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DougHaigh_JenMercer
Joined: 05 May 2006
Posts: 654
Location: Mary Valley
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Darren E
Joined: 04 May 2006
Posts: 2075
Location: Dagun, Qld
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 Posted: Fri Mar 28, 2008 6:50 am Post subject: |
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And also at Maryborough City Hall, FRIDAY 4th APRIL at 7.30 pm
Adults $10 Families $20
Tanzi and I had the opportunity to see Steve's presentation at the Australian Water Association Conference last year - and it was excellent. I understand that he has rearranged it since then and the new and improved version is even better.
The fundraiser nights will be both informative and entertaining. Recommend them to your friends - well worth the ticket price.
The Don't Murray the Mary kayak trip will kick off in Brisbane on Saturday 12th April, midday, from the Riverside Centre.
If things go as planned, the schedule is:
Steve will final make it to the Mary River on Tuesday 22nd April, with an "anniversary paddle" at Traveston on Sunday 27th. (Everyone welcome, further details to be announced).
On Saturday 3rd May Steve will reach the mouth of the Mary, and then turn out into the Great Sandy Straight and head south back towards Brisbane.
There may be stops at Noosa and Mooloolaba on the way back (to be announced), before arriving back at the Riverside Centre on Saturday 10th May.
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"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything" - anon.
"There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies" - Walter Lippman |
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Darren E
Joined: 04 May 2006
Posts: 2075
Location: Dagun, Qld
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| Posted: Sat Mar 29, 2008 3:31 pm Post subject: |
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Victor and his "tell 'em to get stuffed" crew have been busy showing signs of resistance...
And also the Sisters of Mary.
Signs and banners going up all over Gympie and Noosa.
One or two people might see that...
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"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything" - anon.
"There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies" - Walter Lippman |
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Darren E
Joined: 04 May 2006
Posts: 2075
Location: Dagun, Qld
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| Posted: Wed Apr 02, 2008 6:53 am Post subject: |
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Below is a map of the journey, together with the schedule. Well done Arkin.
I had to reduce the image resolution to get it to post, but it is still readable. If anyone wants a high resolution version for printing, send a PM to Arkin with your name and email address.
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"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything" - anon.
"There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies" - Walter Lippman |
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Glenda Pickersgill
Joined: 03 May 2006
Posts: 367
Location: Kandanga
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| Posted: Sun Apr 06, 2008 2:22 am Post subject: Bus heading to Brisbane 12th April to see Steve off |
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Come to Brisbane next Saturday 12th April. We have the "Don't murray the Mary" bus seating 49 leaving Kandanga at 7.30 am - [only $15 but please book ph 54479288]. We have space for some canoes/kayaks if you would like to bring them please let me know.
STEVE HAS THE MEDIA COMING AT 11.00 AM AND LEAVES AT 12.00 NOON, FROM THE BOAT RAMP,RIVERSIDE DRIVE WEST END [ between Jane and Boundry streets]
He is doing this to help save the Mary River from becoming the saline degraded Murray that he paddled down last year.
Welcome everyone who would like to join us at West End to celebrate Steve heading off on his adventure with the message that there are alternatives to damming the Mary. |
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Darren E
Joined: 04 May 2006
Posts: 2075
Location: Dagun, Qld
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| Posted: Sun Apr 06, 2008 3:40 am Post subject: |
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Here are some of Glenda's photos of the preparations for Steve's trip.
Steve inspecting the newly decorated support vehicle and kayak.
Let's go! Steve with his support crew member, John. Check out the cool "No Dam" boardies. The yellow rashies have big "No Dam" triangles on the back too.
Just a few Save the Mary River stickers...
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"If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything" - anon.
"There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies" - Walter Lippman |
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bensoncooroy
Joined: 28 Jun 2006
Posts: 223
Location: Ridgewood
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| Posted: Sun Apr 06, 2008 4:44 am Post subject: Steve Posselts Trip |
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Please get your friend in Brisbane to come along as well, we must show Brisbane we mean business.
In the End
We will remember
not the words of our enemies,
but the silence of our friends. Maritn Luther King Jn.
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arawajo
Joined: 13 May 2006
Posts: 628
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| Posted: Sun Apr 06, 2008 8:16 am Post subject: Teeming river to dust bowl |
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A story about the Murray from today's Australian Newspaper.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23485369-11949,00.html
| Quote: | Teeming river to dust bowl
Amanda Hodge April 05, 2008
TIME has not been kind to the people and landscapes of the Murray-Darling river system.
Stories of crops not sown, fruit withering on vines and trees, creeks and wetlands drying, and fauna dying of starvation at the banks of stagnant water sources are as consistent along its reaches as they are eerily biblical. Water levels in the main channel and many of its beautiful, distinctly Australian anabranches are tragically low.
Drought - the most extreme in 120 years of recorded river history - is the main cause of this hardship, abetted by bureaucratic stasis that has allowed too much water to be taken from the rivers.
