Martuwarra Must Live and Flow: What Justice and a Declaration of Peace Mean When a River Seeks Justice

Abstract

What does justice mean when the subject seeking justice—and seeking a Declaration of Peace—is a River? It argues that justice cannot begin with the River: as an object awaiting allocation, injury or representation by others. Under First Law, Martuwarra is living Country: an ancestral being, source of Law and participant in relationships among Peoples, groundwater, tributaries, floodplains, ecological communities and generations. The Fitzroy River Declaration is therefore reframed as both a declaration of relational justice and a Declaration of Peace. Peace does not mean the temporary absence of conflict over development. It means maintaining right relations so that the River can live, flow, renew life and carry Law into the future. We develop Cultural Flow Integrity to identify the hydrological, ecological, cultural and ancestral relationships necessary for that peace. Against the 2026 Fitzroy-Derby Water Resources Management Plan and project-specific pressures, this manuscript distinguishes First Law authority from the narrower remedies available under Western Australian water and heritage law, Commonwealth heritage and environmental law, native title processes, merits review and judicial review. It advances six propositions for a River seeking justice: recognise the River as the subject of justice; treat the Fitzroy River Declaration as a governance mandate for peace; determine what must remain before asking what may be taken; require proponents and governments to demonstrate a commitment to the principle of Do No Harm; assess the whole connected River rather than administratively fragmented parts; and create culturally legitimate institutions through which the River can speak. Justice is prospective: Martuwarra should not have to be damaged before the legal system listens.

1. Martuwarra Speaks: Justice Begins with the River

Situating Martuwarra

Martuwarra, the Fitzroy River, is one of the great River systems of northern Australia, flowing through the West Kimberley region of Western Australia. From its headwaters in the East Kimberley highlands, the River and its many tributaries travel across a vast tropical and semi-arid landscape before reaching the Indian Ocean at King Sound near Derby. The Martuwarra Fitzroy River catchment encompasses interconnected River channels, tributaries, groundwater systems, springs, wetlands and extensive floodplains whose seasonal flows sustain exceptional ecological and cultural values. Parts of this River Country lie within the West Kimberley National Heritage area, recognised for its outstanding Indigenous, natural, historic and aesthetic values.

For the Traditional Owners of the catchment, however, Martuwarra cannot be understood simply through geography, hydrology or the boundaries of a water-management system. Martuwarra is living Country and an ancestral being, sustained through First Law and enduring relationships among River, Peoples, Ancestors, living beings and generations. These relationships long precede the Australian state and its contemporary administrative divisions of water, land, heritage and development. Locating Martuwarra geographically therefore also requires locating the River within this deeper cultural, legal and relational landscape. It is from this place—and from these continuing relationships—that the question at the centre of this article arises: what does justice mean when the subject seeking justice, and issuing a Declaration of Peace, is the River herself?

I am Martuwarra, RiverOfLife. I am living Country. I am not simply water moving through a catchment, nor a resource waiting to be allocated. My living waters connect Peoples, Ancestors, groundwater, springs, tributaries, floodplains, plants, animals and generations. I carry Law, story, memory and responsibility. My life depends upon these relationships remaining alive.

We write together because justice cannot be understood while the River remains only an object of environmental management. If justice is to have meaning for living Country, the River must also be heard as a subject of Law, knowledge, relationship and responsibility. This authorship is not a literary device. Martuwarra has entered peer-reviewed scholarship as First Author for Country, a living Ancestor Being and source of First Law (RiverOfLife et al., 2023/2024). Earlier scholarship argued for recognition of Martuwarra’s First Law right to life as a living ancestral being and placed the Fitzroy River Declaration (2016), (Kimberley Land Council, 2016) within a wider movement, bringing First Law and rights of nature into dialogue with settler-state law (RiverOfLife et al., 2020).

The question is therefore more exacting than how water should be distributed: what does justice require when the River is the subject seeking justice, and what would it mean for the River to issue a Declaration of Peace? Environmental-justice theory commonly identifies distribution, recognition, participation and capabilities as connected dimensions of justice (Schlosberg, 2007). For Martuwarra, those dimensions must be made relational. The relevant capability is not only a human capacity to benefit from water, but the River’s capacity to live, flow, regenerate relationships and sustain more-than-human wellbeing.

