Archives for July 10, 2006

Television personality John Doyle (from Roy and HG) was on Australia’s Radio National yesterday afternoon talking about the environmental problems he observed as he ventured down the Darling River recently with another Australian celebrity Tim Flannery.

I gather the journey was undertaken in a small boat earlier in the year and is being turned into a television documentary lamenting the state of the river and blaming irrigation in south western Queensland.

Doyle suggested that one hundred years ago the river used to ‘dry up’ because of drought, now the problem is apparently cotton farmers upstream taking all the water.

Interestingly two very large irrigated cotton farms were auctioned just last Friday; Ballandool Station at Hebel and Clyde at Dirranbandi. Together they have a storage capacity of 220,000 megalitres which is huge.

I am surprised there was no interest from any government in buying the properties which were passed in at auction for $20 and $27 million respectively. The irrigation licences could have been cancelled and the water ‘returned’ for the Darling River.

Meanwhile, on Saturday the Sydney Morning Herald published a long piece by Daniel Lewis titled ‘Fat Ducks, fat cattle – fat chance’ [1] that quotes from my blog piece titled ‘Cattle killing the Macquarie Marshes?‘ [2]. This is the first time I’ve read something in the mainstream media acknowledging that there might be an overgrazing problem in the marshes. Usually the finger is only pointed at the irrigators.

Lewis also quotes Chris Hogandyk from Auscott suggesting that government would get a better environmental result by spending $33.2 million buying 82,000 hectares of core marshland than spending money on ‘environmental water’ that ends up fattening cattle.

Reference was made in the Sydney Morning Herald to the following photograph, first published at this blog in October last year:

As I wrote in the original blog post, the photograph taken in 2005 shows the dramatic impact of grazing. The fence is the line of demarcation between an overgrazed private property and ungrazed nature reserve. The impact of grazing here is obvious and dramatic.

A very similiar photograph was taken three years earlier in 2002 and published by the Australian Geographic as explained at my second blog post on the Macquarie Marshes entitled ‘Marsh Graziers Don’t Pay For Their Water’.

I wrote last year that it seems incredible that flood-plain graziers are screaming so loudly for more water and yet the issue of overgrazing is being ignored by all.

Well, just maybe, overgrazing as an issue, in the marshes, is now starting to be acknowledged!

Thanks Daniel Lewis.

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[1] Fat ducks, fat cattle – fat chance
On one side of the river stand the irrigators, on the other the graziers. Both are pointing the finger over the demise of the Macquarie Marshes, writes Daniel Lewis.
Sydney Morning Herald, Saturday 8th July 2006
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/fat-ducks-fat-cattle–fat-chance/2006/07/07/1152240493862.html

[2] Cattle Killing the Macquarie Marshes
October 21, 2005. https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/archives/000949.html

I’ve written two other pieces on the marshes:
Marsh Graziers Don’t Pay For Their Water, October 25, 2005
https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/archives/000958.html
and
Fat Ducks Equal Fat Cows, On Line Opinion 18th April 2006
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=4377