Andrew McLachlan (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Sturt River is a 27-kilometre-long stream that starts in the Adelaide Hills, breaks out of the escarpment and flows across the south-western Adelaide alluvial planes towards the Gulf St Vincent. With normal flows, it is a diminutive stream, not much more than a creek, but it carves its way through an ancient landscape that is the remnant of a once large mountain range.

The waterway is famous, at least to the geologist community, because the landscape offered early evidence of global glacial events. Long before engineers thought to tame its flow, this waterway carried deep meaning for the Kaurna people, who know it as Warripari, the windy place by the river. Today, the Warriparinga Living Kaurna Cultural Centre sits on a bend where the stream emerges from the hills and spills onto the plains.

This is the last point where it can still be recognised in its natural course, for, in the 1960s and 70s, misguided engineering saw its flows diverted into a concrete channel. The serpentine path of the river was buried and built over as if it never existed. In the process, ancient river redgums were destroyed along with Aboriginal cultural places and an entire river ecosystem. A flood dam was also built in the Sturt Gorge to protect the downstream urbanisation of the old floodplain.

The foolishness of our failed engineering solutions was eventually understood and acknowledged by the state government. Less than 20 years after this system had been built, in 1991, the state government strategic planning document for Adelaide, entitled Vision 2020, was accompanied by plans to reverse engineer the system and help bring the river back to life. It was a bold plan driven by a sense of contrition and cautiously advised that it may take 30 years to implement. In the end, an off-stream wetland or two were built, but, disappointingly, nothing much else has happened since.

Now in 2026, we have a problem of continued urban flooding, a channel that is starting to structurally fail and polluted water still flushing into the sea. Intergenerational investment is needed to bring the stream back to life. While it may be too late to restore the river to its former natural beauty, we can still aspire to set it free, to revive its flows, to renew its spirit and to protect the flora and fauna that have survived. The community goodwill is there, but that will not be enough. We need a succession of ambitious governments to rise to the challenge and pursue the restoration.

I thank community leaders Corey Turner and Des Fowles for sharing with me their dream of releasing these waters from their concrete prison. As Corey rightly says: "The river needs room to breathe and to live. We have imprisoned her and made her and ourselves unhealthy." It is an incredibly ambitious project at a time when our society only talks of growth and not about the cost of such growth to our natural world. Warripari, the Sturt River, is an example of what unrestrained development inevitably delivers. Where nature is not at the heart of the decision-making, you bequeath your communities not a sustainable future but a pitiless dystopian landscape.

The potential sale of Army's Warradale Barracks, which sits alongside the river, offers the perfect opportunity to take the first step in reclaiming land for nature. I acknowledge that encouraging conversations across Adelaide are beginning. Corey and Des are at the forefront of them. It's time for nature to come first . It's time for us to right the wrongs of the past.