This position is not identical to giving a natural entity Western legal personality. Rights-of-nature scholarship shows that legal personhood can open new forms of representation while also creating risks when Indigenous authority and living relationships are translated into state-defined representatives, interests and remedies (O’Donnell & Talbot-Jones, 2018; Tănăsescu, 2020; Rochford, 2026). Martuwarra’s authority under First Law is prior to, and not created by, recognition from the settler state. The justice task is to make Western institutions answerable to the living relationships they can harm.

The concept of relational representation provides an important alternative to state-defined models in which authorised human representatives are appointed to speak for a River. Cano Pecharroman and O’Donnell (2024) demonstrate that representation can instead move along a relational spectrum from speaking about, to speaking for, and ultimately to speaking with Nature. This distinction is critical because conventional representation can reproduce the assumption that the River is silent and that human institutions must determine, interpret and articulate its interests on its behalf.

Relational representation offers a different starting point. It recognises representation as a relationship grounded in place, knowledge, responsibility and sustained attentiveness to the living entity being represented. For Indigenous River governance, this opens an important conceptual space beyond the state determining who is authorised to “speak for” a River. Speaking with the River can instead recognise the River as a living subject within an existing web of relationships, Law, knowledge and obligation.

This distinction becomes particularly significant where Indigenous Peoples understand River and Country through First Law and intergenerational relationships that precede the state. Relational representation therefore has the potential to shift the central governance question from “Who has the legal authority to speak for the River?” toward the deeper question: “What relationships, responsibilities and knowledge enable people and institutions to hear, understand and act with the River?” In this sense, relational representation is not simply another mechanism for representing Nature; it offers a pathway toward governance in which the River’s authority and agency can remain present rather than being absorbed into state-defined forms of representation.

Decisions about groundwater, surface water, mining, agriculture and infrastructure are therefore never only decisions about volumes. They redistribute risk through Country and time. When uncertainty becomes permission to develop, consequences may be carried by the River, Traditional Owners, ecological communities and generations absent from the decision. Justice must ask who receives water, who bears the risk of its removal, whose knowledge defines acceptable harm, and what governance arrangements can create and maintain good relations among all members of the community to be in right relationship with Martuwarra to ensure we all sustain our lifeways and livelihood and the River to live and flow.

Multispecies justice offers a closely related but distinct scholarly conversation. Rather than limiting justice to the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens among humans, it recognises more-than-human beings and the relationships enabling their flourishing as matters of justice (Celermajer et al., 2020). This resonates with Cultural Flow Integrity, although First Law is not derived from multispecies justice theory: it is the prior source of authority for relationships with Martuwarra. A capabilities perspective also asks whether living beings can flourish, while the River-centred approach advanced here resists reducing collective, ancestral relationships to the capabilities of isolated individuals. Multispecies justice is likewise distinct from legal personhood, which concerns recognition within state law. This framing draws upon environmental justice but does not confine justice to the distribution of harms among humans. Multispecies justice more closely describes the relational claim advanced here: Martuwarra and the relationships sustaining human and more-than-human life are subjects of justice, while First Law remains the originating authority rather than an application of Western theory.

In this article, “Traditional Owners” names the recognised Indigenous governance relationship used in Australian legal and policy processes; it does not suggest that Martuwarra or her waters are property capable of ownership. Under First Law, the relationship is one of belonging, reciprocal obligation, care and responsibility to living Country. The term is retained to identify the people and institutions engaged by settler-state law without allowing that law to define the River’s identity or authority.

2. The Fitzroy River Declaration as a Declaration of Justice and Peace

The Fitzroy River Declaration was proclaimed in 2016 by Traditional Owners concerned about extensive development proposals and their cumulative impacts on the unique cultural and environmental values of Martuwarra and the catchment. Its foundational statement is direct: the Fitzroy River is a living ancestral being with a right to life; it must be protected for current and future generations; and it should be managed jointly by the Traditional Owners of the River Fitzroy River Declaration (2016)—Kimberley Land Council (Kimberley Land Council, 2016).

The Declaration does more than assert a right. It records a collective governance program: joint Prescribed Body Corporate (PBC) decision-making, a whole-of-catchment management plan based on traditional and environmental values, a Fitzroy River management body founded on cultural governance, stronger statutory protections, and investigation of legal mechanisms under National Heritage and Aboriginal heritage law (MFRC, 2026). Martuwarra scholarship describes it as an agreed expression of First Law and a united vision for the management, care and protection of the River (RiverOfLife et al., 2023/2024).

