I lived for the first six years of my life in a mud brick house up the hill a bit from a creek in the Northern Territory. I remember the water as black and very deep. I remember as a child jumping as far into the middle of that creek as I could, and staying there as long as I could.
When it came time to get out, my aboriginal friends and I would scramble up the step muddy banks as quickly as we could. We were frightened of the little yabbies that lived in the holes in the mud.
When I returned to Coomalie Creek for the first time just last year, the water was just as black as I remembered it. But that swimming hole was deserted. There was no path through the bamboo to the water’s edge.
When I showed the current owner of the property where we used to swim she was incredulous, “There are crocodiles.” she said.
I wonder why I was frightened of the yabbies and not the crocodiles when I was a kid?
My family left Coomlie Creek when I was six or seven years old. A year or two later we moved into a little house over looking the Mary River, the river the Queensland Government is now talking about damming.
My siblings and I made toy boats from styrene foam. We would spend hours swimming with our boats in the Mary River with the platypus. The water was so clear and also so shallow that we could see every pebble on the bottom of the stream.
Christopher Pearson writing in today’s Weekend Australian about my work on the Murray River suggests that:
“Marohasy thinks that catastrophist science regarding the Murray [River] is persuasive mostly because, apart from feeling absurdly guilty about our imagined impact on the natural world, we have a precarious grasp of its history as a waterway and tend to imagine that it’s quite like a European river.”
There are a couple of errors in the article, including reference to Mannum — it should be Morgan — but I think it’s the first time I’ve read someone fairly accurately report my feeling, that as Australians, we are ridiculously guilty about our impact on the environment and at the same time we have a “precarious grasp of its history”, true nature or current state.
I wonder how much my general approach to life has been influenced by the different rivers that I’ve had the privilege to live beside, wander along, and swim in?
I now live near the Brisbane River, it’s just at the end of my street. In Madagascar I lived near the Fiherenana River which was mostly empty of water. It was just a very wide sandy bed. But when I looked very carefully after rain I could usually find egg shell from the now extinct Aepyornis along its banks.
The Brisbane River is not the Murray River, and the Murray is very different from the Mary, and neither are anything like Coomalie Creek.
As a people, Australian’s probably identify most with the Murray. But have we reconciled ourselves with how this river really is? Would we like it to be more like the Mary?
Christopher Pearson finishes his piece about the Murray and me by suggesting:
“If we were to stop fantasising about a clear, fresh blue stream coursing through the Australian equivalent of meadows and thought instead of an old waterway, often a bit murky and sometimes salty, meandering to its lower arid land reaches, we might be less surprised by its resilience and prone to imagining that it needs somehow to be transformed by a technological quick fix.”
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You can read the full article here: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,19341984-7583,00.html .
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Jennifer,
What a breath of fresh air! Too often, environmental dictats, ukases and imperatives are issued by urbanites whose only connection to “nature” is at best the poetry of Keats or Longfellow, or the ponderous pronouncements of doom enunciated by people whose most persistent connection to nature is carrying a wallet made of leather.
I do not mean to denigrate “armchair science,” or those whose attention is absorbed in the exhalations of burbling flasks, but there is an undeniable authority that comes from truly living within the place of contention.
An involuntary endurance of nature’s indifferent discomfitures is the best tutor for those who oppose the pernicious idealisms of the fatuous romantics.
Sally on!
Schiller.
I read with interest the essay on our learned and esteemed porfessor and her riverside view point in the national paper and having travelled thruout Australia the wide brown land, having seen the stream the Burdekin and the cataract the Burdekin, similarly with the majority of them, one has to understand that in a nation of drought, which it is, We are so far from the Avon idyllic rivers of Europe in weather and distance. Drought or flood and not in between.
Our rivers are brown to match our landscape.
Nice one teach.
The need (to be transformed by a technological quick fix) sustains technocracy and the greater the need, the more abundantly resourced the facility becomes.
Sustainability, from a technocratic perspective, identifies transformation needs and holds them perpetually on the brink of disaster.
Australia must inevitably legislate against environmental corruption.
“our imagined impact on the natural world” …..
