Death of the rivers.

Autumn rains have broken the worst drought in the memories of south-west Queenslanders. Yet for rural producers downstream in New South Wales it's as though the drought remains. For millions of litres of the resulting floodwaters have been dammed up by cotton producers in southern Queensland. About one-and-a-half times the volume of Sydney Harbour. This flood diversion has reduced the flows of the Condamine and Balonne to half their natural levels; it has cut off the long-awaited flows to the Darling and Murray rivers to the south; and the Coolibahs are dying on the dried floodplains.

A year ago, the devastation of our rivers, including the once mighty Murray, had become a matter of public concern. It had finally sunk into public awareness that the solution to the river crisis lay in the reduction of over-allocated irrigation quotas. With this knowledge as background, civic leader and senator Bill Heffernan described this current act of vast water harvesting as stealing and 'a national disgrace'.

Floodwaters dammed up this year at St George in southern Queensland are nearly one-and-a-half times that mooted to replenish the Murray River. Cubbie cotton station alone--the main siphoner--has a quota of 450 million litres, as much as Sydney Harbour. And this station's annual irrigation quota is only 50,000 million litres short of the amount to be 'squeegeed' out from somewhere to help the Murray flow again.

According to Greg Roberts' '"Cotton-pickin" hands off our water' (Weekend Australian, 20-21/3/2004); the catchment we're speaking of represents half of Queensland's contribution to the Murray-Darling basin. Unfortunately, self-justificatory statements often accompany gross actions of self-interest. In this vein, a spokesperson for irrigation group Smartrivers spoke recently of the need for give and take between irrigators and farmers 'for the sake of the community':

You can't have a developing industry out here with enormous benefits for Australia ... [and] let the graziers have it all.

What benefits? He says nothing about the life of the floodplains; about the still rivers; the rivers flowing backwards; the pulse of the pumps resounding along the rivers. As historian Heather Goodall records graphically, for years locals in the cotton-growing areas of northern New South Wales have given voice to a deep unease at the reversal of the natural order of the river and the floodplains: 'The river flows backwards, you know, when they turn on the pumps!'

Leaving to one side the hoary old argument about revenue from cotton and the gross national product, what are the cotton growers doing 'for the sake of the community'? Unlike the Styx Valley of Tasmania where environmentalists' arguments are countered by real concerns about job loss (remember 'the Apple Isle'?), here machines, not hands, do the picking--no hands, no songs, nut even sad ones.

I believe the interests of the community happen to be the same as the 'interests' of the landscape, the rivers and the floodplains, their lives and those that inhabit them. We are blessed with a beautiful but dry country. None of us who are guided by ethical and practical concerns about the future of the community can escape from the truth that re-flowing the Murray is not some sort of deal. 'For the sake of the community' cannot be weighed or measured in bales of cotton or their monetary equivalent. And flowing rivers and the diversity of landscape are not the exclusive preserve of the green-minded. They are everybody's business. As long as the rivers run ... Cotton on? The answer is probably 'cotton off'.