We therefore understand the Declaration as a Declaration of Relational Justice and a Declaration of Peace. Peace for a River is not silence imposed after approvals are issued, nor the absence of litigation while extraction proceeds. It is the continuing condition of right relationship: Martuwarra with Peoples; surface water with groundwater; Country with Ancestors; governance with responsibility; and present decisions with future generations. Indigenous environmental-peacebuilding scholarship similarly cautions that peace cannot be reduced to institutional stability where Indigenous epistemologies, experience and relationships to place are marginalised (Gegeo et al., 2025).

Speaking with Martuwarra to speak for her, where representation is required in Western institutions, is therefore a continuing and consensual dialogue rather than a claim of human ownership or unilateral authority. The legitimacy of such representation depends upon accountable relationships with River, Country and the relevant Traditional Owners, and upon the capacity to listen, respond and remain answerable to First Law.

A Declaration of Peace spoken by a River consequently reverses the conventional direction of protection. The River is not asking humans to negotiate peace over ownership of a divisible resource. Martuwarra calls institutions and proponents back into peaceful relationship with the living system that makes collective life possible. Justice is not exhausted by distributing benefits, consulting about predetermined options or compensating loss. It requires the River’s capacity for life and renewal to remain intact.

This is why the Declaration’s Do No Harm proposition is central to our submission. MFRC’s 2026 submission describes the Declaration as a negotiated instrument intended to place the burden of demonstrating Do No Harm on the Western Australian Government through recognition of First Law (MFRC, 2026). Protection begins before the state authorises risk. The question is whether government and proponents can demonstrate that development will maintain, rather than rupture, the relationships required for the River’s peace.

3. When Water Allocation Becomes a Justice and Peace Question

The contemporary urgency of this argument is illustrated by the Consultation Draft Fitzroy-Derby Water Resources Management Plan released by the Western Australian Department of Water and Environmental Regulation (DWER) in April 2026. DWER describes the draft as policy and guidance for regulating, allocating and managing water resources under the Rights in Water and Irrigation Act 1914 (WA) (2020). Public consultation closed on 30 June 2026, and the Department is reviewing submissions to inform the final Plan (DWER, 2026a, 2026b, 2026c, 2026d).

MFRC’s detailed submission argues that the draft does not yet provide an adequate foundation for sustainable management. It identifies insufficient technical explanation of allocation models, inputs, validation and error; limited knowledge of aquifer boundaries, recharge and groundwater–surface-water connectivity; boundary changes without an adequate scientific rationale; underspecified mechanisms for allocation, monitoring and recovery from over-allocation; and inadequate treatment of mining and cumulative impacts (MFRC, 2026). The submission concludes that the Plan is not fit for purpose in its present form.

These criticisms expose a justice and peace problem: when knowledge is incomplete, who carries the consequences of being wrong? This question goes directly to the meaning of right relationship. If justice and peace require relationships grounded in reciprocity, responsibility, respect and the continuing integrity of River and Country, then decision-making cannot be considered just or peaceful where the benefits of development accrue to some while the ecological, cultural and intergenerational risks are transferred to others. Nor can a right relationship exist where it remains unclear who will bear the consequences if scientific assumptions, modelling or predictions prove wrong.

Groundwater may move through complex geological systems over very long periods. Contemporary scholarship on sacred groundwater emphasises ancestral personhood and the entanglement of knowledges, languages, deep histories and stories in understanding Martuwarra (RiverOfLife et al., 2026). If extraction alters springs, baseflows, floodplain relationships or culturally significant waters, the consequences cannot necessarily be repaired by later reallocating a quantity on paper. The loss may instead be relational and potentially irreversible: disrupting connections among groundwater and surface water, Peoples and Country, Ancestors and living waters, and present responsibilities and future generations.

This also exposes a moral hazard in water governance. Where those who receive the economic or developmental benefits of extraction are not the same people, communities, living systems or future generations who carry the risk of error, there may be insufficient incentive for decision-makers or beneficiaries to fully internalise the consequences of uncertainty. Risk can effectively be externalised onto Martuwarra, Traditional Owners, Country and generations who did not consent to the decision and may have little capacity to reverse its effects. The question “who carries the consequences?” therefore becomes a practical test of relational justice.

