Water dreaming

They are scattered with thousands of shards of ancient, bleached-white shellfish. Below their surface lie more remains: countless bird bones and eggshells, freshwater mussel and cray, kangaroo, and the spines, skulls and ribs of Murray cod, trout cod and perch. To the untrained eye they might be burial mounds of generation upon generation.

These red gums and middens are symbols of life and death in Australia. They are icons that touch on myth and reality. But which is which? One is still living, but whispers of creeping death; the other is stark and skeletal and perhaps thousands of years old, but talks of copious and vibrant life.

And each speaks eloquently of the gift of water in this, the world's driest inhabited continent - and of the unimaginable consequences of misusing it.

Along hundreds of kilometres of Murray River bank and flood plain, thousands - some say more than 300,000 - of these giant, centuries-old river red gums are slowly and silently dying.

The drought may have hastened their passing, but the real killer has been man's intervention in the natural order. River management practices, dictated by the massive irrigation regimes of the Murray-Darling Basin, have stopped the natural flooding that regularly soaked the flood plains, filled the anabranches and billabongs and sustained these majestic trees. The Murray and its tributaries are now carefully controlled levee-banked channels that are no longer permitted to waste water on the flood plains.

Under normal circumstances, Murray red gums could expect, on average, to see a flood every 3.3 years. These trees have not had a drink since 1993. Many experts believe they are beyond saving.

"This is what I call a death event," says retired Riverland horticulturist and conservationist Jack Seekamp, who has lived on the river for 81 years. The die-back in this area alone, he says, stretches from Euston in NSW to Walkers Flat, downstream in South Australia.

Don Blackmore, chief executive of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission, is equally pessimistic. He suspects we may be "on the cusp of a catastrophe". If that happens, a quintessential element of how we see our landscape will be erased and that, he says, "will be a character-changing event for the whole nation".

Professor Tim Flannery, palaeontologist, author and director of the South Australian Museum, believes it may already be happening. "This drought year has brought on a vision of the future for Australia," he says. "This is exactly what we'll be looking at every year in 10 years' time."

But the Aboriginal middens near Deniliquin are another vision, he says. At a cursory glance, they may seem skeletal heaps, bleached and dusty, but in fact they are a snapshot of the life-giving bounty of the Murray and its plains.

Before 1788, Aborigines flourished along its length in population densities up to 40 times that of anywhere else on the continent. "Look at those middens. Look at the size of some of the Murray cod bones you'll find in there, the millions of bird bones, eggshells. You are looking at the absolute richness of the place as it was, in terms of life. It's the contrast between what it is now and what it once was; that's the clincher."

In February, Flannery told the National Press Club in Adelaide: "I believe that Australians are engaged in a struggle for their own long-term survival. We are effectively fighting a slow-burning war for future clean water, air and fertile soil.

"We will only find ourselves, and our shape as a nation, through reconciling ourselves with our land - it is the one thing all Australians share in common that is unique to us."

Water is at the heart of all that. And what is happening to the rivers and plains of the Murray-Darling system - "the lifeblood of the continent" - is a symbol of how we may be losing that war, he says. "The river is dying, trees that have been growing for 300 years are now pegging it because of the poor and declining water quality. The loss of biodiversity in that river, the salination; it is clearly unsustainable.

"Now, if you're telling me that Australia can go into the future with a dead river system in its heart, with the loss of that 40 per cent of our productive land, I think that's just a fantasy. I think we really are struggling for our future survival."

As Dorothea McKellar noted, Australia is a land of droughts and flooding rains. But it is not, at least in the European sense, a land of rivers.

Historian Tom Griffiths, in his essay The Outside Country, tells of a pastoralist of the 1880s who said waterways like the fabled Paroo and the Warrego in the north-western part of the vast Murray-Darling Basin scarcely deserved the name rivers. What Australia has in their place, says Griffiths, is "channels, swamps, dry deltas, waterholes, freshes, shallow ephemeral lakes, warrambools, billabongs, dunefield swales, anabranches and flooded alluvial plains".

But, he goes on, "water, in all its peculiar inland guises, and even in its absence, is the primary elemental force to have shaped this land."

