Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Murray River

Good Advice from New York on the Murray Darling

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A year or more ago a prominent climate sceptic suggested that he felt sorry for me whenever he heard me talking publicly about the Murray Darling.    When I asked why, he suggested it was a lost cause… the Murray Darling.  Furthermore, he hinted, it did the reputation of other sceptics no good for me to be defending irrigators.

More recently, in a piece in The Monthly, New York-based Australian author and poet, Kate Jennings, suggests it does the Murray Darling cause no good my being a “prominent climate-change sceptic”.  While Jennings, may understand very little about anthropogenic climate change, her recent article on the Murray Darling is better researched than most and is of course beautifully written.

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No Water for Murray River Irrigators: A Note from Debbie Buller

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This year we have record inflows to dams and rivers, a deep snow pack and all environmental assets are totally sodden.  It is inconceivable that farmers on the Murray and Murrumbidgee Rivers have insufficient access to their irrigation water entitlements. Yet, on the Murray River, allocations are at 15 percent and on the Murrumbidgee, where I farm, they are currently at 57 percent.

On our farm, near Leeton in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, we grow many different cereal crops such as wheat, corn, oats, barley, canola and rice. We also graze sheep. 

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Sea will save the Murray mouth

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THE Murray-Darling Basin is the food bowl of Australia and for years has been considered an ecological disaster.

Later this year the government will release a plan that is supposed to place the Murray-Darling on a sustainable environmental footing, and already $10 billion has been set aside for the plan’s implementation. But if the guide released last year gives any indication of what to expect, then it will do nothing to restore that part of the system most affected by agriculture and most in need of saving: the Lower Lakes and Murray mouth, once the Murray River’s estuary.

The estuary was destroyed when 7.6km of concrete barrages were built across the bottom of the Murray in the 1930s. If nothing is done about this enormous structure there is no guarantee water will get to the Murray’s mouth even if South Australia gets the 4000 gigalitres it is demanding as part of the water reform (4000GL has a market value of $3.2bn to $8bn, depending on where in the Murray-Darling it is purchased).

The barrages have turned the coastal terminal lakes into a permanent and artificially freshwater system, to the detriment of the local environment and the river.

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Convoy of no confidence: what I will say

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I’ve been asked to speak outside Parliament House tomorrow morning, to the ‘Convoy of No Confidence’.   What an honour.  

Following are my speech notes:

THERE is nothing more basic to our physical well-being than food, and Australian farmers are amongst the most efficient and responsible food producers in the world.  Yet they are increasingly demonised and their businesses right now under extraordinary and unnecessary pressure.

The pressure comes, at one level, from apparently arbitrary decisions made by this Commonwealth government, but the previous Coalition government was no better.

Decisions affecting agriculture increasingly reflect the values of an overweight metropolitan elite who have no empathy for, or understanding of, food production or food producers.

It is fashionable to denigrate the very people who keep our supermarket shelves piled high with affordable milk, meat, fruit and vegetable.  And so GetUp! – with members who mostly sit down – dictate ever more impractical but fashionable policies.

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Soil Chemistry, Irrigation and the Disappearance of Murray Cod

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I visited the State Library of South Australia today looking for information on species of fish caught by the Ngarrindjeri in the Lower Lakes at the time of European settlement.

It is evident from the writing of the Reverend George Taplin (who ran the mission on the Narrung Peninsula) that there were Murray Cod in the Lakes and that they were a “forbidden” food for boys.

The local Ngarrindjeri name for them was “Ponde”.

Susan Myers from LakesNeedWater.org has been sending me newspaper articles on the history of the fishery including the following from the Adelaide Advertiser of October 13, 1933, giving reasons for the “Disappearance of Cod”:

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Inefficient Spending, Flawed Government Logic and False Assumptions

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THE lead story on Channel 7’s news tonight was a Commonwealth government program where there has been “inefficient spending, flawed government logic and false assumptions”. [1]

I thought the mainstream media had finally caught on to the absurdity of the Commonwealth’s water reform agenda where the Gillard government plans to spend $10 billion returning end-of-system flows without actually addressing the issue of the 7.6 kilometres of barrages that prevent end-of-system flows. [2]

But, alas, Seven’s political editor Mark Riley was reporting on the findings of a report on indigenous education, health and housing where $3.5 billion has yielded “dismally poor returns”, with progress “mixed at best”.

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