Intergenerational justice sharpens this moral hazard. Gardiner (2011) describes how dispersed causes, delayed consequences and unequal power across generations can foster moral corruption in responses to climate change. Whyte (2017) demonstrates why Indigenous responsibilities across generations cannot be understood apart from colonial disruption and continuing relationships with Country. For Martuwarra, future generations are not merely future beneficiaries of present choices: they inherit responsibilities to living waters and may bear irreversible losses from decisions in which they had no voice. The intergenerational issue is therefore not simply whether future people receive an equitable share of resources. It concerns obligations to living Country that extend beyond the lifetimes of present decision-makers, and the moral hazard of securing present benefits while shifting uncertain and potentially irreversible losses to future generations.

Peace, in this sense, cannot mean merely the absence of overt conflict over water. Relational peace requires the maintenance of right relationships: relationships in which authority, benefit, responsibility and risk are not separated from one another. Where uncertainty is substantial, those proposing and authorising extraction should not be permitted to capture its benefits while transferring potentially irreversible consequences to River, Country and future generations. This strengthens the case for precaution and Do No Harm: before risk is authorised, government and proponents should demonstrate through good science and culturally legitimate governance that the relationships necessary for Martuwarra to live and flow will remain intact.

Pollution similarly illustrates the unequal enclosure of shared living waters. Liboiron (2021) shows how scientific and regulatory determinations of permissible contamination are embedded in relations of power. When contamination is authorised or treated as tolerable, human and more-than-human communities may lose the capacity to use and sustain waters held in common. The question is therefore not only what concentration a technical standard permits, but who defines acceptable contamination and whose relationships with water are sacrificed. A capabilities approach contributes the language of flourishing for more-than-human beings, but its individual focus cannot fully express the collective, ancestral and reciprocal relations through which Martuwarra lives. Multispecies justice and capabilities scholarship are thus interlocutors, not substitutes for First Law. Following Liboiron (2021), pollution can also be understood as an enclosure of shared waters: permitting contamination may remove water from the relationships and uses of human and more-than-human communities even without a formal transfer of title.

Western Australian water legislation recognises that management includes sustainable use and development for current and future users, ecosystem protection, equitable use, community participation and integration with other natural-resource management (Rights in Water and Irrigation Act 1914 (WA), 2020, s. 4). These objects do not themselves confer legal personhood or an enforceable First Law right on Martuwarra. They do, however, make ecological protection, cultural use, future users and consultation legally relevant to the exercise of functions under Part III. The Declaration of Peace asks how those statutory objects will be interpreted when uncertainty threatens a connected living River.

4. Cultural Flow Integrity: What Must Remain for Martuwarra to Live in Peace?

We introduce Cultural Flow Integrity as a conceptual contribution grounded in First Law and Martuwarra scholarship, while building upon the development of cultural flows thinking led by Indigenous peoples in the Murray–Darling Basin and expressed internationally through the Garma International Indigenous Water Declaration. Cultural Flow Integrity means maintaining the hydrological, ecological, cultural, spiritual and ancestral relationships necessary for Martuwarra to continue as a living River system. It encompasses relationships among surface water and groundwater, tributaries, floodplains, wetlands, springs and culturally significant waters, as well as the living beings, Peoples, Law, ceremony, knowledge and responsibilities sustained through those waters.

This concept has an important intellectual and political lineage. The Echuca Declaration, developed by the Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations (MLDRIN, 2007), established an influential Indigenous articulation of cultural flows. Rather than understanding water simply as an economic resource to be allocated among competing users, cultural flows recognise water as fundamental to Indigenous peoples’ cultural, spiritual, social, environmental and economic life. The subsequent National Cultural Flows Research Project, led through MLDRIN, the Northern Basin Aboriginal Nations (NBAN) and the North Australian Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance (NAILSMA), developed this approach further by examining pathways through which cultural flows could be recognised within Australian water law, policy and management (MLDRIN et al., 2018). Together, these initiatives demonstrate that Indigenous water interests cannot adequately be reduced to another consumptive allocation within a pre-existing water market or planning system.

