The Sierra Club believes that national parks and areas like my own cannot be effectively defended if they do not build up a constituency of political support by allowing more and more visitors to enjoy them. In other words, we need to degrade our treasures in order to promote their preservation. This is a pernicious argument. Read more here.
National Parks
No ‘Happy New Year’ for Koalas in the Central Murray Valley
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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Cattle Still in the Barmah Forest
ON Monday, the first day of summer here in Australia, residents of the little town of Barmah in northwestern Victoria, drove cattle into their forest in defiance of a government ban. The Department of Sustainability and Environment has threatened legal action, but so far the cattle are still there.
The forest has historically been grazed and the Barmah locals believe this is important to reduce the fire risk.
Campaigning for National Parks is Against Australian’s Bush Ethos: Part 1, Buying Back Tooralee
THERE has been much written about Australia’s national character emerging from a bush ethos: the idea that a specifically Australian outlook emerged first amongst workers in the Australian outback. Banjo Paterson, perhaps more than any other writer, created and defined this cultural heritage. His story about the shearer and his sheep (the jumbuck) remains our most popular national song, ‘Waltzing Matilda’. I grew up on ‘The Man from Snowy River’; a poem about a courageous young horseman who out-rides wild brumbies in the High Country.
But few Australians now have anything much to do with the bush. They mostly live in cities, don’t know how to ride a horse and go to the beach for their holidays. They just singing about sheep at sporting events and read poems about mighty rivers and like the idea of saving the outback. And so it seems every new Australia government makes saving the Murray River part of their platform.
The previous Howard government was going to save the Murray from salinity – and achieved this through the construction of salt interception schemes and catchment wide drainage plans all administered by the Murray Darling Basin Commission.
The new Rudd Government wants to save the Murray from climate change. This is a much more ambitious undertaking than saving the Murray from salt.
As part of this campaign the new government has new legislation, The Water Amendment Bill 2008, and it is currently being debated in federal parliament with its second reading beginning last week. A centre piece of the new legislation is the creation of a ‘The Murray Darling Basin Authority’. This new institution is claimed to be needed because the existing Murray Darling Basin Commission doesn’t have enough control over the states, but in reality the new organisation, like the old, will still be subject to state politics. In short, nothing much will change, but it keeps the politicians in politics.
Politician and new Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong, plans to relieve the claimed climate change problem by buying up farms; most recently through the purchase of a 91,000 hectare property called Tooralee near Burke in NSW. Tooralee currently grows maize, cotton and beef cattle but following the federal government takeover will be converted to national park.
Internet campaigners ‘GetUp’ helped get the Rudd-government elected, and have recently joined ‘the fray’ on Murray River issues claiming to provide an opportunity for Australians “to keep the rivers flowing” and save “Australia’s food bowl” through a few mouse-clicks. But this new campaign is particularly deceptive as Penny Wong’s policies will actually close-down agriculture in the Murray-Darling Basin i.e. empty the food bowl! Indeed the federal government has something like $3.6 billion to buyback farms like Tooralee.
Furthermore, as some farmers explained on ABC’s TV’s Four Corners program on Tuesday night, you can’t buy back rivers, not even with billions of dollars, because water allocations are just air space until it rains.
But hey, modern Australia’s are now a mostly soft and gullible lot and likely to support this campaign which is essentially a campaign in support of more politics and big government and against bushies because they now know no better. But none of this makes senses in the context of our heritage which was about being practical and a part of the bush – the floods and the droughts and the climate change.
Beyond Burke, May 2005. Photograph by Jennifer Marohasy
Impressions of humanity in wilderness
We have an enlargement of this image printed on stretched canvas, hanging on the wall of our living room. In its abundance and purity, water underpins the richness of our rainforest home and this image beautifully captures the celebrity of its most central supply.
As a family, we spend a surprising amount of time discussing and enjoying impressions within the image, such as the somewhat maniacal moss-covered face at the centrepiece of the two major falls. Another, somewhat haunting depiction of what we agree appears to be a woman’s face, looks upward from the right-hand wall of the cascade towards the heavily-browed simian face to the immediate left of the upper fall.
In an absence of formal identity, I named these Bridal Veil Falls, for the splendid way that the water diverted to the left spreads, with such an even, parabolic descent.
In retrospect, I would have liked to have been able to provide a presentation service to this gorgeous feature deep within the Cooper Valley, but such an entitlement is vigorously prohibited, through application of the precautionary principle. Of course, being national park, public entry is an existing right, however, the provision of a guiding service is not allowed.
Ironically, I may be called upon to assist in the recovery of a lost hiker, along with perhaps another hundred or so volunteers, in an environment deemed too important to suffer the impact of a guide that might prevent the loss in the first place.
What is Wilderness? (Part 3)
“An infamous media type said, ‘In essence we’re a conceited naked ape but in our mind we’re a divine legend and we see ourselves as some sort of God that we can walk around the earth deciding who will live and die and what will be destroyed and saved.’ Wilderness has no gods or one almighty. All is equal in life and death and just simply being. The rich tapestry of a wilderness includes the naked ape, but does not sustain those that want to dominate it. It then becomes something else.” Posted by: Travis at May 7, 2008 08:07 AM
Near Wentworth, Blue Mountains, photo taken April 27, 2008
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.