And those of us who live in it. "The Australian psyche," writes the CSIRO's Dr John Williams, "is dominated by dreams of water."

Monash University emeritus professor Joe Powell, author of a number of histories of water use, says: "Water is by definition at once pervasive and absorptive. It underpins so much of the changing profile of human effort and regional development in Australia, including so many of the pivotal 'successes' and 'failures' - very Australian, these loaded words.

"At no stage has it ever been anything less than 'important'. Yet it is often taken for granted: dangerously, for us and for the environment at large."

Williams says white settlement transported to this apparent terra nullius not only convicts but European attitudes, biases and understanding of landscape. "The early settlers found the landscape harsh and arid, lacking the verdance and parklike qualities of Europe. Its rivers were untamed: vast floods that spread across the plains, then, in weeks, became a chain of muddy pools."

Williams is the chief of CSIRO's division of Land and Water. As the current drought has dragged on, he has been alarmed to see age-old, scientifically discredited solutions rise "like spectres from the dying landscape": schemes to "make the deserts bloom"; to turn the rivers around lest they run to waste in the sea; and to "drought-proof" Australia.

What we really need to do, Williams insists, is to myth-proof Australia. "It isn't the drought that is the problem. It is our delusions. We now know - as Australians did not know 100 years ago - that these are not solutions but recipes for disaster."

What the first Europeans here did not understand was the nature of this ancient land: A lone island floating in a vast expanse of ocean since it broke away from Gondwana more than 40 million years ago. As Flannery notes: "Its soils were by far the poorest and most fragile of any continent, its rainfall the most variable and its rivers the most ephemeral. It was a harsh land for any creature that demanded much from it."

It also carried a dangerous inheritance; a reservoir of enormous amounts of salt buried deep within. Some had been released from ancient marine sediments, but most had been carried in rain from the surrounding oceans to fall and be trapped, for millennia upon millennia, in the soils, lakes and groundwater.

But because the continent is dry, flat and inward-draining - in Williams's words, "a bit like a dinner plate" - with sluggish rivers and groundwater systems, there was little capacity to flush the salt to the sea. So it sat under the ground in huge storages stretching in an arc from North Queensland, across the Murray-Darling Basin to the Riverina and Mallee regions of Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales. Another swept in a mighty crescent beneath south-western Australia.

In these semi-arid zones, native vegetation evolved to cope with the unforgiving conditions: trees, woody shrubs and perennial grasslands with deep roots that intercepted and used almost all the rainfall, evaporating it back as free water and minimising leakage past their root zones. Everything was in balance.

But then came the Europeans and, among them, what historian and journalist Michael Cathcart has called the "Water Dreamers", and they looked at this apparently desiccated heart of the continent and despaired. And then determined to reshape it.

In Uncharted Waters, a publication for the Murray-Darling Basin Commission last year, CSIRO scientists Sarah Ryan and Steve Morton quote a Chinese proverb: "Arrogance invites ruin; humility receives benefits." Over the past century, they say, our agricultural successes have played a large part in making Australians on average five times wealthier than their ancestors in 1900. But the successes have often been accompanied by ecological arrogance. And they have come at great cost.

Flannery tells how James Joyce had Dedalus, a character in his Ulysses, say of history that it was "a nightmare from which I am trying to awake".

"Our nightmare, in terms of the Murray," Flannery says, "is the Snowy Mountains Scheme."

The scheme, he believes, became an icon of postwar Australia and united the nation because it appealed to a potent cocktail of sentiments. "It was the old myth. It had everything going for it: they were going to turn the rivers inland; they were going to fight off the Yellow Peril by bringing out lots of good white-European migrants; and it was going to be a massive scheme like you'd see in America - the foundations of our becoming a great antipodean United States.

So it appealed very strongly to that frontier Australian mentality that we really do have to get away from."

But the real nightmare of the Snowy, he says, is that it created an addiction to unsustainable water use among irrigators by mainlining to what was essentially "free" water.

Even when the scheme was first discussed, the then South Australian premier, Sir Thomas Playford - a cherry grower, who knew a thing about the agricultural use of water - warned prime minister Robert Menzies about its likely impact. Now that irrigators knew more water was available, he said, there was "not the slightest doubt" that they would develop their use of that water more extensively. Nor would it mean that there would be less likelihood of restrictions.

