The rain in South East Queensland last week gave us a few extra days grace before the authorities tighten the screws on water usage even further. I suspect that Beattie went to the polls early in part because he didn’t want to face the electors after yet another hot summer with even more ferocious water restrictions. There is talk of a dreaded El Niño forming.
A few weeks ago Shaun posted on a story that the environmental impact report on the lungfish had been “shredded�. Last month tigtog posted on the lungfish and the damming of the Mary River and earlier Mark had a word or two on Queensland, dams and the politics of water.
Last week there was a discussion on national radio with Cate Molloy, the Labor member who broke ranks on the dam issue and is standing as an independent, and the other candidates for the Noosa electorate on the proposed Traveston Dam on the nearby Mary River. Then in the Courier Mail today Jane Fynes-Clinton’s opinion piece really ripped in.
Cate Molloy did OK, I think, pointing out that the dam was to be built on an alluvial plain, that the rainfall is dodgy (OK on average, but that’s on the basis of quite huge floods once a decade or so) and getting worse, and that the dam would be subject to silting (it will be fairly shallow.)
Jane Fynes-Clinton’s told us that the dam wall will be built on a site which:
is a mess of various forms of rock, gravel and slushy shale which will cause enormous engineering complexity in the dam construction. Bedrock is hard to find.
In truth the bedrock is just not there. They are going to have to do without it. Then she said:
And forget the fear of drinking poo water via recycling: the Mary Valley has residues of cyanide used to mine gold in the area’s financial heyday; traces of arsenic from the cattle dip used for generations; and deep-down fertiliser that was once laid on and cultured. Suddenly purified poop by the glass doesn’t seem so bad by comparison.
The last sentence is a cheap shot, of course. But the dam is sounding less and less like a good idea. Professor Jean Joss (see Shaun’s post) has always worried me. She just asserts that the dam will be the end of the lungfish without explaining herself. A dam on the Mary will not affect the Burnett. Is the lungfish already extinct in the Burnett River, a system considerably larger than the Mary? And as wpd said on Shaun’s thread there will be plenty of the Mary undammed. One wonders whether Joss is just saying anything it takes to achieve an effect.
I’ve found it difficult to pinpoint just where the Traveston dam is meant to be. This map shows the Traveston Road crossing the river just south of Dagun. I think the wall will be about there. This map gives perspective, aligning the dam roughly with Tewantin and Noosa. This map gives the whole Mary catchment. The extent of the inundation is unclear, but the original proposal would have flooded part of Kadanga. Nevertheless this leaves a large part of the catchment below the dam.
How important this is we don’t know. Yesterday on Awaye! a woman from the Gubbi Gubbi people told us that the lungfish breeds in the shallows. The Traveston dam will capture 15% of the flow, which means that the shallows below the dam will tend to dry up, she said. But it is not clear whether the lungfish inhabit the tributaries that flow into the Mary below the dam. She did say the fish turned up to their family picnic at Imbil, which, I note, is on Yabba Creek just below the Borumba Dam.
This is quite apart from the cultural significance of the lungfish to the Gubbi Gubbi and other cultural sensitivities associated with the area, which are legion. Traditionally the Gubbi Gubbi protect the lungfish and don’t eat it.
Nevertheless we need the water, or so we’re told by the Qld government. As a voting citizen it is hard to know. In the discussion with Fran Kelly, Cate Molloy et al it was said that the Federal Government would have a close look at the dam and “would do the Queensland Government no favours.” But there was disagreement as to whether the engineering and environmental reports have yet been completed. And will the Feds be looking out for the public interest or playing politics?
Perhaps we should just put our faith in technology. After all it will soon be possible to make rain (thankyou Steve Munn) or desalinate seawater cheaply using new technology (thankyou JC). Both of these are at least five years away, but so is the dam.
Apart from that the government report Water for South East Queensland: a long term solution (pdf file) did cover most of the bases. As Mark said, the Beattie government has a clear message, one which plays to our fears. It leaves the anti-dam brigade thrashing around.