Seven years ago The Australian sent me in a boat down the Murray River from Albury to the mouth in South Australia to highlight the plight of this important and overworked water resource and encourage greater co-operation between the commonwealth and the four Murray states that have traditionally bickered over its wealth.
At the time The Australian wrote of a need for commonwealth control of its management and for a tighter, more enforceable water cap that shared the river more equitably between humans and the environment.
Since then, there have been several false dawns. Saving the Murray has turned out to be not so much a glorious campaign as a prolonged war of attrition.
The most recent agreement - sealed last week - hands the commonwealth power to control water extraction caps and environmental plans. The deal comes with a $10billion fund for buying out water licences and fixing old and leaky water irrigation channels. In the new, clubby ALP atmosphere of the Council of Australian Governments, the plan has been hailed as a breakthrough. But is it?
About 20km downstream of the NSW border town of Albury, Paul Hickey greets us at his front door. In 2001 we pulled up to the heavily eroded river banks at the edge of his property to see a cattle gate suspended several metres over the river. The raging torrents of irrigation water, sent down from dams each year for downstream irrigators, had claimed metres of his property.
Back then affected landowners were prepared to go to court. Now, millions of dollars worth of timber groyne work lines both sides of the river. The Murray-Darling Basin Commission, the river's management authority, has been working to alleviate the problem. Some landowers have been bought out.
Others, such as Hickey, have stayed on in the hope the groynes will do their job and slow the irrigation water that reverses the river's natural flows to summer highs and winter lows.
"Give them credit, they've done a lot of work, the commission," Hickey says. "I like to think the article The Australian wrote seven years ago had a lot to do with that. There was a change in attitude (within the commission) after that ... and a lot of us feel it turned into a fairly constructive experience." All this good work is yet to be tested, however. In recent years there simply has not been the water to send downstream.
Hickey's cattle property, while beautiful, is bone dry. He sold the last of the cattle six weeks ago.
"After 47 years of breeding our beef here, it's gone," he says. "The price we got was much the same as in 1977. People just aren't getting paid for the food they produce."
Like many people we revisit, Hickey talks of climate change, the needs of the river and environment, and an uncertain future. There is less optimism, but also greater realism, and an understanding that there are too many buckets and not enough water to fill them.
Former MDBC chief executive Don Blackmore, who now chairs the CSIRO flagship, the Co-operative Research Centre for Water, and also works as a river management consultant with the World Bank, is explicit about the pain ahead. "There's no doubt we're going to need to get about 20 per cent of current (water) consumption out of irrigation; that is a lot," he says.
"In five years I think the Murray-Darling landscape is going to look quite different. Common sense would say that as a nation we need to hang on to the things we're good at and let go of the things we're not so good at. We all cried tears of blood when Mitsubishi went offshore. The same with irrigation."
He hopes the Government will consider paying premiums for water from districts that are not viable.
In the meantime, areas such as Deniliquin, Kerang, Coleambally and Moulamein are in desperate times. Deniliquin's rice mill is closed, grain harvests are way down and water licenses are being traded out of these regions to producers with more profitable crops elsewhere. Robin Crawford knows she works marginal lands in the NSW soldier settlement district of Moulamein, between Deniliquin and Swan Hill. She and her brother, Leigh Vial, are among a new breed of rice farmers who "vertically integrate" their business, using their water entitlements to grow rice crops in the summer, then planting wheat on those areas immediately after harvest to double the productivity of the water.
Seven years ago The Australian captured Vial among a sea of green rice. But for the past few years there has been no water and no rice crop, a first for the Vial family in almost 40 years. The same farm is an expanse of dun-coloured paddocks and dry water channels.
Vial has moved, at least temporarily, off the land. He works in Laos helping poor farmers find alternatives to rice crops as part of a PhD. Meanwhile, his sister struggles to keep the two businesses afloat. The local primary school where Crawford sends her two girls is down to 10 students, and many local farms are for sale. Crawford's husband works off-farm so there's money to keep food on the table, but she can't say whether there's a future for rice or the community in which she grew up and is rearing her daughters.
"There's no win for anybody unless we look after everything. I walk along the river frontage every morning and the dieback is devastating. I would like to think Australia can accommodate rice. We need some agriculture that can perform when the water's there and then do this when it's not," she says pointing to the dry paddocks. But she adds: "I guess it depends - if there's no rain then no, there is no future for rice."
Rice and cotton were the enemies last time I travelled the Murray, thirsty crops considered by many conservationists to be unsuitable for Australia's climate. Something has shifted since then. Fruit and grapevine growers, the permanent planters, are now taking the heat. Victoria's water act no longer prioritises water for these growers and even respected water scientists had begun talking of the benefit of annual crops that can be grown in good times and abandoned in bad.
In the fruit block community of Woorinen, near Swan Hill, we search in vain for stone fruit farmer Kerry Gammon who, when we last met, was the engine behind a local fruit co-operative branding its product for international export. Her motivation was to keep local farmers in business and her community alive. Even back then she feared water licences would be traded out of the area, placing strain on the remaining farmers still paying for water delivery. The Woorinen fruit block farmers have had a win since then.
