The Birrarung Catchment

The Birrarung Catchment is McGregor Coxall’s contribution to the Reimagining Birrarung, Design Concepts for 2070, an exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria.  Looking fifty years into the future, Reimagining Birrarung: Design Concepts for 2070 presents a series of provocations for the lands and waters of the Birrarung (Yarra River).

All land within the Birrarung’s catchment impacts the river itself. As such, this project examines the river beyond its water course – as one living, integrated natural entity – through the perspective of past, present and future.

As a vast living entity, the Birrarung existed freely and unrestrained for over one hundred million years, shaping and being shaped by the lands.

There is an intrinsic connection between the Birrarung and its Traditional Custodians, which has developed over a period of deep time. This work examines how colonisation has and continues to cause irrevocable damage to the Birrarung – through alteration and coercion – to the river’s health, its lands and its people.

Looking forward, this project offers a future where the Birrarung is a connected and expansive vital waterway, enabled by First Nations’ cultural land management practices. Mapping incremental and catchment-scale change, this project envisions that by 2070 Melbourne could feasibly coexist with a thriving Great Birrarung Parkland.

The Birrarung catchment area includes 4078 square kilometres of land and is home to more than two million people – about one third of the population of Victoria. The river is 424 kilometres long and starts at Mt Baw Baw in the Yarra Ranges National Park, flowing downstream to the mouth of the river at Port Philip Bay. It is a significant waterway, fed by twenty-four tributaries and providing approximately 70% of Melbourne’s drinking water. The Birrarung is the source of life for diverse ecosystems and provides habitat for fish, reptiles, mammals and more than 190 species of birds.

The vast scale and complexity of the Birrarung, its topography, river network and ecology, can be demystified using the expertise and tools of landscape architecture. This scale model of the Birrarung catchment combines topographic modelling, mapping and data analysis to visualise the social, economic and environmental factors that have shaped the Birrarung and how we live with it. Tracing the layers of the past and speculating into the future, the data presented here culminates with a vision for the Greater Birrarung Parkland, advocated for by the Birrarung Council, Traditional Custodians and others, of a connected parkland providing a continuous, publicly accessible landscape and habitat that runs the entire length of the Birrarung. This parkland could be fully implemented by 2070.