Bathurst is much better known for its race track, where the annual Holden/Ford high performance production car race was held. Photo / File
Bathurst is much better known for its race track, where the annual Holden/Ford high performance production car race was held. Photo / File
Millisphere: a discrete region inhabited by roughly one thousandth of the world population. Around eight million people.
In these columns, the millisphere is a Utopian alternative, an imagined ideal future, to the nation state. For cultural and environmental reasons I usually arrange millispheres on watersheds.
Australia can be divided intothree watershed millispheres. The main watershed flows south into the Murray/Darling river system, which is often dry where it once discharged into the Great Australian Bight. Adelaide (population 1.3 million) and the rest of Australia all the way to Perth (population 2 million) on the west coast, are also needed to form the millisphere I call Oz.
I first saw Oz looking west from the Blue Mountains, a short train ride from Sydney.
Another day on a bus heading west and we were still just on the edge of Oz. Scrubby plains curved off over the horizon. The country was vast.
Bathurst, "the objective and terminal point of the only inland journey made by Charles Darwin in Australia in January 1836", is much better known for its race track, where the annual Holden/Ford high-performance production car race was held.
The Australian Holden finished production in 2017. Bathurst had noticeably fewer "immigrants", meaning the non-British stock, like Lebanese, Greeks and Italians, and those who came after Australia's "whites only" immigration policy ended in 1973.
Down the road Gundagai is immortalised in Banjo Paterson's poem The Road to Gundagai. "Branching off there runs a track, across the foothills grim and black, across the plains and ranges grey to Sydney City far away".
Following a beautiful woman to Sydney in Paterson's poem was a metaphor for the attraction of the big city and Gundagai a simile for Hicksville. The Sydney and Melbourne metropolitan areas combined have about half of all Australia's population. Oz however is largely rural.
A convincing argument for the millisphere is the fragmented management of the Murray/Darling catchment. When I was there, Australia was experiencing the worst drought since European settlement; the 1996-2010 "millennium drought", or as they called it, "the big dry". Municipal water supplies were drying up and Murray/Darling irrigation water was being rationed.
Fred Frederikse
The ecology of the Murray/Darling river basin (population 2 million), which drains one seventh of Australia's land mass, was, by all accounts, already in poor health. Flowing through Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia the catchment was administered by four competing states.
In 2008 the government established the Murray-Darling Basin Authority (MDBA), attempting to mediate inter-state water rivalries and manage the river better.
One third of Australia's agricultural production comes from the MDBA. Australia is the world's fourth largest wine-exporting country, much of it from the MDBA. In the headwaters large cotton and rice operations catch much of the water. Getting Chinese-owned farms growing cotton for China, to give up their irrigation water for the ecological health of the river is not going to happen without a fight.
Australia can be divided into three watershed millispheres.
In pre-British times the Murray/Darling wetlands were a huge source of food for the Aboriginals. Historically the white people pushed Australian Aboriginals off the best land and into the desert, killing those who didn't move.
When the British set up their penal colonies on the coast there were around one million Aboriginals in Australia. A century later it had dropped by 80 per cent to 200,000. It's now around 400,000.
In 1938, before the war, and the holocaust, Aborigine William Cooper petitioned the Nazi German embassy in Melbourne against Kristallnacht and the treatment of Jews in Germany. His people knew about genocide.
"The big dry" affected all of Australia. The coastal cities all initiated expensive desalination schemes. Sydney's cost A$1.8 billion, Melbourne opened one in 2011 at the cost of A$3.1 billion. Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide all fired up smaller pilot plants to drought-proof their cities.
Australians will always face water worries and the Aborigines will never truly be compensated for the destruction of their environment but restoring the Murray/Darling wetlands would be a good place to start.
