Annual Lecture 2003

Leith Boully

A landholder and Chair of the Community Advisory Committee of the Murray Darling Basin Ministerial Council, Leith Boully told the story of how over a 12 year period, she has actively engaged with her community on the Murray Darling flood plain in regional Queensland to work out how they could not only share the water more fairly, but also ensure enough was set aside to protect the environmental health of their catchment.

Leith's activism was triggered when her neighbor on the Lower Balonne threw up a levy bank cutting her pastoral company's access to water flowing across the 1.2 million hectare flood plain between the St George and Darling rivers. With the family's livelihood threatened, Leith reached out to other members of her community and together they eventually found a way to end the conflict over water sharing, and to turn a community that didn't value its environment into one that did.

Leith has extensive experience in business management and corporate governance. She is a Director of the ABC and a former Director of the Land and Water Resources Research and Development Corporation.