I’m frustrated and conflicted on the issue, lacking sufficient information to make a rational decision. Given that we can’t cap the population in the region (my preferred emotional position) I’d tend to favour the Coalition’s “Four dams� proposal. It captures less water than the Traveston, but in the Mary it only involves raising the Borumba Dam wall plus a new dam on Amamor Creek, leaving the major part of the basin and the productive farming land undisturbed and avoiding the arsenic and cyanide, real or hyped. This would clearly be better for the lungfish and other species of interest, the Mary River cod, the Mary River turtle, and the great barred frog plus three other frogs, Coxen’s fig-parrot and the Richmond birdwing butterfly. Then there is the Great Sandy World Heritage area and the Great Sandy Straits Declared Ramsar wetland area which will be adversely impacted upon by changing the flow of the Mary River.
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But then the Nationals have suggested piping in water from the Great Artesian Basin, essentially a silly idea. They should be aware that the Israelis have found that if you pipe water more than 200 kilometres it is cheaper to desalinate.
I would go harder on recycling and make it a frontline strategy for human consumption, rather than Beattie’s approach of only in the case of an ‘Armageddon scenario’ and then only after a referendum. The Greens claim that we could get 40% of our water from recycling. If people don’t want to drink perfectly good water they can buy it in a bottle or go somewhere else.
But then politicians have to get themselves elected.
September Monthly has a feature essay on the proposed Mary River dam. It was the first coverage I’d heard / seen outside of Shaun & Tigtog’s posts, down here in Victoria.
Brian, an excellent post. It will take me some time to chase up all the links. But as to one question:
The answer is yes. I know that they can be found at Miva Station. Or at least they were there 10 or so years ago.
wpd, I suspected you were right. The lungfish advocates get very emotional and I think almost invariably overstate their case.
The Gubbi Gubbi woman was emphasising that they were known as the (insert aboriginal word meaning lungfish) people, so the lungfish was part of their identity. Emotion has to be respected in that case, I’d suggest.
If anyone can find a map showing the area of inundation of the proposed Traveston dam, it would be really helpful. We know that it is on an alluvial plain, basically river flats, and I think is only 8.5 metres deep, so the area is likely to be large.
Laura, I suppose it’s too much to ask for the Monthly article to be online.
Brian, from what I have been told and from what I have read the Traveston site is far from ideal re geological formations. Also, the dam will have to be shallow and therefore will lose a lot through evaporation. But can beggars be choosers?
I agree with you that Beattie would not relish an election after a long hot summer exacerbated by Level 4 water restrictions with plants dying, foundations cracking, fines, dobbing neighbours etc. Undoubtedly the political temperature will rise unless we have good summer rains. The SOI for the SE corner is actually looking better than it has for some time.
While the maps you point to are good, they do not provide all the detail. For example, the Mary River Map does not show Little Yabba Creek or its main tributary Booloumba Creek. I raise these two examples because those creeks contain any number of fish nests, any number of marine plants and are still flowing after all this drought; albeit very slowly. I don’t know whether there are any lungfish in these creeks, but from what I have read, the habitat seems ideal. These creeks would not be affected by the Traveston Dam.
I would like to know whether there are any lungfish above the Borumba Dam. Certainly there are some below the Dam as testified by one of the traditional owners. (By the way, there is a lungfish in an aquarium just below the Borumba Dam wall.)
It is true that gold mining was very extensive in the headwaters of the Mary not just in the immediate Gympie area. The Booloumba Creek area is dotted with many, many deep mine shafts; some of which have recently come to light after extensive searches for the bodies of three women who have gone missing, presumed murdered, in the area. I imagine that there was gold mining in the area above the Borumba Dam. Does this mean that cyanide and arsenic are already in the Gympie water supply? I do know that many backyards in Gympie are badly affected but the residents don’t talk about for fear of driving down prices.
I really don’t know how much the lungfish will be affected but to date I haven’t seen any hard evidence one way or the other. Those who have the expertise and are committed to their survival have not argued their case very well. I am sure there must be hard data, but where?
Beattie says he will have industries use recycled water. The irony might be that industry will be using the purest and best water. The people of Toowoomba voted no to recycled water. So the treated water goes into the headwaters of the Darling and then is used by the residents of the many towns dotted downstream without any reported problems.
Some normally rational people have a real mental block when it comes to ‘recycled’ water. As if the water they are drinking is somehow ‘new’..
Recycled water is a must, but politically difficult.
