Tuesday, Feb 27, 2007
International
Plan to divert Australian rivers http://www.hindu.com/2007/02/27/stories/2007022703941600.htm
Ben Sandilands
[- PHOTO: AFP
Australian farmers inspect an empty dam in Wimmera, northwest of Melbourne, in this recent photo.]
Canberra: It is 70 years since the designer of the Sydney Harbour Bridge had his plans for reversing the flow of some major Australian rivers inland for irrigation buried in ridicule.
But John Job Bradfield, whose landmark bridge turned 75 only a few weeks ago, may yet have the last laugh.
Bradfield proposed diverting the copious tropical flows of rivers of the State of Queensland in north-east Australia, through a vast network of dams, viaducts and tunnels so that they percolated into the "dead heart" of the red continent.
The deserts would become rich farmlands like those of the mid-western U.S., and bring to life the colonial myth of an "inland sea" that lured the first European explorers to cruel deaths in the burning sands.
"Inland sea"
If it sounds as if it could have been set to music, it apparently was. Patriotic songs and "nation building verse" were immensely popular in Australia between the wars, including grandiose projections as to what would happen when the waters that gushed uselessly into the northern seas found their inland destiny in a British Empire version of the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia.
But back then, the problem with the Bradfield plan was that as Australia struggled with such basics as city sewage and electricity services, reversing the northern rivers required civil engineering skills and techniques far in advance of those used to bridge Sydney Harbour.
Enter the current Premier of the State of Queensland, Peter Beattie. Mr. Beattie says that with a slight change in direction, the Bradfield Plan could drive prodigious volumes of monsoon flood waters into of the Murray-Darling river system, which flow like a crescent south-westwards through four Australian States - from south Queensland through New South Wales and Victoria to the south of South Australia.
Except that it hasn't been flowing at all in recent years, at least not continuously but more as isolated strings of ponds or billabongs separated by long stretches of dry riverbeds and flanked by ruined or struggling irrigators.
"It would require a huge pipeline and it mightn't work, but we need to think about finding more water than cutting back on those who use it," Mr. Beattie says.
Mr. Beattie's critics accuse him of diversionary tactics in an on-going debate about a $10 billion Federal Government plan to reform under one authority the regulation and conservation of the entire Murray-Darling river system.
Queensland Opposition leader Jeff Seeney says: "The Beattie/Bradfield scheme is not about diverting water, it is about diverting attention."
If Canberra gets its way, all the States involved will lose control over lucrative irrigation allocations which combined add up to more water than is sustainable - and that's even without the prolonged drought which has gripped most of the southern half of the continent since 1999.
But as Australians contemplate a visionary plan that last inspired their grandparents, a cautionary tale is emerging in the Snowy Mountains hydro-electricity and irrigation scheme in southern New South Wales. -
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007
Copyright © 2007, The Hindu.