AUSTRALIA
Land of droughts & flooding rains
By Greg Hunt
"There is nowhere in the world that vaguely compares with the long stretches, the beauty and the mystery of Australia. We have many things we can be proud of, but we must all be conscious of the immense damage which has been done to our rivers and other waterways.
Indeed, the magnitude of the effects of pollution, salinity and other degradation upon our waterways is belatedly being recognised, by all sections of our community and all sides of politics, as among the most important of the contemporary challenges facing our nation."

–Sir William Deane, Former Governor-General of Australia and Waterkeepers Australia’s Honorary Patron speaking on the banks of the rejuvenated Alphington Wetlands

Australia is described in Dorothea McKellar’s poem “My Country” as "a land of droughts and flooding rains." And it is! If ever a country needed Waterkeepers, it is Australia. There are times when we have precious little water at all, and then there are times when we have too much. So if there is any chance of keeping it when we have it, we take it.

Australia is a very old, very flat place. It is also a very big place, almost as large as the continental U.S. It is 2500 miles from the forested east to the parched west and 1500 miles from the monsoonal north to the snow-clad mountains of the south. The centre is all desert – millions of acres of desert. There are five- year-old Australian kids living there who have never seen rain. Maybe that’s why 85 percent of our population lives within 50 kilometers of the coast.

Australia has an abundance of strange animals, from 50 different kinds of kangaroos to over 200 snakes, including eight of the top ten deadliest in the world. The leaves on our gum trees hang down to avoid the sun – they lose less water that way. You wouldn’t call our trees shady. This is just one of the adaptations of our flora and fauna to arid conditions. There are more. Desert mice never drink. There’s nothing to drink anyway, and they metabolise (that’s metabolize for our American friends) all the water they need from their food. As long as there are good seasons and plenty of grass, kangaroos can be continuously pregnant, turning out joey after joey. If there is a chance to reproduce, kangaroos take it.

Australia’s water problems arose with the arrival of the English and other European settlers. The Aboriginal people, the marsupials and other animals, and the plants were adapted to the arid environment, including the erratic rainfall. Europeans brought different animals and plants, and they had very different ways of making a living from the land. The bush was cleared, crops were planted, and rivers were dammed. Plants and animals that relied on infrequent, but heavy rains, and the flooding that then surged across the land suffered mightily. The gum trees that needed regular inundation suffered stress and died, and the giant freshwater Murray Cod that breed in the flooded billabongs which flank the rivers were unable to reproduce.

The hard-hooved stock animals – the sheep and cattle – trampled the soft soil of the river banks and gave erosion a foothold, so riverbanks crumbled away and the riverside vegetation disappeared. The frogs, reptiles, birds, and mammals that relied on this habitat also suffered. The importation of traditional farming practices, extensive single-species crops, and flood irrigation also exacted a toll on the land. Deep-rooted trees were cleared so the groundwater, which contained the salt accumulated in the soils over millions and millions of years, rose to the surface. Without the trees to pump the groundwater up into the atmosphere, large tracts of agricultural land were taken from production as salt poisoned the soil.

The crops that settler farmers brought with them were often ill matched to the Australian environment. Why should a dry country such as Australia produce cotton or rice, both extremely reliant on huge volumes of water? These crops are just not viable, and other countries can grow them without the same environmental cost.

Most Australians have yet to come to terms with the nature of the continent upon which we live – we’ve only been here a little over two hundred years. We still don’t know how to live here; we are not yet possessed of understanding.

So when some environmentalists who were starting to understand began looking for better ways to protect our water and our waterways, they were delighted to learn about Waterkeeper Alliance. Australians profess a great love for our rivers, and an even greater love for our coasts. After all, we reckon we have the best beaches in the world! If we could look after our rivers and coasts better than we had been, we wanted to join up.

Waterkeepers Australia started in late 2003. Derwent Riverkeeper: Our first member, "Derwent" Dave Turner hails from Tasmania, an island-state off the southeast coast of Australia. Derwent Dave has been looking after the Derwent River and its estuary for many years. He can tell you how introduced sea stars have been taking over the seabed, and how the waste from the yachts in the annual Blue Water Ocean Classic, the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race, was being dumped in the river. The newspaper article describing his success with the port authorities, who now require the yachts to pump their bilges into a sewer for proper treatment, was titled “No to Poop Decks.” Derwent Dave is indeed a successful Riverkeeper.

The Lang Lang Riverkeeper is involved in a battle to stop six chicken broiler sheds from being built on the flood plain seventy five yards from the bank of the Lang Lang River. They had been involved for some time in planting trees and grasses to create the habitat that brings back wildlife. And their efforts have paid off: even platypus have returned to the river. Now there is a weird animal – an egg-laying, fur-covered, duck-billed, beaver-like creature that finds food with its eyes closed, diving to the riverbed to find small invertebrates by touch.

The platypus is the only egg-layer that Peter Row, the Lang Lang Riverkeeper, wants in abundance around his river. With the support of Waterkeepers Australia and lawyers from the Environment Defenders Office who work for free on such cases, Peter is organizing efforts to stop the sheds.

Another member is Rob Caune, the Snowy Estuarykeeper from the south-east corner of the mainland of Australia. Rob is an active fisherman in the lakes at the mouth of the Snowy River. A proposal to build a gas plant on the shores of one of these lakes galvanized his angling club into action. They have been running a highly successful campaign to put the plant on hold until they find a better place to build it. Rob is not opposed to the gas plant – he just wants a good one. As he says, "I want a world-class development. What they are proposing insults our common sense."

And this is what Waterkeepers Australia is all about – common sense. Water is fundamentally important to us all, to all life. There are no alternatives to water. That it comes to us in creeks, rivers, lakes, and bays means that it is just plain sensible to look after them too. In a country like Australia, where the availability of water cannot be taken for granted, who wouldn’t want to be a Waterkeeper?