Our relation to the Birrarung / Yarra is turning full circle

9 Nov 2026 · @derek

Melbourne exists because of the Birrarung

Melbourne exists because of the Birrarung. Its waters created the possibility of colonial settlement, on a river that had already sustained life for tens of thousands of years.

Since then the river has been renamed, drained, doubted and, more recently, recognised in law. Read in order, the story of what we have called it, and what we have asked of it, bends into a circle. Our relationship to the Birrarung / Yarra is turning full circle, back toward the kind of relationship the river held for most of its human history.

Deep time, then 238 years

The Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung have been in relationship with the Birrarung for somewhere between 40,000 and more than 65,000 years, depending on the source. The river sustained fish, eels, birds and drinking water, and in Woi-wurrung understanding it is a living being.

British colonisation of Australia began in 1788, and the river was renamed in 1835. Everything that follows in this story fits inside roughly 238 years. On the poster below, deep time is a single long line of green, and the last 238 years appear as a thin stripe of colour at its very end.

One river, many names, many intents

People come to the river with different intent, and that intent dictates how the river gets used. The names it has carried over time show it.

• Birrarung: river of mists and shadows, the name it held for most of its human history.
• Yarra (1835): one idea is that the name began as a mix-up. "Yarra" may have been a word for the waterfall near today's Queen Street, which a newcomer wrote down as the name of the whole river. That is an idea, not a settled fact.
• The Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works' Number One Drain: as the city grew, its street gutters were connected to the river as a way to wash the streets clean. The river became the city's drain.
• Yarra, again: through the twentieth century, a river with an undesirable reputation for being gross.

The circle closes

The name Birrarung has come back into law and into planning. In 2017 an Act of Parliament recognised the river as a single living entity, an Australian first. It is not full legal personhood: unlike New Zealand's Whanganui River, the Birrarung has no legal guardian with standing to sue on its behalf. It is still a significant change in how the river is understood.

In 2022 the Yarra Strategic Plan took the name Burndap Birrarung burndap umarkoo: what's good for the Birrarung is good for everyone. Today a growing movement is working toward a swimmable Birrarung by 2050, with Yarra City Council signing the Swimmable Cities Charter in 2024 and the City of Melbourne following in 2025.

On the poster, the colour that opens the story returns at Burndap Birrarung burndap umarkoo. The river ends the way it began, in green.

Swimming with Birrarung Swimming

The Swimmable Cities movement is a global effort by cities to make their rivers and waterways clean enough to swim in, and to treat swimming as a sign that a city is looking after its water. In Melbourne it gives the Birrarung a concrete, shared goal: a river people can step into.

What follows is imagination, not prediction. If we swam in the Birrarung regularly, we might see the city differently.

• The river would become a place, not a view. We would cross a bridge and think about the water under it, not only the traffic on it.
• Our streets would feel like part of the river. A kerbside drain would read as the start of the swimming hole downstream, and every street would be a small decision about what the river receives.
• We would check the river the way we check the weather. Water quality, rain and flow would become everyday knowledge, shared across a neighbourhood.
• The city would turn to face the river. Lunch breaks, school lessons and summer evenings would drift toward the water.
• Care would come naturally. Few people litter or pollute the water they swim in.

Swimming is the most embodied way to know a river. A city that swims in the Birrarung is a city in relationship with it.

Learning the river with your body

A regenerative future is one in relation with the living systems we depend on, where human activity is interconnected with them rather than separate from or extracting out of them. Birrarung Regenerative Futures is a five-hour journey built around that idea.

We walk the CBD to see where a city's streets and drains send their water. We spend time with Doughnut Economics, thinking in systems rather than silos. Then we take to the water for a two-hour paddle, and this is where the learning becomes embodied. As participants learn to paddle, reading the current and finding a rhythm together, the day's ideas stop being concepts and become something felt in the body.

Participants return with a deeper connection to the cycles of the city, and with actionable ways to be part of regeneration in their own streets and suburbs.

How would you like to relate to your river?

Whether you walk it, swim in it, paddle it or cross it on your commute, you bring an intent to the Birrarung, and that intent shapes what the river becomes. For most of its human history the intent was care. For a stretch it was convenience. Now there is a chance to choose again.

How would you like to relate to your river?