Australia: A continent running dry

By GREG ANSLEY

The summer is merciless, blistering Australia with what just five decades earlier would have been considered a once-in-a-century broiling.

The nation's biggest cities have become virtual islands in which water is the single most valuable commodity and where declining national wealth is further distancing the handful of rich from the increasing mass of poor.

The gracious metropolis of Adelaide is gasping, its water undrinkable for most of the year.

Outside the cities, Australia's once-mighty agricultural industries are a shadow of their 20th-century forebears, crippled by vast paddocks of salt or stripped of their soil.

The continent's rivers are seriously, if not terminally, ill.

The cost of just staying alive is fearsome.

The nation's foreign earnings have been clamped by falling farm exports; the proportion of national income devoured by the need to preserve the remaining reserves of water and productive land is fearsome, and rising.

An apocalyptic fantasy? For the moment, perhaps. But this scenario for 2050 has been drawn from the projections of Australia's leading researchers, many now written into Government policy.

This week a national summit of political, industry and community leaders, chaired by acting Prime Minister John Anderson, met in the Victorian city of Mildura to save the quality of the nation's soil and water.

Along the endless banks of the Murray River, the heart of a system that nurtures most of eastern Australia, communities are being asked, in effect, to reduce their standards of living by pumping water back into a dying artery.

The suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney will soon face similar decisions.

Authorities are considering plans to increase the cost of water - with permanent summer hikes - to write water-saving systems and appliances into building codes, and to introduce national efficiency standards for everything from shower heads to dishwashers.

Last week their message could not be ignored.

Driven by searing northerly winds, a wall of red dust reaching 400km from Mt Isa in Queensland down through New South Wales to southern Victoria, billowed across Australia's largest cities and towns, cloaking homes, cars and businesses in a film of ochre and turning backyard swimming pools to mudholes.

This was prime agricultural land blowing in the wind.

At least 7 million tonnes of irreplaceable topsoil was whipped out to sea: some of it, similar dust storms have previously shown, will cross the Tasman and tinge the snow of the Southern Alps.

The immediate cost will be enormous.

After a smaller storm blanketed Melbourne two decades ago, blowing 2 million tonnes of farmland into the Southern Ocean, the federal science agency CSIRO estimated the cost of replacing lost nutrients at A$4 million ($4.56 million).

The long-term cost to productivity is infinitely higher.

Twenty years ago Queensland scientists calculated that if nothing changed, the soil of the state's grainbelt had a lifespan of 100 years: 60 of those years had already passed.

Environmental audits since then have shown that soil erosion is as severe as ever.

In South Australia, the tiny farming town of Morgan is a touchstone of Australia's environmental health.

Perched on a wide limestone plateau roughly midway between the irrigated Riverland of Victoria and Port Augusta at the tip of the Spencer Gulf, Morgan is surrounded by a desert of salt, lifted from beneath the earth by rising water tables and poisoning hectare after hectare of once-productive farmland.

At Morgan the Murray River has carved great cliffs from the limestone before swinging south in a sweeping right-angle towards its mouth at Goolwa, near Adelaide.

Morgan is important because it is here that water is pumped to the steel port of Whyalla: all too frequently the level of salt exceeds World Health Organisation limits for potable water.

Federal studies warn of worse to come.

Unless the flow of salt in the Murray can be reduced, within 20 years Adelaide's water will be undrinkable two out of every five days.

Environmentalists alarmed at the dramatic and accelerating decline of the continent have now engaged veteran actor Jack Thompson, a national icon, to front a series of emotive TV advertisements warning of the peril. Thompson is an impassioned advocate.

"If our land was a body, it would be in the early stages of malignant cancer," he tells a National Press Club luncheon in Canberra.

"We are losing a piece of land the size of a football field every day to salinity ... We've lost the majority of wetlands that once acted as kidneys for our rivers."

Federal Environment Minister Dr David Kemp is as blunt, warning of what he describes as a looming disaster for Australia.

"If we're going to have environmental as well as economic sustainability, then we have to meet the challenge of salinity head-on," he says.

Time is running out for a dying continent.

Australia is only starting to come to terms with the reality that it is the driest inhabited continent on the planet - one-third is arid, another third semi-arid - and has fewer rivers and less run-off than any other continent except Antarctica.

Its soils are among the world's most deficient in nutrients, with less than 10 per cent of its mass wrapped in land capable of sustaining intensive agriculture or dense vegetation.

The enormous groundwater reserve of the Great Artesian Basin, which extends beneath one-quarter of the continent, is being drained much faster than it can replenish.

State and federal governments, while rapidly facing the inevitability of action, continue to wrangle over questions of jurisdiction and cost. "The national ability to manage the environment is continually hamstrung by structural problems between different areas of government," the federal Government's state of the environment report says.

Environmental demands are gaining priority, but economics are still frequently more important to policymakers.

Land clearing continues at an alarming rate: 687,000ha of native bushland vanishes every year, more than Mexico and rapidly gaining on Brazil, Indonesia, Zambia and Sudan, the world's worst land clearers.

Cities, especially Sydney, Melbourne and the Brisbane-Gold Coast-Sunshine Coast triangle - devour land and resources at a frightening pace.

The consequences are tragically clear.