It was a prescient statement. But Playford was up against a grand tradition of schemes to transform the antipodean reality into the European dream. From the beginning of white occupation, there was a refusal to accept the continent on its terms, particularly its vast - and, to European eyes, empty - interior, where the rivers disappeared away from the sea. By 1798, Sir Joseph Banks had declared it impossible to conceive that this massive land did not "produce vast rivers, capable of being navigated into the heart of the interior". The explorer Charles Sturt held, as an article of almost religious faith, that those rivers must flow into a vast inland sea, and spent years in futile search for it.

Alfred Deakin, a father of Federation, later prime minister and "water dreamer", was one of the strongest early advocates of irrigation. He had travelled the world studying water schemes and in the 1880s met irrigation entrepreneurs the Chaffey brothers, and brought them to Australia to begin irrigating at Mildura. His vision was largely responsible for the agricultural industry across the Riverina, which was spread into New South Wales by Samuel McCaughey in 1902. When the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area was being developed between 1908 and 1912 it was the largest capital works program of its kind in the world.

Deakin was justifiably proud of what he had inspired but, with hindsight, the arcadian picture he presented at the launch of the Mildura scheme dripped hubris: "Countless flocks feed contentedly along vast plains which once appeared barren and desolate; abundant harvests are reaped from glades across which the Aborigine painfully sought his scanty meal; and out of the heart of once withered wastes have burst flowing rills that make channels bordered by verdure athwart stretches of aridity, formerly shunned in drought even by the kangaroo.

"The more we learn of our country, the more we are led to believe that the first fearful impressions of its discoverers will all be falsified, and that energy, resource and perseverance will yet find ample scope and recompense in the collection, conservation and distribution of the waters of Australia."

Deakin's vision could only go so far. Even by the time the first fruit trees were going in near Mildura, in 1890, there were already signs of salinity, leakage and high evaporation, and erosion from poor clearing practices.

Perhaps the most ambitious of the water dreamers was engineer Dr John J.C. Bradfield, bridge and dam builder. Fascinated by irrigation, his vision, first proposed in 1929, was one of transformation: to turn the dead heart into something he christened Girraween, or "place of flowers". To achieve this Cinderella scheme, the mighty flood-flows of the tropical rivers of North Queensland - the Tully, Johnstone, Herbert and Burdekin - would be turned around and diverted, via the Flinders, Thomson, Cooper and a series of channels, across the inland to Lake Eyre. There they would create evaporation and, in the face of nature, bring reliable rain to the arid interior.

The scheme provoked great interest, but was quickly - and consistently, ever since - damned by a series of scientific reports, citing hurdles of storage capacity, reliability, the energy required to pump the waters inland, massive losses through evaporation and the lack of science of the original meteorological intent.

But even today, variations of Bradfield's scheme have their evangelists. In 1981 Bob Katter, then Queensland Minister for Northern Development, began pushing a scaled-down version. On the other side of the continent in the late '80s, WA state minister Ernie Bridges launched a proposal to pipe water from the Ord scheme thousands of kilometres to Perth and eventually to South Australia.

And last year, as the current drought bit, Sydney radio host Alan Jones talked up another resurrection: in July he told listeners that the Clarence, Burdekin, Pioneer and Daly rivers could all be turned inland. "And then you can flood your river system in drought time, dam the water, flood the river system, irrigate off the rivers. Build dams." Money raised from the sale of Telstra, he said, could "water Australia".

To that, Flannery gives an exasperated but well-considered response: "Bullshit". Don Blackmore, of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission, is as scathing: "All those schemes are a dog." Even putting aside the environmental impacts of taking water from one ecosystem to a salted, arid one, he says that even on the best sums they are wasteful and uneconomic. Paul Sinclair of Environment Victoria has a gift for imagery: those old water myths are "dead attitudes that need to be shot in the back of the head and buried down the back paddock".