Earlier today I googled up ‘Gubbi Gubbi’ and turned up an interesting post on Jennifer Morahasy’s blog on the lungfish with quite a few interesting links. I’ll say a bit more when I’m not so tired but it seems the woman I heard on the radio, whose name I didn’t catch, was Eve Mumewa Doreen Fesl,OAM,CM,PhD (nee Evelyn Serico), Gubbi Gubbi Elder. Their name for the lungfish was “Dala”.
Google also turned up this “Rainbow Spirit Warriors” website who claim that the “Gubbi Gubbi” are really the “Ka’bi” who are in fact extinct. They refer to “a highly-profiled so-called ‘Gubbi Gubbi’ personage and ‘family’ connections” who have promoted “misinformation and community indoctrination” for (false) land-claim purposes.
Ouch! It does ring a bell but I have no way of judging the merits of the case.
The following day Morahasy put up a guest post by Steve Dennis where if you follow the links you get at last an inundation map.
wpd, The post on Marohasy’s blog is really a guest post by Eve Fesl. From it we find that the lungfish is 380 million years old. John Harms’ article, mentioned by Laura, (I found it in the newsagents on the way to voting yesterday) tells us that it hasn’t changed for 50 million years and is one of only eight species that gave rise to land vertebrates.
So we can take it as read that it has world significance.
The most interesting piece on the lungfish I found (from a link provided by rog) is an advice to the Minister for the Environment and Heritage from the Threatened Species Scientific Committee recommending vulnerable status for the lungfish. It is annoying that the document has no date, but here are some of the important points.
Internal evidence puts the date at prior to the Paradise Dam completed in November 2005. This makes the following statement worrying:
So we now have 39% of the main channels impounded, with Traveston to be added. The tributaries are considered marginal in terms of habitat.
Translocation occurred during the 1890s when the lungfish was introduced to a number of streams in SEQ. They are known to exist in the Brisbane and North Pine Rivers and at the Enoggera Reservoir but in the case of the latter are assumed to be no longer breeding because the vegetation on the edge of the water has been cleared.
These populations appear to be inadequately studied but even in the Burnett, before Paradise, we have this statement:
Beattie won the election and now has a mandate to proceed, having probably sacrificed two seats (Kawana and Noosa) to achieve his mandate. I’m extremely uneasy about what we’re about to do to the Mary River. I don’t know how these things play out in terms of procedure, but I think the Minister for the Environment and Heritage, the Senate and local members should be lobbied to have a good hard look at it.
Brian, sorry for the slow reaction and I do appreciate your search for the ‘truth’; a new grandson has been born and therefore family obligations.
But, with respect to the lungfish:
I don’t think that there was ever any question about the significance of the lungfish. I accept it is under threat and I wish it wasn’t.
I found Marohasy’s blog to be particularly illuminating. But it does raise some further (political) questions. For example, there is the statement that (Criterion 3
Criteria 3, 4 and 5 state clearly:
It would seem that it is ‘vulnerable’. But I don’t know what meaning to give to that. Is ‘vulnerable’ more serious than ‘threatened’. I don’t know. Who can tell me?
In short, I don’t want a dam at Traveston for a whole range of reasons. But in my ideal world, I want arguments that withstand scrutiny.
My recent experiences, before retirement, were concerned with the political world; a world of disinformation or spin if you like. I am therefore attuned to the way ‘crap’is peddled.
I hope this makes some sort of sense.
Yes, I don’t usually go to Morahasy’s place but apart from a few ratbags they did well on this one.
Re ‘vulnerable’ status I wondered also about the criteria. You’ll note that it was not eligible on Criteria 3-5 because the requisite information was unknown. On the first two what it came down to was that there was an observed decline in numbers and a limited geographic distribution. Maybe that’s enough according to their rules or maybe there is discretion in how the rules are interpreted. I suspect the former because there was no special arguing for a discretionary listing.
I still wanted to make a comment on how it’s not raining in the right places to run water anymore, but I’m being pursued over a history project about my former life and she’s showing up tomorrow. Unfortunately that will be the beginning rather than the end. I’d rather think about lungfish!
the lungfish is alive and well in the burnett river system between the walla weir and ceders crossing. i have a property on the river at pine creek and are lucky enough to see the lungfish playing in the weed everyday , your welcome to come and enjoy it for youself, the biggest problem for the lungfish is maybe the catfish which is in plauge proportions in the river in our area