Your guided tour of the Wannon River diversions, as they were operating in August 2026

In my other article this month, I mentioned how rainfall has not fallen evenly across the landscape surrounding the Grampians this year, leading to highly variable conditions for local wetlands. Although the plains around the Grampians-Gariwerd National Park remain quite dry, the higher elevations in the Park (like Mt William and the Major Mitchell Plateau) have experienced much better rainfall, and the Wannon River has been flowing.

To get a sense of precisely how the upper catchment of the Wannon River is behaving in a year like this, and to once again take a closer look at the impact of the Wannon River diversions, we visited all the key locations on the same day in August 2026.

So, if this is an issue you are interested to learn more about, then the following video tour is for you!

As you can see for yourself in the video, the streams that should have been contributing by far the largest volume of water from the Wannon River’s upper catchment in the Grampians National Park, were all being diverted away from the river to another catchment entirely, towards Lake Bellfield. Once the water is in this dam, unlike many other dams that are situated within the same catchment as the river they are impacting, this water can never be recovered for environmental flows or later released back to the Wannon. To read more about this issue, you can view our previous stories here.

I really want to emphasise that the example shared here, of the upper Wannon River diversions, is just one of many issues repeated across western Victoria that justify a fresh review on the basis of declining rainfall, runoff and/or groundwater recharge over the past 30 years, not to mention our increased understanding of the need to maintain our most sensitive surface and groundwater dependent ecosystems as key refuges for biodiversity.

As we reported last month, all long-term water management issues in western Victoria are now open for discussion, with the review of the Western Region Sustainable Water Strategy underway. Although initial feedback on the Scoping Paper closed on 30th August, there will be further opportunities for community input, and we recommend that you pay attention, register for updates and have your say if you care about the health of our rivers and wetlands. After all, our aquatic ecosystems and the species they support serve as a vital indicator of whether our surface and groundwater systems are being sustainably managed.