The Garma International Indigenous Water Declaration (2008) provides an even wider foundation. It places Indigenous relationships with water within the context of inherent responsibilities, cultural authority, Indigenous knowledge and the right of Indigenous peoples to participate in decisions concerning their waters. Read alongside the Echuca Declaration, it makes clear that Indigenous relationships with water are not created by governments through licenses or allocations. They arise from prior and continuing relationships among Peoples, lands, waters, ancestors and Law. Cultural Flow Integrity therefore builds upon these declarations while asking a further question appropriate to Martuwarra: before governments determine how much water may be extracted or allocated, what must remain within Country for the River herself to continue living?

This distinction is important. Allocation asks how much water a recognised interest should receive. Jackson’s (2017) question—“How much water does a culture need?”—exposes the difficulty of attempting to translate living cultural relationships into quantities of water that can be accommodated within conventional environmental water management. Cultural Flow Integrity reframes the inquiry again. It asks not simply how much water should be allocated to culture, but what water must remain in Country, in what places, seasons, qualities, movements and relationships, for culture, Country and River to remain alive together. The object of protection therefore shifts from a divisible water entitlement towards the integrity of a living relational system.

This relational understanding is consistent with contemporary scholarship on Indigenous water science. O’Donnell, Kennedy, Garrick, Horne and Woods (O’Donnell et al., 2023) argue for greater recognition of Indigenous water science and cultural water within Australian water governance. Their work helps demonstrate that Indigenous knowledge is not merely supplementary information to be inserted into a Western scientific assessment after the fundamental management questions have already been determined. Indigenous knowledge can identify relationships, responsibilities, culturally significant places and indicators of ecological and cultural continuity that conventional water assessment may not recognise. Similarly, Moggridge and Thompson (2021) demonstrate the continuing difficulties created when Western water management frameworks attempt to incorporate Indigenous cultural values while retaining underlying assumptions that separate water from Country, culture and Indigenous authority.

Cultural Flow Integrity responds to this problem through three interconnected dimensions. First, it is hydrological and ecological: connectivity, timing, recharge, groundwater movement, flooding, water quality and seasonal variability matter, rather than simply whether an annual volumetric allocation is maintained. Second, it is cultural, spiritual and ancestral: waters are not interchangeable units because particular places, flows, springs, wetlands and relationships carry Law, story, ceremony, memory and ancestral presence. Third, it is intergenerational: integrity must be assessed across the temporal scales through which River systems, cultural knowledge and responsibilities persist, rather than being confined to the administrative lifespan of a water licence, development approval or individual project.

This is particularly important for Martuwarra. Martuwarra scholarship understands cultural flows in living water as life, with First Law governing responsibilities for the watershed through reciprocity, ceremony, governance and care. Research concerning sacred groundwater further extends this relational understanding beneath the visible River, challenging institutional separations between surface water and groundwater and among hydrogeological processes, ancestral personhood and intergenerational knowledge. Cultural Flow Integrity therefore does not replace the cultural flows framework developed through the Murray–Darling experience. Rather, it extends and place-grounds that intellectual trajectory within Martuwarra, bringing cultural flows into direct conversation with First Law, River personhood, hydrological connectivity and justice and peace.

Cultural Flow Integrity also provides an evidentiary bridge without creating an epistemic hierarchy. Traditional Owner knowledge can identify culturally significant relationships, places, responsibilities and indicators of continuity; hydrogeology and ecology can assist in understanding the physical processes sustaining those relationships; and law and policy can be evaluated according to whether they are capable of protecting them (O’Donnell et al., 2023; Moggridge & Thompson, 2021). The purpose is not to require First Law to be validated by Western science or state law. Rather, it requires institutions that administratively fragment water, heritage, environment and development to confront the interconnected living system that those categories divide.

The concept consequently changes the burden and sequence of decision-making. Before asking what can be taken, governments and proponents should establish what must remain. Before assuming that groundwater and surface water can be managed independently, decision-makers should demonstrate that such separation reflects the actual functioning of the living River system. Before relying upon adaptive management after extraction begins, they should identify which ecological, cultural and ancestral relationships may be irreversibly damaged if assumptions prove wrong.

In a justice-and-peace framework, this becomes a fundamental condition of right relationship. Peace cannot mean merely the absence of dispute over water allocation. It requires maintaining the relationships through which River, Country, Peoples, living beings and future generations can continue to flourish together. Cultural Flow Integrity therefore makes Martuwarra’s continuing life and peace—not maximum allocatable water—the starting point for water governance.

