Traveston Crossing Dam - 11 November 2009

Peter Garrett has finally used his common sense (and probably satisfied is conscience), and prevented a large environmentally damaging project from going ahead. After Anna Bligh and the QLD Water Department had spent four years or so planning, buying up 14,000 ha of 'prime' farming land (as all land that is going to be drowned by a dam is called), and trying to convince people they wouldn't be harming the endangered turtles and lungfish that live in the river, Mr. Garratt has put an end to the madness.

The Traveston crossing dam was planned for the Mary River north-west of Brisbane, near Gympie. The Mary River is one of two rivers in the world that are host to populations of Australian Lungfish. The nearby Burnett River contains the other population, and is already dammed. There is a fish-way up the dam that is meant to be best-practice. How anyone knows what best practice is when a fish-way has never been built for this species of fish before, I am not too sure. And this is no ordinary fish. Fossils identical to this species, found in NSW, have been dated at 100 million years old, and 400 million year old fossils of lungfish have been found in Australia. That makes them one of the oldest vertebrate groups still living. The lungfish is called a lungfish because it can surface and take a gulp of air, when the water it is living in becomes too deoxygenated for it to survive. I forget the physiology of it all, but I assume it has a primitive lung in addition to its gills. The ability to breath air means it can survive in small stagnant pools. The ability of ancient relatives of the lungfish to breathe air may have been one of the first steps to moving out of the water and on to land.

The best practice fish-way on the Burnett River was to be the basis of the fish-way for the Mary River. Despite there only being evidence the fish-way has carried one juvenile lungfish from bottom to top on the Burnett fish-way, any official from QLD Water will tell you it functions effectively and will not impact lungfish populations!

So Pete has put an end to a ridiculous dam, and hopefully signaled that dams should not be high on the priority list for water departments Australia wide. Indeed it is hilarious to think that QLD Water's response to low water levels in SE QLD dams over the last few years, and hence dwindling water supply, was to build another big dam in SE QLD. I hope you see the logic!