Qualla: McArthur River

McArthur River: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carole Mackinney, CC0. Follow the McArthur River far enough and the question becomes whose river it is. To a German explorer in 1845 it was a feature to be named — Ludwig Leichhardt called it for the wealthy Macarthur family who had funded his expedition, men who never saw it. To the Yanyuwa, Garrwa, Mara and Gudanji peoples whose country it crosses, the river is something older and far harder to rename: the Dreamtime pathway of the Rainbow Serpent, the ancestral being who shaped the land and still keeps its law. Both claims still run side by side along these banks, and where they meet — at a bend in the river, beside a great deposit of zinc — is where the modern story turns.

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Image: Carole Mackinney | CC0

McArthur River: Off the Barkly, Down to the Gulf

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frank Vincentz, CC BY-SA 3.0. The McArthur gathers itself on the northern edge of the Barkly Tableland and runs north and east toward the sea, draining a basin of just over 20,000 square kilometres. It is fed by creeks and rivers with names like Tooganginie, Kilgour and Clyde, and it pushes some 3.27 million ...

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Image: Frank Vincentz | CC BY-SA 3.0

McArthur River: The Serpent's Road

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tentotwo, CC BY-SA 3.0. For the peoples of this country, the entire river is sacred — not a backdrop to sacred sites but a living one. It is the road the Rainbow Serpent travelled, and there are places along it where the great snake is said to have risen from the ground. Not far off lie the Barramundi D...

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Image: Tentotwo | CC BY-SA 3.0

McArthur River: Bending the River

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carole Mackinney, CC0. Beneath that sacred bend lies one of the largest zinc, lead and silver deposits on Earth. Underground mining began at the McArthur River Mine in 1995. To reach more of the ore, the operation proposed turning open-cut — which meant diverting the river itself, roughly five and a ha...

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Image: Carole Mackinney | CC0

McArthur River: What the Law Allowed

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carole Mackinney, CC0. Then, in early 2009, the federal environment minister Peter Garrett — once a protest singer himself — formally approved the expansion, attaching conditions meant to protect the freshwater sawfish and the migratory birds that depend on the estuary. The diversion went ahead. The ri...

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Image: Carole Mackinney | CC0

McArthur River: A Near-Pristine Mouth

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carole Mackinney, CC0. Downstream of the controversy, the McArthur still arrives at the Gulf in remarkable health. Its estuary is rated near-pristine and forms part of the Port McArthur Tidal Wetlands, recognised internationally as an Important Bird Area. The river empties opposite the Sir Edward Pelle...

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Image: Carole Mackinney | CC0