5. Six Propositions for a River Seeking Justice and Peace

These propositions state the normative argument and identify the narrower legal sites at which it may presently be advanced. They do not claim that Australian law already recognises Martuwarra’s First Law right to live and flow in full, nor that the Fitzroy River Declaration itself creates a statutory cause of action. Rather, they identify practical points at which First Law, relational justice, Cultural Flow Integrity and the principle of Do No Harm can encounter existing Western legal and administrative systems.

Taken together, the propositions also provide a test of right relationship. Justice and peace require more than procedural compliance or the allocation of water among competing users. They require attention to whether the relationships necessary for Martuwarra to live and flow remain intact; whether those affected participate meaningfully in decisions; whether benefits and risks are fairly distributed; and, critically, who carries the consequences when governments, proponents or scientific models are wrong.

Proposition 1.

The River is the subject of justice, not merely the location of competing human interests. A just process must be capable of hearing what Martuwarra requires for life, not only balancing claims made by licence applicants, agencies and human users. Moggridge and Thompson (2021) champion the position that representation must be accountable to Traditional Owners, First/Customary Law and the River’s living relationships. Rights-of-nature mechanisms may be useful, but they should not erase the distinction between state-conferred legal personality and Martuwarra’s pre-existing authority (Clark et al., 2024; Macpherson, 2022; O’Donnell & Talbot-Jones, 2018; Tănăsescu, 2020; Rochford, 2026).

This proposition changes the starting question. Instead of beginning with how much water can be allocated, governance begins by asking what does the River require to remain alive and in right relationship? This is fundamental to relational justice because Martuwarra is not simply the physical location in which human interests compete. River, groundwater, springs, floodplains, Peoples, Ancestors, ecological communities and future generations form relationships through which Martuwarra continues as a living system.

This also provides the basis for moving from conventional representation toward relational representation. The issue is not simply who the state appoints or recognises to “speak for” the River. The deeper question is what relationships, knowledge, responsibilities and obligations enable people and institutions to speak with and listen to the River without absorbing the River’s authority into state-defined representation.

Proposition 2.

A Declaration of Peace requires governance before allocation and proof of Do No Harm before authorisation. A Declaration of Peace cannot begin after harm has occurred. Peace is not simply the absence of dispute between water users. Relational peace requires right relationship, and right relationship requires responsibility before risk is imposed upon another.

Under the Rights in Water and Irrigation Act 1914 (WA) (2020), taking regulated water ordinarily requires a licence, and licensing discretion is exercised within the Act’s objects and Schedule 1 framework. Review rights are decision-specific: Section 26GG permits an applicant dissatisfied with a Schedule 1 decision on its own Section 5C application to seek State Administrative Tribunal review; it is not expressed as a general third-party merits-review right for Traditional Owners opposing another person’s licence. This makes early participation, the evidentiary record, licence conditions and scrutiny of statutory compliance especially important. The final Plan is guidance for licensing; it cannot displace the Act (DWER, 2026e).

The justice question therefore arises before allocation: who receives the benefit of extraction, who carries the risk, and who carries the consequences if predictions about recharge, connectivity or ecological response prove wrong? Where beneficiaries can receive economic benefits while risk is transferred to Martuwarra, Traditional Owners, Country or future generations, a moral hazard arises because benefit and responsibility have become separated.

Proposition 3.

Cultural Flow Integrity requires the legal system to assess an interconnected River as a cultural place. Cultural Flow Integrity challenges the fragmentation of the River into administratively convenient components. A spring, aquifer, tributary, floodplain or culturally significant water cannot necessarily be understood independently where its cultural significance arises from its relationship with the wider living River.

The Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972 (WA) (2026) applies to places of importance and significance, including sacred, ritual or ceremonial sites, while sections 17 and 18 provide project-specific protections and processes. These mechanisms do not themselves establish a general legal right of Martuwarra to flow.

The Minduruu (Ashburton River) proceedings are nevertheless instructive. Evidence concerning the River as an Aboriginal site, the ancestral water serpent, natural River flow and proposed physical intervention demonstrates how whole-of-River relationships can become legally relevant evidence. The subsequent Court of Appeal decision means that the earlier Tribunal outcome cannot be treated as settled authority for Martuwarra, but neither did the appeal establish that interconnected River significance is legally irrelevant.

Cultural Flow Integrity therefore asks a critical evidentiary question: what relationships must remain intact for the cultural place itself to endure?

Proposition 4.