Yes must have imagined clearing from Emerald to Victoria and much of SW Western Australia. True nature? Natural state?
All those rabbits, foxes, cats, goats, and cane toads, Imagined all the blackberry, lantana, mesquite, rubber vine and prickly acacia.
The extinction of 18 native marsupial species in 100 years (as per Steve 3 posts back).
The east coast rivers that used to have sandy beaches and bars now filled with the eroded mud of agriculture
As they now detect tebuthiuron, the chemical bulldozer, finding it’s way onto the reef.
European rivers – what a comparison !
Perhaps the European rivers like that Danube have been more like chemical drains until recent cleanup efforts kicked in. Sort of like is now happening on the Murray.
Wouldn’t want to upset the irrigators would we? Don’t all rush off to church just yet.
Time to take an inventory and take stock. Yes there is a lot to be thankful for – but the there’s a lot of very ordinary land management too.
“The east coast rivers that used to have sandy beaches and bars now filled with the eroded mud of agriculture..”
Years ago a few bodies lobbied to have silted areas in the Hawkesbury, McDonald and associated waterways dredged back to their original depths. These waterways that were once navigable by small ships are in places now reduced to shallow trickles. They even got the Minister to go up on a boat ride, the answer was a firm NO.
Too political. When I lived up there the oldtimers told me of ‘the good old days’ when they had sawmills and boatbuilders on the creeks and used to ferry produce down to a steamer which would take it down to Sydney. After WW2 most of this industry collapsed, with the Depression and the advent of the trucks river based industry became unprofitable. They showed me one gully they logged where not a scrap of timber was wasted, if it wasnt for sawlogs it was box wood, fire wood or pulp wood. Now the gully is fully regrown and a most impressive piece of bush. These old timers (now passed on) had a very low opinion of the current lot of opinion makers.
But anyway, whats wrong with dredging?
One might contemplate why the rivers have silted up in the first place – natural processes, climate shifts or land disturbance.
Regenerative forestry is one thing but much of the inland has been permanently cleared for agriculture. The debate is what’s enough – is there never enough.
Jennifer may have a point – one may speculate as to what is the natural state of the inland rivers – flow, turbidity, water quality, salinity. But we ought be careful in generalizing that model to ever river in the nation as she herself indicates.
My intimate experiences are of the Mitchell river in east Gippsland and the Towamba river in se NSW. Two totally different rivers. the first probably approximates to the idea of English rivers deep and fast flowing. The Towamba on the other hand is a huge sand bed studded with granite boulders with trickling rivulets linking deep holes. In heavy rain it rises into a flooding torrent for a short time only to subside just as quickly.
In my life time the Towamba river has silted up even more – the water holes are smaller the trickling water less. Also there are more weeds and tee tree etc growing on what once was clear sweeps and banks of sand. The greenies who are opoosed to any form of logging have always claimed it is woodchipping impacting on the river. I’m not so sure – a lot of the valley was planted down to pine and small creeks like the Camping ground dried up completely for quite a few years whilst the pines were young. My brother tells me it is running again now but the pines are older now and need less water. Personally I hate the pine plantations but can see they have to go somewhere.
At the headwaters of the Towamba is the Coolangubra – a lot of old growth there but some younger stands which were logged before the Coolangubra was “saved” as well. Beyond that are huge acreages of more pine plantations which were once old growth forest or pasture. I have no idea how far the catchment is affected by that change or how long the impact lasts.
In the early 70s we had huge rainfalls as much as 10 inches in a few hours which resulted in heavy floods. A huge part of the escarpment at the headwaters fo the river collapsed under the wieght of the water. The greens all jumped up and down claiming that logging had caused it. Yet there wasn’t any logging there. However there was a lot of land clearing going on for pine plantations not that far away. Of course at the time plantations couldn’t be criticised but woodchipping and logging native forest was the devil’s work in thier eyes.
You could well say the same thing for the land clearing which created our farm in the valley. The change from forest to pasture must have impacted on the river enormously. In fact the old timers talk of bringing boats up the first part of the river in the early days something you couldn’t do today. Not far away is the Wallagaraugh river which has very little clearing for farms and I imagine the Towamba was similar two hundred years ago. A shallow sandy river with bush on both sides. I guess the moral is that all sorts of human activity and natural events impact on our rivers but the process just keeps rolling on often in cycles so long term that humans don’t always observe them.
