But there is another truly remarkable natural wonder in Australia that deserves to be mentioned alongside these iconic landmarks.
It's the Murray–Darling Basin.
As Chairman of the Murray–Darling Basin Authority I urge Australians this World Rivers Day to find out a bit more about this critically important and hard-working river system.
Inland from the Great Dividing Range is a vast area that isn't pristine wilderness, and all more amazing because of it. It's pivotal to so much of Australian life and yet so familiar and productive that it's easy to take for granted.
It's one million square kilometres—stretching across the bottom third of Queensland, taking in most of New South Wales and Victoria, all of the Australian Capital Territory and the south-east of South Australia. Its 23 rivers and more than 30,000 wetlands traverse fabulously diverse landscapes from the Snowy Mountains in the east to the arid red expanses west of Broken Hill.
The thing that connects each corner of this extraordinary national asset is the flow of our great inland rivers, which come together and travel more than 3000 kilometres all the way to the Southern Ocean in South Australia.
That means managing the health of an area the size of France and Germany combined as one system. It traverses five jurisdictions, is home to 2.6 million people, produces 40 per cent of Australia's food and fibre, and hundreds of species of birds, mammals and native fish depend upon it.
Management of such a big, diverse and variable system is an important challenge. And variable it is—in 2006 the River Murray recorded the lowest inflows on record at 7,000 billion litres when 50 years earlier the inflows reached 118,000 billion litres.
Those low inflows in 2006 shook the assumptions that had underpinned the management of the rivers. For the first time it was recognised that there may not always be enough water to go around. Water extraction had increased six-fold between the 1920s and 1995 when a cap on diversions was introduced. The millennium drought showed us that managing this vast interconnected system on a state by state basis was not sustainable.
And so the Basin Plan was born. Internationally, this system of management is world first policy. Other nations are looking to our example and watching our progress closely as they look to manage water availability and quality issues of their own.
The Murray–Darling Basin is important historically in the development of modern Australia as well as for the people of our first nations. It works hard as Australia's main food bowl and in generating tourism dollars for our rural and regional communities. And it is important ecologically for the native flora and fauna found nowhere else on earth.
On this World Rivers Day I hope all Australians can take a moment to see past the complexity of the challenge and recognise the benefits this vast river system and natural wonder provides us all.
The Hon Neil Andrew AO
Chairman Murray–Darling Basin Authority
ENDS