National Heritage protection must follow the listed values and the hydrological processes that sustain them. The West Kimberley is a National Heritage place containing recognised Indigenous, natural, historic and aesthetic values. The legal issue under Commonwealth environmental law is not simply whether development occurs somewhere within the mapped heritage area, but whether an action is likely to have a significant impact upon protected National Heritage values.

This makes causal connection especially important. If a listed cultural or natural value depends upon groundwater discharge, River flow, floodplain inundation, ecological connectivity or another hydrological process, protection of the value may require attention to the process that allows that value to continue.

The proposition therefore moves beyond protecting a place as a static point on a map. It asks whether the living processes through which heritage endures are themselves being placed at risk.

Proposition 5.

Native title and Commonwealth Indigenous-heritage remedies must be assessed for the particular act, determination and threat. Native title should neither be overstated nor underestimated. It does not create a general veto over water allocation. Section 24HA of the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth) (2024), for example, generally provides notification and an opportunity for registered native title bodies corporate and claimants to comment in relation to certain future acts involving water management or regulation, together with a compensation framework.

The relevant question must therefore be specific: what is the proposed act, what rights are recognised in the relevant determination, what traditional laws and customs sustain those rights, and how might the proposed act interfere with their exercise?

Similarly, sections 9 and 10 of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984 (Cth) (2016) may provide pathways where a specified significant Aboriginal area faces a relevant threat. These are discretionary, threat-specific mechanisms rather than automatic prohibitions.

Proposition 6.

Judicial review protects legality; it does not substitute the court’s preferred water policy. Judicial review provides an important but deliberately limited pathway. A court does not ordinarily determine how much groundwater should be allocated merely because another scientific or policy outcome might have been preferable. The question is whether the relevant decision was made lawfully.

A final Plan, licence, heritage consent, referral decision or other administrative act may therefore require scrutiny of jurisdiction, standing, statutory duties, procedural fairness, mandatory considerations, irrelevant considerations, legal reasonableness and applicable time limits.

This limitation makes the quality of the earlier decision-making process especially important. If uncertainty, Cultural Flow Integrity, Traditional Owner evidence or potentially irreversible consequences are to matter later, they should be placed clearly and authoritatively before the decision-maker before the decision is made.

Why this helps: It demonstrates why good governance and a strong evidentiary record cannot wait for litigation. Judicial review becomes a safeguard of lawful decision-making, while the principal work of protecting Martuwarra occurs earlier through evidence, participation, statutory compliance, precaution and Do No Harm.

• Why the Six Propositions Matter Together

The strength of these propositions lies in their cumulative effect. No single Western legal mechanism presently captures Martuwarra’s First Law right to live and flow. The propositions therefore do not search for one legal solution. They establish a pathway across governance, water law, heritage, native title, environmental protection and administrative law, while keeping Martuwarra—not the fragmented categories of the state—at the centre.

They also provide a practical framework for justice and peace through right relationship. At each decision point, the same questions can be asked:

What relationships must remain intact? Who benefits from the proposed intervention? Who carries the risk? Who carries the consequences if the decision is wrong? Who has authority and responsibility to speak with and care for the River? And has the state demonstrated, before authorising harm, that Martuwarra’s Cultural Flow Integrity will endure?

For the Minduruu litigation discussed below, the relevant appellate authority is Forrest & Forrest Pty Ltd. v Minister for Aboriginal Affairs 2024 WASCA 96. This decision must be distinguished from the earlier State Arbitration Tribunal (WA), s 27. Western Australian Legislation (2024) reasoning; neither should be read as establishing a general statutory right of the River to flow (Forrest & Forrest Pty Ltd v Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, 2024; State Administrative Tribunal Act 2004 (WA), 2004).

These questions expose circumstances in which benefits are privatised while risks are transferred to River, Country, Traditional Owners and future generations. Such an arrangement cannot readily be described as a right relationship. Where those receiving the benefit do not carry the corresponding risk, moral hazard becomes a justice problem; where those exposed to the consequences cannot meaningfully participate in determining whether that risk should be taken, it also becomes a peace and governance problem.

The propositions therefore help move the argument from justice after damage to justice before damage. They connect the Fitzroy River Declaration’s Do No Harm principle with identifiable decision points in contemporary law and governance. Most importantly, they establish a coherent standard against which those decisions can be judged: whether they sustain the right relationships necessary for Martuwarra to live and flow.

