Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Murray River

New Murray Darling Basin Guide: All Politics?

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The Murray Darling Basin Authority released a ‘Guide to the Proposed Basin Plan’ yesterday which had been touted as an independent scientific report.   My impression of the document, however, is that it is an audacious grab for more water based on popular myths.  

Amongst the many unsubstantiated claims in the Guide, is mention of an 80 percent decline in the abundance of waterbirds across the Basin since 1983.   

I am a little familiar with numbers of water birds  in the Macquarie Marshes.  According to various public statements by expert Richard Kingsford numbers have also been in dramatic decline here, but his actual data, only available from 1985 through to 2001, indicates an increase.

Save the Murray: Remove the Barrages

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The release of a new Murray Darling Basin plan on October 8, 2010, is likely to reignite debate over how best to solve the problems of the Murray River. It will further pit some environmentalists and some South Australians against upstream irrigators as a debate over how to fix the two very large freshwater lakes at the very bottom of the Murray River rages. Lake Alexandrina and Lake Albert are situated behind the narrow expanse of water known as the Coorong, beyond the Coorong is the Southern Ocean and upstream of the lakes is the River proper. 

Few understand how different ecologically this region was before European settlement and the impacts of agriculture and the construction of barrages designed to keep salt water out. Oral histories from local families and the diaries of the first European explorers paint a different picture of the Lakes than that shaping the debate today. If we look back to what the river was like before the barrages then there is a much different solution than that currently being proposed. A solution that may not be as palatable to the South Australian Government or those communities who have grown used to life behind the barrages but a much cheaper and more environmentally sustainable solution in the longer term.  

Many academics and bureaucrats deny that the lakes were ever estuarine. But families that have lived in the region for generations explain, for example, that in 1915, before the barrages and during a period of prolonged drought, sea water penetrated beyond Lake Alexandrina up the River Murray as far as Mannum with the sightings of a shark at Tailem Bend and a dolphin at Murray Bridge.

Since 1941 and the completion of the barrages blocking 90 percent of flows between the lakes and the South Ocean a new history and geography of the Lower Lakes, Coorong and Murray mouth has been created…

Read more here at Quadrant Online.

Reconnecting with the Coorong

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I first learnt about The Coorong – a narrow lagoon that runs parallel with coastal dunes for 140km in southern Australia – when I saw the 1976 film ‘Storm Boy’, the story of a boy and a Pelican. 

The impression I got from the film, and then later from media reports and environmental campaigning is that the lagoon is connected to the freshwater lakes at the bottom of the Murray River, when in fact they have been separated since the 1940s by barrages – infrastructure built to keep out the Southern Ocean.   

But as Susan writes in the following note, “looking at the satellite imagery of the Coorong and Lower Lakes drives home the message that the two are really part of the same ecosystem and should not have those 1940’s barrages separating them.”

There will be people disadvantaged if the barrages are now opened, in particular South Australian irrigators, and also environmental campaigners who have used images of the drying lakes to argue for more water to be taken from irrigators in New South Wales and Victoria for environmental flow. 

But given the dry conditions that continue through the lower Murray Darling Basin, it is surely the best solution and would immediately restore water to this ecosystem. 

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It May Get Even Drier Along the Murray

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THERE has been no general decline in rainfall in Australia due to global warming.   But it is possible that the Murray Darling Basin, once regarded as the food bowl of Australia, will get even drier.  

When farmers say that the region has never been as dry in their lifetime they are correct.  However, the data clearly show that over south eastern Australia the first half of the 20th century was much drier than the second half and the recent ‘drought’ is a return to the conditions of the early 20th century.  Also, the recent dry period is not yet as dry as the period from about 1935 through 1945.

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No ‘Happy New Year’ for Koalas in the Central Murray Valley

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THE Victorian Premier, John Brumby, has waited until New Year’s Eve to announce the end of timber harvesting and grazing in 83,000 hectares of red gum forest in the Central Murray Valley in north western Victoria, Australia.

The creation of new national parks was a 2006 election promise to secure inner-city votes but is based on a lie – on the false belief that by declaring an area a national park you can somehow “save it”. 

In reality the red gums of the mid-Murray need water and thinning and a national park declaration will achieve neither.    The national park declaration will simply increase the risk of wild fires and the death of koalas.

The Rivers and Red Gum Alliance, representing local forest users, provided the government with a well research plan whereby 104,000 hectares could be managed under the principles of the internationally recognised Ramsar convention.  

As Peter Newman, chairman of the Alliance, explained yesterday, “The forests exist in a highly modified landscape surrounded by farmland and need active management to maintain forest health.  This includes fuel reduction through controlled grazing and thinning of the red gum trees to keep the forest open and in a healthy state.” 

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