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!

WTF - 24 October 2009

This afternoon I walked into the kitchen after bouncing around in an open air 1974 tractor slashing fire breaks all morning. There on the table, on the front page of the paper was a criminal shot of a guy I know. Arrested on suspicion of child sex offences at a summer camp in America, he was arrested at the airport as he was heading back home. I did not know what to think. I did not know whether to share my connection with everybody else in the room, or hide it, as if I had something to be ashamed of. Not sure what to do I just carried on as normal, whilst constantly debating whether to tell anyone in my adopted family what I knew. It took me almost half an hour to decide that it was ridiculous not to tell people, just because he was arrested under suspicion of child sex offences. If he was on the front page for burglary, or something good, I would not have hesitated to say I knew him. But potential child sex offences certainly made me think.

What funny creatures we are (or maybe just me).

Green to Gold - 4th October 2009

Everyday I lift my head from my pillow and gaze out across the vast valley in front of me to see what the days weather might hold. From out my window I can see 10 to 15 k's across the valley, down the valley 25 kms away I can see Mingenew. You can tell when people are training on the town oval at night as the two huge spotlights point right as us, glaring brighter than all the rest of the town lights. You can also see the lights of any cars on the Coalseam road almost all the way from Mingenew to the front gate.

My drive to work in Mingenew takes me down through the valley, the Nangetty valley, and past 22 kms of crop. The crops are turning, and every day brings a different shade. First the dark green of the rapidly growing crop gets more and more silvery as the wheat throws up ears with their spiky silvery green glumes that sparkle in the sun. As the grains fill, and the days get warmer and longer, the tips of the glumes wither and bleach, tipping the crop like a light dusting of snow on green fields. Slowly the flag leaves, the leaf that provides the majority of energy for the growing grains, begin to die back. Then as grain fill is completed the ears themselves turn a golden brown. If you leave for 4 or 5 days you will hardly recognise the place when you get back! Everyday I see a new colour on my way to work, and a new one on the way home!

There is another annual change from green to gold up here. I didn't watch the transition because I was here too late. I only basked in the golden yellow glow of carpets of millions of yellow pom poms that adorn all the break-aways and roadsides around the farm, and the nearby Coalseam conservation park. Once the pop poms flower come the pink and white everlastings, then an array for three or four other species of wildflowers, depending on where you look. If you have to tolerate a southern winter there is no better place to spend it than in the heart of wild flower country!

Yellow pom poms growing in a fenced area. The grader is filling in the gully in an attempt to arrest the severe erosion, and revegetate the gully head. The soil is clayey. sodic, and quickly becomes very crumbly once exposed. The paddock at the top of the picture is suprisngly goos grazing country. The dark patches are bluebush (Maireana brevifolia) plants, that the sheep really take a liking to, especially when there is also some grass or straw to eat as well.

And to top it all off a flock of Budgerigars returned last week. They seem to head out to station country during the winter, and are back now to start feeding on all the seeds that have just finished filling.

Sunset in the Nangetty valley.

Mingenew Bulldogs Premiership Winners - 6 September 2009

Yesterday was an experience for me. I watched three quarters of a game of Australian Rules Football, in person, not on TV. And it was a better experience than I was expecting. Our team, the Mingenew Bulldogs, won after leading in the 1st quarter, but being challenged in the second and early third. They won 96 to 35 after Coorow-Latham dropped the bundle in the second half. The boys were all very excited about their win. Perhaps deservedly so, although with only 6 teams in the competition they are not fishing in a very deep pool.

The after-party was what I would expect in a country town. A small, but lively gathering with people of all ages getting in on the act. Lots of the locals studying at uni were home from Perth for the weekend, as well as a few random city blow-ins. As usual in Western Australia you run into people you don't expect to see, like a girl I met at a New Years eve party in Bunbury three years ago who was in Mingenew with her sister, who is going out with a local boy she met in New York.

The party was also a chance for me to meet the sons and daughters of the farmers I have been meeting over the last few weeks, and begin the long (but not too long!) journey of learning the local family trees.

The wildflowers are still out up here, and the hordes of caravaners and day trippers are getting bigger as more pictures and articles feature in the travel section of the paper. Mind you they have well and truly missed the best displays. That was about when I arrived. The yellow and white pom poms had been out for a week, so were still at their best, and the pinks and oranges, and some more whites were just starting to appear. Many of the colours have faded now, and the petals are going a bit manky. Mind you they are still a very impressive natural carpet!

Mingenew - 16 August 2009

So I am back in the cold, and the rain, in the south-west. Mingenew to be precise. And the wildflower season is cranking. There are yellow, orange, pink, purple, and white everlastings in patches dotted across the landscape, on bits of land that are not cropped, and through the bush.

The Irwin River flowing through 'the Coalseam' (Coalseam Conservation park), just up the road from where I am living.

After 5 or 6 weeks travelling I have a job for 6 months or so. I am not really sure of the timeline, and I am employed on a short term rolling contract. My position is a Natural Resource Management Officer with the Mingenew-Irwin Group (MIG). MIG is a local farm research group. My job is in partnership with the Northern Agricultural Catchments Council (NACC), who will actually pay me. NACC is one of 6 Natural Resource Management bodies that cover the whole of WA. From what I have heard they are a reasonably effective group.