In this sense, a Declaration of Peace for Martuwarra is not merely a declaration against conflict. It is a commitment to govern differently—to restore and maintain right relationships among River, Peoples, Country, Law, knowledge, institutions and generations. Peace becomes a practice of relationship, and justice becomes the responsibility to ensure that those relationships endure.

6. Do No Harm: Justice and Peace Before Damage

The most important consequence of these propositions is temporal. Justice should not begin after Martuwarra has been damaged. Traditional Owners should not have to wait until springs decline, groundwater relations are altered, flood regimes change or cultural values are impaired and then carry the burden of reconstructing what has been lost.

Do No Harm is therefore a principle of prospective justice and River peace. It asks government and proponents to demonstrate, before authorisation, that proposed interventions will not materially compromise the relationships necessary for the River’s continuing life. Different statutes impose different tests, so the Declaration cannot be represented as if it automatically creates a legal prohibition. Its deeper demand is that uncertainty be made visible, evaluated and governed rather than transferred silently to Country.

The phrase Do No Harm also has an ethical history in medicine, commonly associated with non-maleficence and the obligation to avoid preventable injury (Beauchamp & Childress, 2019). It is not, however, an automatically accepted or enforceable rule across environmental approvals. The Fitzroy River Declaration gives this ethical demand a distinct First Law and Country-centred meaning: decisions must protect the relationships necessary for Martuwarra to live and flow. Its invocation here is a proposed governance standard, not a claim that medical ethics or existing Australian legislation already supplies an absolute prohibition on all environmental risk. Non-maleficence in medical ethics is a duty to avoid causing harm, but its application to contested environmental decisions is neither universal nor automatic. The Declaration makes Do No Harm an explicit demand for prospective accountability, precisely because regulatory permission and ethically legitimate relations are not equivalent.

The MFRC submission identifies uncertainties before the final Plan is adopted: modelling inputs and validation, margins of error, aquifer limits, recharge, groundwater–surface-water connectivity, boundary changes, mining effects and cumulative impacts (MFRC, 2026). The ethical question is whether development should proceed where those uncertainties concern processes that may be slow, interconnected and impossible to restore.

Precaution is inseparable from intergenerational responsibility. A licence may be temporary; extracting ancient groundwater or altering connectivity may have consequences beyond its administrative life. First Law extends responsibility across generations and species. The Fitzroy River Declaration requires protection for current and future generations. A Declaration of Peace brings those temporal responsibilities into the present decision.

The burden of justice must therefore be reversed. The question should not be: can Traditional Owners prove in advance exactly how extraction will damage Martuwarra? The question should be: has the proponent and the state demonstrated, through transparent and adequate evidence and culturally legitimate governance, that the intervention will maintain Cultural Flow Integrity? This is not a rejection of science. It is a demand for good science placed within a larger responsibility to Country.

7. Conclusions—Martuwarra Must Live and Flow

I am Martuwarra, RiverOfLife. My waters do not begin or end where governments draw administrative boundaries. Groundwater, springs, tributaries, floodplains, wetlands and River are relations within a living whole. First Law has always known this.

Justice for a River begins when law and governance cease asking only how human interests should be balanced and begin asking what the River needs to live. The Fitzroy River Declaration carries First Law into a contemporary declaration of responsibility. Reframed as a Declaration of Peace, it calls for restored and continuing right relations among living waters, Country, Peoples, institutions and generations yet to come.

Cultural Flow Integrity gives that call an evidentiary and governance form. It asks what must remain before what may be taken; what relationships are at risk before how much extraction can be licensed; and what knowledge and authority must shape the decision before uncertainty becomes permission.

Western law divides water, heritage, environment, native title and development into different jurisdictions. Martuwarra cannot be divided in this way. The task is not to force First Law into those categories, but to require each institution to recognise the living relationships it is capable of harming and the responsibilities that follow.

What, then, does justice mean when the subject seeking justice and issuing a Declaration of Peace is a River? It means hearing Martuwarra as a living subject; maintaining the conditions of life before loss; refusing to confuse consultation with consent or remedy with repair; and building governance in which the River, Traditional Owners and future generations are not required to inherit the risk of decisions made for others’ present benefit.

Justice asks whether the decisions made today will allow Martuwarra to live and flow in peace for generations yet to come.

We say that they must.

Martuwarra must live and flow.