The most serious recent attempt at euthanasing them has come from the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists that came together last October in response to Jones's and others' revivalist spruikings. They included Flannery, Williams, 2001 Environmentalist of the Year Professor Peter Cullen, Murray-Darling farmer Leith Boully and CSIRO resource economist Professor Mike Young. They advocated a series of radical water reforms including clarifying legal rights and obligations on water use; ending broadscale land clearing; requiring farmers, and ultimately consumers, to pay the full costs of water used in production; compensating farmers for environmental constraints, such as loss of clearing or water rights; and restoring environmental flows to stressed rivers.

In its Blueprint For A Living Continent, the group says Australia is "falling apart" - not because of drought but because of poor policies and poor management. Cullen, a freshwater ecologist, says Australians now need to reflect on how they depend on water and develop "a new ethic" for its use. "Perhaps the place to start is the maxim of doing to others as we would like them to do to us," he says.

The most visible example of where we have gone wrong, he says, is in our agricultural heartland, the Murray-Darling. The basin covers one-seventh of the continent and produces 40 per cent of our agricultural produce - 90 per cent of all irrigated agriculture, using 11 million megalitres of water a year - and directly supports a population of 2 million. It is fed by 408,000 kilometres of rivers, but now less than 20 per cent of its capacity flows out of its mouth. (In "good" years: in fact nothing has flowed out of that mouth since November 2001.)

We have damaged its eco-systems by reversing natural flow pattern, starving the rivers in winter while turning them into bank-full irrigation channels in summer. We have extracted too much water and built weirs to help distribute it, and these have provided ideal habitat for both European carp and toxic blue-green algae. Levees have isolated the river from its flood plain, devastating native fish and bird populations as well as the river red gum forests. Native fish populations have fallen to 10 per cent of original numbers and we have removed 15 billion of its trees.

And where we have applied that excess water to irrigation areas, the water table has risen, bringing with it uncountable tonnes of salt.

It is now feared that between 3 and 5 million hectares of the basin will be salt-affected within this century. By 2050, according to the Australian Dryland Salinity Assessment of 2000, more than 20,000 kilometres of rivers and streams will be salt-affected. The worst damage is in Mallee country in Victoria and South Australia, but salt is also destroying Western Australia's wheat belt - 11per cent, mostly in the most productive alluvial valleys, is already salty and by the end of the century, it is predicted, 30 per cent, or 6 million hectares, will be damaged.

In a joint statement in 2000, the Australian Conservation Foundation and the National Farmers Federation predicted that salt-affected land would increase to 15million hectares, about a third of all cultivated land. More than half Australia's net annual value of farm production, more than $20 billion a year, would be needed to fight the problem.

The bitter irony of the salinity disaster is that it has been caused by too much water in the world's driest inhabited continent. A land of droughts and flooding rains is both poetry and scientific fact. This is an island of low but incredibly variable rainfall. While the average rainfall is 455 millimetres, the range is 150 to 3000 millimetres, and half of everything that does fall lands on just a quarter of the land area, a fringe around the eastern and northern coasts.

Much of what does fall is lost through evapotranspiration - it simply evaporates away - and for three-quarters of the continent, only about 5 per cent of rainfall runs off in creeks or rivers. The nation's average annual run-off is about 52 millimetres - less than a sixth of that of Asia or North America.

Yet while our annual availability of fresh water is the world's lowest, on a per capita basis it is the world's second-highest, after the US. The average Australian household uses more than 250 kilolitres a year - more than twice that used in better-watered countries like Britain, Germany or France.

As journalist and author Ticky Fullerton points out in her book Watershed, while Australia insists, for the most part, that all water piped into our homes is pure drinking water, we drink or cook with just 1per cent of that. Typically, half of everything we use goes on our gardens and the rest flushes our toilets, washes our clothes and cars, and disappears down our plug holes. We recycle just 11 per cent.

Urban water use might account for only 12 per cent of all water used in Australia - about 78 per cent goes for agriculture - but water supply is an issue in the cities as well. While Melbourne is well served by protected catchments, Adelaide takes 40 per cent of its drinking water from the heavily salinised Murray - and 90 per cent in drought years like this last one. Salt interception schemes over recent years have reduced salinity at Morgan, from where Adelaide pumps its water, but if nothing more is done it is predicted that by 2020 the city's drinking water will be below World Health Organisation standards two days in every five.