I start work tomorrow. What my job entails is somewhat of a mystery - to everyone I think. Which was part of the appeal, and I am hoping will mean that it can be about responding to what farmers are interested in, as well as innovating a little rather than purely running established programs. One of the things I expect I will be involved in is the whole climate change - agriculture - carbon conundrum. I imagine my involvement will be through desktop research and extension on emissions from different components of farming systems, and work on the potential for sequestration.

Karijini National Park - 13 August 2009

I have had my first big day of driving home. From Broome to Karijini.

I am camped in an overflow camping area, that could just be a carpark - I am not sure as I got here after dark. I arrived in Karijini and headed straight to Dales Gorge, to Fern Pool, a nice little waterfall and pool I remember loving as a kid. Low and behold it is exactly the same as I remember. Big fig and paperbark trees, beautiful green water, and the place to myself, given that the sun had almost set.

Fern Pool, Dales Gorge.

My brain is starting to switch modes, and change track to the things that will concern me working in Mingenew. Specifically I noticed today in the car I was paying attention to the ridiculous politics on the radio surrounding the emissions trading scheme - politics I would usually ignore. I was also running over what a farmer might want to know in relation to the scheme, what numbers regarding agricultural emissions we do know, and who are the people that are going to tell me what I want to know. It seems I might enjoy this real work thing! I guess we will see…

It is clearly evident up here that iron ore mining hasn't been hugely effected by the downturn. Along 250 kilometres of road today I would have passed over 50 trucks, mostly triple road trains, and three oversize load convoys. Port Hedland is as busy as ever, the main roads between Wedgefield, South Headland, and Port Headland are being upgraded, as are parts of the highway east and west of town.

Yet still it is all not happening fast enough for the miners, those pesky environmental and indigenous impact assessments are taking to long to assess and approve according to the industry report tabled in state parliament this week. They would have us create one body to approve everything.

The thing I love most about the way the reports chief author speaks is the way he says that approvals are too slow, and that a single agency would approve mines more quickly. It is clear that the possibility of a mine being refused approval on environmental or indigenous concerns has never been entertained. But indeed there is good reason for that. I cannot think of one mine that has been refused approval to mine in quite a while. Often the EPA will recommend certain restrictions and requirements, that must be agreed to by the government, but rarely are they so stringent as to have any effect on what can be mined. They only affect how much money the company has to spend on environmental initiatives.

I also wonder at the wisdom of our approach to our non-renewable resources. It seems the mantra is that we must mine what we find as quickly as possible. My brief contact with FMG executives when I was involved in an innovation workshop with them indicated that is the mentality. They were annoyed that Rio and BHP were not mining their leases fast enough, but had been sitting on a few for 5 to 10 years. They would like the government to renege leases if they are not mined. It sounds to me like the conditions placed on early agricultural land grants, that it must be cleared and cultivated within a certain time frame. That turned out to be a great idea, didn’t it!

Economics also suggests that we are better off to mine now because money is worth so much more now than in the future. How much more it is worth depends on the discount rate you use. However the discount rate is not a simple idea, it changes based on how far into the future we are talking. For example you would be happier to accept 100 dollars today, than next year, but if I offered you 100 today or 120 next year you might have a harder time deciding. If the $100 and $120 seem of equal value, then the discount rate for that year would be 20%. However if I offered 100 dollars in 2015 or 2016 you would hardly care which year I gave it to you in. So less discounting occurs further in the future than immediately because well, people are people.

Anyway the whole point of that lecture in economics was to indicate that the economic reason to mine now rather than later is based on a difficult assumption about discount rate. I do not know how they include in their calculations the likelihood of declining metal supply, the costs of recycling, and the increase in extraction costs as low grade ores replace exhausted high grade deposits. So I am not convinced we need to mine, and make approvals, at break neck speed. I think a steady as she goes approach would serve us just as well, and reduce the intensity of the infrastructure and skills headaches of the last few years.

A picture from my Karijini odessey: 5 gorges, 1 mountain in 9 hours. The perfect way to end an Australian adventure. Kalamina Gorge, Knox Gorge, Joffrey Gorge, Weano Gorge, Hancock Gorge, and Mount Bruce. This is a picture of Weano Gorge from above. The furthest you can go in, and get back out of the gorge without a rope, is the narrow section in the foreground. To get there you have to wade or swim through chest high freezing cold water. I was there about 20 mins before i took this. It feels much safer being in the gorge, than looking down on it!


Nearing the end of the odessey, halfway back down Mt Bruce. The pointy hill in the background is Chinamans Peak.


Salut

Broome - 12 August 2009

I am in Broome. The bustling tourist hub of the north! There are people everywhere.

I have been down on Cable beach, running, throwing the boomerang, practicing cartwheels, all the things normal tourists do! I have done some normal tourist things, like walk around china town, and spend lots of money (on books not pearls though).

As I was leaving the car park at Cable Beach I ran into some people I met right at the start of my trip, back in Kakadu. A couple from the sunshine coast with a young daughter, who are leasing out their house, and travelling around Australia for 18 months. But I didn't just meet them in Kakadu, I ran into them in one of the 5 caravan parks in Katherine, one of 6 caravan parks in Kununurra, they were parked at reception of a caravan park at Fitzroy crossing as I drove past on my way to Camballin, and finally in Broome.
It's a funny old world we live in.