In Awe of Mud & the Waders

It is a magical time, just before the Sun comes up each day – especially outside with a view to the horizon.

Two days ago, on Wednesday morning, I was at the Cairns foreshore just on sunrise.  This mudflat is home to a great diversity of migratory birds, including the Eastern Curlew that travels back to Cairns from Siberia each year.   Not all the birds migrate each year, but many do.

We can count the number of birds at the Cairns foreshore, but it is hardly the same as knowing their story.  I am always in awe of these little birds, knowing how far they travel.  What adventures they must have, and what fun it must be – out on the mudflats from Cairns all the way north, visiting mudflats in Indonesia, Taiwan, China, and on to Russia.

I flew back from Cairns yesterday, on what they call the ‘milk run’.  This is the little aeroplane, the Dash 8-400 that stops at Townsville and Mackay before Rockhampton – where I got off.

Flying into Mackay I noticed all the sugarcane.   Of course, there is also a lot of sugarcane grown to the north and south of Townsville – but Townsville itself there is no sugarcane in the catchment that drains into Cleveland Bay.

The activists variously complain that because of the sugarcane there is too much sediment along the Queensland coast effecting the Great Barrier Reef.

I can still remember where I was on Wednesday 6th June 2001, and how that day unfolded – that was the day Imogen Zethoven from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) went on and on, and on some more about how bad the sugarcane farmers are, and how they have polluted the Great Barrier Reef with sediment – with mud from their farms.   She made local, national and international headlines with her ranting that day and for the next year and some.

Imogen was making the most outrageous and untrue claims but instead of anyone calling her out, John Howard who was then the Prime Minister of Australia ensured she was given even more money – more funding, hundreds of millions of dollars followed into the coffer of the WWF after her nonsense ranting.

I have noticed that as a nation we increasingly give in to the ranting from the bullies rather than calling them out.   Our leaders are not brave, not at all.

That Wednesday morning in June 2001, I was staying in a motel room in Townsville, my hire car was parked under an awning outside.   I woke-up that morning to the lead news bulletin explaining how many truckloads of mud were being ‘dumped’ onto the corals of the Great Barrier Reef – by farmers, specifically sugarcane farmers.

There was Imogen Zethoven on the large screen – with her mop of brown hair, thin face, innocent eyes, small chin, hippy clothes telling us this as fact, as truth.

I knew Imogen well; she had told me about a year earlier how the World Wildlife Fund was planning a campaign to improve sugarcane growing practices.

I had taken her through the audit document and the strategy the industry was embracing.  I had asked her where she thought we needed to do better, and whether perhaps timelines could be brought forward.  On reflection, she seemed little interested in the details of cane growing.    The industry had barred all as part of the audit process that was began five years earlier, two years before I had started with the organisation.

We were addressing the real issues as they had been detailed in that audit.  We were happy to partner with WWF to fast track any issues they specifically wanted addressed.  But Imogen had other plans.  She and the WWF were not interested in technical detail, they wanted to tell a compelling story, even if it was a nonsense story.

That morning she was on television, her warnings of catastrophe were accompanied by footage of her in a helicopter above Townsville harbour, pointing to a plume of sediment snaking its way out to what she claimed were the once crystal-clear waters of the Great Barrier Reef.  At least that is what we were being told, by Imogen.  Imogen, who as far as I knew, had never ever set foot on a sugarcane farm or Scuba-dived the waters of the Great Barrier Reef.  And didn’t see know that there was no sugarcane upstream of Cleveland Bay.

‘Snaking’.   I used to sometimes have dreams with snakes.  They are a potent symbol in so much mythology.

All was now sullied was how Imogen explained it, that is what we were being told by Imogen with the imagery from the helicopter on the television screen as proof – as evidence.

I could see the plume of sediment.  But there wasn’t a dump truck in sight – or a sugarcane farm.  There are no sugarcane farms to the west of Cleveland Bay.

The entire notion of canegrowers dumping sediment on the reef was invented, an idea Imogen had presumably come up with.   Sediment runoff was not an issue identified in the environmental audit.  Sediment runoff had been an issue for sugarcane farming before the advent of trash blanketing, and when farmers grew sugarcane on hillsides, which was when sugarcane was cut by hand and that was a very long time ago.

Over the previous hundred years the industry had changed its practices completely: there was mechanical harvesting since perhaps the 1940s, and since the 1990s what was known as ‘Green Cane Trash Blanketing’, whereby the cane was harvested green, without first burning.

Imogen’s words about the coral reef waters being polluted with mud from the farms appeared to be backed-up with the authoritative words of a journalist explaining exactly how many ‘dump truck equivalents’ of soil were coming down the rivers and streams from the sugarcane farms.   None of it bared any relationship to what was documented in the technical literature or in the environmental audit of the industry.

