Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for June 2006

Reflections on World Environment Day 2006

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It’s World Environment Day and I woke to hear Australia’s MInister for Foreign Affairs Alexander Downer talking up the possibility of the Australian Government building a nuclear power station to run a water desalination plant for Adelaide.

Adelaide is the capital of the driest state on this driest of continents. South Australia has plenty of uranium. Nuclear power is greenhouse neutral. Much of the water for Adelaide has been traditionally piped a couple of hundred kilomtres from the Murray River. It would all seem like a rather sensible idea me, but it is radical and of course the very conservative Australian Labor Party has already condemned it (click here for the response from Kevin Rudd on ABC Online).

Interestingly British Labor PM Tony Blair is talking about the possibility of a second generation of nuclear power stations for the UK, when Australia doesn’t yet have a single nuclear power station. And while the USA gets something like 20 percent of its water from desalination, desalination is also a novel idea for Australia.

My friend Phil Sawyer proposed both a desalination plant for Adelaide and a nuclear power station in his documentary ‘In Flinders Wake’ released in 2002 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the voyage of Matthew Fliners. It was shown on SBS TV about the same time.

Phil Sawyer.jpg
[Phil at the launch, photograph from the ABC SA website]

Phil has been a supporter of new environment group the Australian Environment Foundation (AEF) which was launched exactly a year ago in Tenterfield. The group has been fairly quiet over the last year, but there will be a big get together for the first Australian Environment Foundation AGM and conference on 23rd and 24th September at Rydges, Southbank in Brisbane. Mark that date in your diaries. Chances are Phil and copies of his video will also be there.

Reconciling with the Murray River

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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 .