On Good Friday I plunged into the refuse of Sydney’s inner western suburbs – a disgusting scum of polyethylene bottles, plastic bags, fast food cartons, disposable nappies, Christmas decorations and crumbling polystyrene foam.

I’m getting too old for bare-chested Putinesque heroics but there was nothing else for it. A young lady was in danger. When it came down to it I just had to roll out of my kayak and into the Cooks River muck.

It all began with a distressed Australasian Darter called Spike (scientifically, that’s Anhinga melanogaster). Darters are really beautiful waterbirds. They’re related to cormorants, but they have long elegant necks and a fine razor-sharp beak used to spear fish under water.

I first spotted Spike when I was paddling Cooks River on the Tuesday before Easter. Her beak was caught firmly in some ribbon tangled around her neck. I tried to catch her but failed, and she flew clumsily upriver.

By the Thursday night, more reports of Spike had come in to the Wildlife Information and Rescue Service (WIRES) and a rescue posse was organised for Good Friday with my partner Lee and I providing the kayak flotilla and local conservationists scouring the banks.

Eventually Spike was located five kilometres upstream of my original sighting. She evaded capture by plunging into the river. I flopped into the raft of muck into which she’d surfaced but she dived and got away. Luckily, Lee managed to herd her onto the opposite bank and I grabbed her as she clambered over rubbish-encrusted mangrove roots. After a big dose of electrolytes administered by a local Newtown WIRES volunteer she was rushed to a specialist seabird carer.

You can’t blame local government for the state of Cooks River. The councils are doing a wonderful job transforming it from a stormwater drain to a living waterway. They’re diligently removing the tragic “improvements” of long ago – treacherous concrete banks and ugly steel sheetpiling – and planting swathes of native vegetation to re-create the pre-European natural habitats, but the rubbish is another matter. The sheer size of the problem overwhelms their efforts. A great deal of money has been spent on gross pollutant traps to intercept the litter that sweeps down the stormwater drains, but these can only do so much.

The river drains a huge area of the inner western suburbs and, with every heavy rainfall, tens of thousands of plastic bags and bottles wash into it, coagulating in floating mats of nasty rubbish that endanger birds like Spike. Deep down in the water you can see plastic bags – ‘urban jellyfish’ – drifting in and out with the tide. If it doesn’t end up tangled in the mangroves, or on the beaches, or all this crap ultimately gravitates to the Pacific Gyre.

It’s way past time the state government took a stand. Garbage in our waterways is unsightly to us but can mean a lingering death for wildlife. Years ago we were assured that supermarkets would start charging for plastic bags after customers had had a chance to buy ecobags, but it’s never happened. And container deposit legislation to get the plastic soft drink bottles out of the gutters has been kept firmly off the agenda lest civilization collapse in NSW as it apparently did in South Australia.

Last Thursday, Spike was released near where I first spotted her. Hopefully, she’ll stay out of trouble, or set up house somewhere less polluted.

By Gavin Gatenby

Gavin Gatenby is a long-time Sydney conservationist and the convener of public transport advocacy group EcoTransit Sydney