What interests me is that in the recent Snowy HYdro kerfuffle a leading green can be relied on to drag out the fact that logging a small coupe affects catchments for 150 years never mentioned the environment in his opposition to the sale but focussed on whether or not the queen had been asked permission to sell Snowy. What gives? I smell a rat.
It always makes me very angry when the affect on catchment of logging is dragged out by greenies because the studies they are quoting are for the Melbourne catchment of mountain ash where as early as 1926 ait was observed that the yield in the catchment increased for several years after a bushfire had killed most of the ash forest but then dramatically decreased by as much as 50% when the saplings were becoming established. The greens have always quoted this and the Kuczera curve out of context to stop the logging of native forests regardless of whether or not they were talking about a fifty ha coupe of mixed species which is hardly 1000s of hectares of bushfire ravaged ash forest.
Yet when 3 million hectares of forest quite a bit of it ash forest was incinerated in 2003 they never mentioned the Melbourne water catchment results or the Kuczera curve but proclaimed it all a natural event beyond human control. Sorry it might have been a natural event but the extent, ferocity and size of it was within the realm of human mangement. The reason it wasn’t managed was a direct result of thier obsession with leaving nature to look after itself. No hazard reduction burns, no fire trails or fire breaks.
I fully expected a ‘public stoning’ after that fire because of what it did to the nation’s water catchment but nothing. Not a word, yet if it had been a logging coupe there would have been the verbal equivalent of a public stoning of people who don’t even make the decision about where they will or will not log.
Personally I think all those urban middle class bushwalkers who are so adamant that they know everything about the environment and how rural people should live in harmony with it should be made to pay for what they have imposed on the nation. Certainly the trees will grow back eventually but try explaining that to people who want to drink water in Adelaide or farmers who have mortgaged their kids future to put in state of the art irrigation equipment on the MUrray now.
So the way I see it is that in the not too distant future there will be a Solomon’s choice. What little water is left in the Snowy can be shared evenly between the Murray or the Murrumbidgee or the Snowy and no one is happy or one is left to return to its “natural” state. My guess is it is the Murray which will be sacrificed and Adelaide will be presented with a nuclear desal plant to solve all its problems and most of the water sent to the MIA.
Of course there is always an extreme option for the irrigators and people of Adelaide to change the outcome but it doesn’t bear thinking about.
Whatever happens lets hope the conflict, vilification and confrontation the greens rely on for publicity and fund raising can be avoided (but just a little bit of me would love to see them on the receiving end of some of the stress we have had imposed on us all in the name of environmental activism and the greater good)
Excuse the rave but boy it feels good to get it off my chest.
such personal experiences of a river, landscape etc is only fleeting – too short from which to make useful assessments about longterm resilience
1edb79f8cc5c Hi
What bonds we make with our waterways, at least those of us who don’t just see them as something to dump in and pump from. I share your bond with the Mary River, the one our state governemnt is adamant about damming.
We have a canoe floatilla there on Sunday to mark 2 years since the “shock and awe” announcement. It was the day after Anzac day. In these two years we’ve come to understand a whole different meaning for “fighting for your country”
Murray/Darling kayaker Steve Posselt paddled thru during the week and will be back to take part in the “floatilla”. He’s travelling fast, a 29 day round trip from Briz, back via coast.
Some of the best country he’s seen was in the part that is but a nod away from becoming Lake Garrett, the last major dam constructed in south-east Queensland since the water Commission finally woke up about alternatives.
My photographer daughter Arkin and Sunshine Coast photographer Chris van Wyk spent four days meandering through the area. Chris’s wonderful photo of the algal-affroed mary river turtle heads the ACF campaign to stop the dam.
Their photos will be at http://www.stoppress.com.au in a day or two.
Jennifer, do come up and renew your acquaintance with the Mary. We’d love to see you up this way.
Details of floatilla at http://www.savethemaryriver.com