Reference was made to a WWF ‘Great Barrier Reef Pollution Report Card’.   I will tell you about this in another blog post – a future note from me, as well as a report that she got various James Cook University professors to pen, backing her up.  I have been rummaging around finding these old documents lately.

That morning, more than twenty years ago, my mobile phone rang out, as I got out of shower.  It was Ian Ballantye, the General Manager of Canegrowers Pty Ltd.   I phoned back, sitting with a towel wrapped about me on the side of the bed in that motel room in Townsville.

Ballantyne was once a Lieutenant colonel in the Australian army.  He had a gravelly voice, and he still spoke like an army officer.  He wanted to know, “Where the hell are you!”

“I’m in Townsville.  The plan is to drive north to Ingham, to assist with the workshop for the rollout of the new bio-active organic pest control for cane grubs,” I said.

“When will you be back in Brisbane,” he asked.  He started on about needing to formulate a response to this WWF campaign.   “Imogen’s accusations are already making international news headlines,” he lamented.

“I want to continue on to Ingham,” I explained.  “These workshops have been planned for months.  Let’s just sit this one out,” I suggested.  My advice was to not respond to the nonsense being promoted by Imogen.

As I checked out of the motel that morning, the balding, overweight owner made comment to me. “The farmers are going to have to finally get their act together,” he said, “There is a New Zealand bird coming after you.”   He wasn’t referring to the waders.

He was referring to Imogen; he had noted her New Zealand accent.   He went on about her master’s degree in environmental science.

I knew that she didn’t have one.  There was no mention of that in the news reporting.  It was assumed, the way she was introduced it was as though she had relevant qualification and knew a lot about sugarcane farming – in fact she has a master’s in English literature.

She had been taught how to tell a good story.  She knew much less about the corals, or sediment loads or pesticides.

The owner of the motel was adding what he thought he heard to his own narrative.

It is a fact; Imogen has a degree in English literature.  To repeat, she knew about storytelling, and how to run a media campaign.   She knew very little about cane farming, and even less about corals at the Great Barrier Reef.  Not much more than what I had told her.  She had declined my invitation for us to go snorkelling together and see the corals, up close.  She had also declined my invitation to visit a cane farm and a sugar mill.  She had not taken any of the thick volumes of the audit document with her, or our response which was an environment management strategy.  I had offered her copies of these documents when she visited at my office in Brisbane a year earlier.

From the news report it appeared she was an expert on agricultural runoff and corals.  The motel owner had believed everything that he heard that morning, on the news.

“Did you know,” I began in response, to the comment from the owner of the motel, “That the Melbourne-based Australian Conservation Foundation  (ACF) set a target of 50 per cent adoption of soil erosion reducing minimum-tillage, green-cane harvesting for the year 2000 for the farmers in the Mackay region?”

He didn’t reply.

“The farmers have exceeded that target,” I continued. “Over 85 per cent of Mackay farmers now green cane harvest.”  I paused hoping he would look at me, “Did you know that under this green cane system, soil loss is equivalent to levels in a natural rainforest situation, that is according to research by CSIRO.”

He still had his back to me.

He was printing off my receipt; when he finally turned back around, and handed me the piece of paper, I asked, “Did you see any dump trucks on the news?”

He didn’t reply.

He was enamoured by everything Imogen had said, I could see that; on whichever news channel he had watched that morning.

Imogen not only told untruths about the sugar cane industry, and the existence of the dump trucks but over the next year with her comments and her continual presence on the news she made many Queenslanders ashamed of their environment and their farmers.  It is a horrible thing, to live with shame and guilt.   The WWF even got a program into the high schools, including in places like Ingham blaming sugarcane farmers for the decline of the Great Barrier Reef corals.  Children were encouraged to turn against their parents; to turn against their fathers who grew sugarcane.

WWF specialise in it, in shaming.  WWF is a multinational corporation that specialises in virtue signalling and making stuff-up.

For sure there are bad people in the world, and many of them pretend to be your friend.

What I do know is that mud, in the right place, is our friend – mudflats are a wonderful habitat including for shore birds and that some of these shore birds, the waders, they fly a very long way, to feed at the magnificent and muddy Cairn’s mudflats.

Like Townsville, there are no sugarcane farms upstream of Cairns.   And I have never seen a truck dumping mud onto the Cairns foreshore.  The foreshore is naturally muddy and has been for thousands of years.   Waders, including the Eastern Curlew, predate European settlement and rely on tidal mudflats for their very existence – they love mud, like mangroves love mud, and so do I.   Mud, farming and corals can coexist along the Queensland coast.  But I have limited tolerance any more for the nonsense stories that can be so divisive.