Water resource development during the nineteenth century focused on water supply and waste disposal, while in the arid inland, successful agriculture and mining often relied on isolated feats of engineering to provide a reliable water resource (Evans, 2001). In this first century of European occupation, there was limited impact upon the landscape yet considerable development of legal and institutional arrangements relating to water supply (Smith, 1998) - many of which remained in place until the early 1990s.