To the west of the Victorian border city of Albury, the Murray Valley Highway speeds through the hamlet of Yarrawonga: beyond the town cemetery and its ancient headstones the horizon is spiked with dead gum trees, killed by salt in the soil or flooded in nearby Lake Mulwala.

Nearing Kerang, the highway is flanked on both sides by kilometre after kilometre of salt-ravaged land, barren of any vegetation save saltbush or low shrubs.

Around the town is a wetland of more than 50 lakes and swamps, home to 14 known species of native fish and breeding ground for vast migratory flocks of birds.

Volunteers are now planting tens of thousands of rushes, trees and shrubs in a fight to keep the wetlands alive; in the surrounding farms, similar massive tree plantings and management plans are planned in a bid to revive almost 2000ha of land denuded by salt.

Between Renmark and the southwestern border of New South Wales, a string of test wells and measuring equipment keeps a worried eye on rising, salt-ridden water seeping above the clay base of South Australia's largest irrigation scheme.

On the banks of the Murray to the southeast, outside the NSW town of Corowa where Australian federation was born, engineers have diverted water from the Carrolls Lane drainage system through a rejuvenated wetlands to filter out the nutrients threatening to trigger another toxic blue-green algae bloom down southern Australia's most important waterway.

These are just tiny snapshots of the woes besetting the Murray-Darling Basin, the sprawling network of 41 rivers and 30,000 wetlands that covers more than one million sq km of eastern Australia, from southern Queensland to the bottom of South Australia.

At its heart is the mighty Murray, bubbling from a tiny spring high in Kosciuszko National Park and running 2200km to the sea at Goolwa. This vast basin waters 16 cities and more than three million people, nurtures 42 per cent of Australia's farms, and turns out agricultural produce worth A$10 billion ($11.4 billion) a year - 40 per cent of the nation's gross value of farm production. Its wider value to the national economy is even greater: A$75 billion ($85.6 billion) a year and 1.5 million jobs.

Last August, the Murray River was declared Australia's most endangered place by the National Trust, citing altered water flows, destruction of native wildlife and habitats, invasion by exotic animal and plant species, and endemic salinity.

"Should these serious issues not be addressed immediately, the rivers and their natural and cultural heritage will be altered and lost beyond repair, and the ecosystems and industries that rely on them will be severely jeopardised," the trust said.

Before European development about half the basin's runoff reached the sea. Much of the remainder watered the flood plains, wetlands and forests, and recharged groundwater.

Now, with irrigators every year pulling water from the Murray at a rate equivalent to 24 times the capacity of Sydney Harbour, barely 25 per cent of the natural flow reaches the sea, very little spills into the floodplains, and the river's banks are collapsing and splintering.

The natural flow has been reversed to meet the need of irrigators, flooding in summer rather than in winter and spring; siltation has now closed its mouth, sealing off wetlands and forcing a A$2 million dredging effort that may never fully work.

At the mouth of the Murray the Coorong wetlands, another internationally significant area, is struggling to survive.

Across the Murray-Darling basin, the native fish population is estimated at only 10 per cent of pre-European levels, and likely to fall further. Siltation and pollution stain rivers throughout the basin.



It is not a problem for the Murray-Darling alone. The National Land and Water Resources Audit released earlier this year warned that nine out of 10 environmental features in the nation's rivers had been changed significantly, one-third of their aquatic creatures had gone, and high nutrient and sediment levels plagued 90 per cent of Australia's waterways. "Without reformed and strategic management, the condition of Australia's waterways will continue to deteriorate," the audit said.

And there is the devastation of salt, burning vegetation from tens of thousands of hectares of land every year: by 2050, researchers warn, 17 million ha of arable land will be affected by salinity.

It is already biting hard.

"Ten years ago I used to grow wheat on this paddock," says Victorian farmer Stephen Manning. "Now I can only graze a few sheep on saltbush on it."

In Western Australia, the 1.8 million ha already affected by salt will triple to 6 million ha within 50 years; in Queensland, millions more hectares and much of the state's water supply is at risk.

The removal of deep-rooted native plant species continues to spread the blight. In the NSW rural city of Wagga Wagga, rising water and salt are killing the showground, school and university playing fields, corroding underground water, gas and sewerage pipes, undermining and potholing footpaths and roads, and attacking homes through rising damp and by damaging foundations and brickwork.

Within 20 years, the nation will pay an extra A$341 million a year to repair the damage to its infrastructure; water treatment costs will rise by up to A$800 million.

Water, wind, land clearing and agriculture are also casting Australia's future to the wind, burying roads, rail lines, and fences, and choking its waterways.

Every year, between 2 and 20 tonnes of soil are stripped from every hectare of farmland on the continent - and with every resulting fall in productivity, the pressure on the remaining soil increases.

Australia, finally, is starting to tackle its mountain of environmental problems.

There have been impressive scores on the board: state legislation and programmes, the successful Landcare scheme to replant Australia and restore its damaged land and water, myriad small-scale projects, widespread adoption of new farm and environmental management practices and technologies, education, and even co-operation between previously combative greens and farmers.

Water removal from the Murray, capped in 1995, may now be reversed under a comprehensive new basin-wide management scheme under which federal and state governments will pay up to A$1 billion to buy back water from farmers.



It will be a long process, says Tim Fisher, of the Australian Conservation Foundation, but at last the first step has been taken. For a continent in peril, there is no other option.

Further reading
nzherald.co.nz/environment