Their water is now delivered through underground pipelines, which prevent evaporation and seepage losses and allow each grower to monitor how much water they're using. A Woorinen neighbour, Graeme Butler, is delighted with the new system. But the word is the Gammons are selling up.
Even Mildura restaurateur Stefano de Pieri, a long-time poster boy for the Murray's inland breadbasket, seems dispirited. He says the conversation has changed.
"Before we were talking about over-allocation, about some unfairness in the system and drought of course. But I think now the notion of climate change is putting everything back on the agenda through a different prism." He is encouraged by CSIRO research aimed at quantifying the maximum water yield for each river reach and the effect of agriculture and other interceptions.
De Pieri echoes the opinion of water scientists such as Mike Young and the late Peter Cullen, who warned the existing management system was built for a wet period and not the potentially climate-changed dry zone it may well have become. "To me the system is in chaos in the sense that people are growing willy-nilly," he says. "There ought to be a centralised system that determines maximum yield by area according to the availability of water. Grid the entire basin and within each grid say: 'This is what you can plant, this is how much water you can use."'
But, he adds, governments have a "moral and social responsibility" - after years of encouraging irrigation farming - to cushion the blow. "Some people ought to be encouraged to go out and sell their water," he says. In instances where the proceeds aren't enough to fund a new life, compensation should be paid.
In Merbein, just outside Mildura, up to 30per cent of the fruit and grape growers have stopped farming. The need to downsize the Murray irrigation community is undeniable but the economic reality on the ground is painful. We see dead fruit trees and vine pulls.
Mildura Deputy Mayor Vernon Knight, who runs the Mallee family counselling service, talks of "the death of optimism" in inland farming regions whose livelihoods depend on rain falling elsewhere. "This is a can-do community that doesn't wait for the cavalry to come, but all that depends on the economy of the region," Knight says.
In the Mildura area he estimates as many as 20 per cent of producers have stopped farming. A lot of water has been sold out of the district, leaving farms worthless, he adds.
As communities are suffering, so too are the Murray's wetlands and river red gum forests, many of them internationally recognised through inclusion on the UN list of important wetlands. On our first visit to the Barmah-Millewa forest, which straddles the NSW-Victoria border, we waded through in the wake of an environmental flow that brought glorious bird life and new growth to the wetlands, eventually abandoning the wellies for a tinnie and binoculars to motor across Moira lakes. It has had one other such event since then. But this time we crunch our way through deep beds of dessicated forest litter, dead phragmites and dry creek beds before driving out on to the hard Moira lake bed.
Drying a wetland is important for its health, allowing new growth that will become food when the next flood comes.
But fewer floods make it on to the floodplains that rely on the wet-dry cycle. They are taken by extractors before they even get close. Now when a drought comes along, the systems are already too stressed to cope.
Banrock Station winery's environmental manager Tony Sharley deliberately dried out the celebrated wetlands in South Australia's Kingston-on-Murray for the first time in years in December 2006, but the failure of winter rains means it has been dry for 15 months. "Nowadays I stand at my office and look out over a dry landscape and, as exciting as it is to see redgums popping up, obviously without water in there we're missing fish and bird breeding cycles," Sharley says, adding he "will never take for granted again having water in that system".
The wetland is undeniably stressed and, without good rains this winter, things will further deteriorate.
But optimism is a rare commodity in the Murray's lower lakes. Boats lie on their sides on dry lake beds. Along the barrages, the Coorong laps the groyne on one side. On the other an abomination of acid sulphate soils, stagnant pools and sand stretch as far as the eye can see.
Back in 2001 the biggest environmental concern was the river mouth silting over through lack of flows from upstream. That fear came to pass and dredging is the only thing keeping it open. New fears, far more grave and unimagined, have replaced the old.
Seven years ago we ended our journey by crossing by boat through the Goolwa lock into the Coorong and over to where the Murray mouth meets the Southern Ocean.
Like so many things we all once took for granted along the Murray River, that is no longer possible.
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When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes obligation" - Steve Biko |
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westholme
Joined: 02 May 2006
Posts: 2628
Location: Amamoor
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| Posted: Tue Apr 22, 2008 10:49 pm Post subject: |
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Is it at all possible to have someone selling no dam yellow triangle stickers at the Crossing on the 27th?
We would like to buy a couple of the smaller triangles to stick to our butts or backs or somewhere, but can't get to the Kandanga Info Centre before this Sunday.
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CESARE LOMBROSO "The ignorant man always adores what he cannot understand" |
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hairymick
Joined: 19 Apr 2008
Posts: 19
Location: Fraser Coast, Queensland, Australia
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| Posted: Wed Apr 23, 2008 12:42 am Post subject: |
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Also, shirts, bordies, mugs etc.etc. please. I have ordered some but don't expect them to arrive in time. Very keen to buy more.
If they are available on the day, I would expect that they are very popular.
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Regards,
Mick |
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