Meanwhile, climate change is already affecting both reliability and supply. The situation in Perth is a stark example of what the future might hold, says Dr Peter Dillon of the CSIRO's water reclamation group. Over the past 20 years Perth has suffered a 20per cent decline in rainfall and run-off resource availability - "That's a climate-change phenomenon" - and now takes more than half its supply as groundwater from the Nangarra mound aquifer.

While the current drought has raised awareness of water issues, Dillon is cynical about how long that will last."Yes, the drought has focused attention - on sympathy and making the right noises. But I think the politicians' view is that droughts will go away. What they're not seeing is that this is an example of what a typical year will be like in the future."

Fullerton also hopes the country's "so-called leaders" won't walk away from the problem. "My big fear is that when the drought breaks, John Howard's quite vocal commitment to pushing ahead with some solutions on water will actually fall by the wayside."

If that happens, says Sinclair, it will be a national tragedy on all levels. Australians can no longer afford to sit back and do nothing about our water, because that will bring not only irreversible environmental damage but increasing social dislocation.

"We'll have no native fish, we'll have flood plains full of... have you ever been to Lake Mulwala? I don't know if people think that's picturesque up there, but it's all dead trees. It's the same at Chowilla in South Australia: you come up the road, and the flood plain looks exquisite, beautiful. But when you look closer into the picture, they're all dying.

"There are some great kids' books about people who live in dead environments. You're not going to have a healthy community. Trees die, the wind blows, people go mad."

Tim Fisher, land and water co-ordinator of the Australian Conservation Foundation and described by Fullerton as "the sanest greenie in Australia", ticks off a checklist of horrifying consequences for the Murray if nothing is done - and soon.

"My gut feeling is that every bloody red-gum, black-box flood plain downstream of Swan Hill is going to go," he says quietly. "They'll die through the combination of lack of water and salt, in maybe 50 years. We'll lose probably half the native fish species in the basin, or more. Murray cray. Blue-green algal blooms will get more and more frequent and widespread. The Coorong is already pretty well cactus; it's lost 90 per cent of its birds and it's difficult to see what you can do to recover that. And if you look at every other Ramsar (the international convention on wetlands) site in the basin, they're not too dissimilar."

In Victoria, without an environmental flow, the Lower Goulburn is in trouble, he adds. Gippsland Lakes, Gunbower, Hattah Kulkyne and Koondrook are steadily getting worse. Lake Albacutya has had two drinks in 50 years and is "going down the gurgler". Closer to home, the Barwon is "totally overtaxed".

"It's also all those creeks that people care about, that they've grown up next to," adds Sinclair. "You won't be able to tell your kids how you caught a blackfish in that creek. 'What's a blackfish?' It'll be: 'Look, daddy, I caught a carp today.' They'll come home and tell you that and it'll break your heart."

Fullerton suggests nothing is to be gained fixating on the "spilt milk" of the mistakes of the settlers and water dreamers of the past. "But the later we've left it, of course, the worse it's got. And it's already got to the stage where the solution is some kind of triage." As in the medical process, that might mean concentrating on those parts of the environment that can be saved - and allowing those terminal parts to pass away.

Cullen says he oscillates between that sort of pessimism and optimism for the future: "(But) one of the heartening factors of the last five years has been the growing community concern with our water, that all's not well, and the growing impatience that governments have failed to address these issues.

"In fact, that's the only way forward, that there be enough community pressure and what I call a water-literate society: people understanding where their water's from, where it goes and that it doesn't just come out of a tap. Understanding where we fit in the water cycle."

Sinclair says some have always had that understanding. "There have always been people prepared to stand up and say it's time to do something: farmers, duck shooters, fishermen, people who walked along the river - you scratch the surface of their knowledge and you find a burning passion for the rivers and for our environment."

As the Wentworth Group has noted, he says, for 215 years white Australia has not lived in harmony with that environment. But we can choose to finally belong. "It's not like we have to create something new; we just have to tap into the positive parts of our culture.

"We do have the capacity to live in this country."

Gary Tippet is an Age senior writer.