Nothing But Muddy Pools Left In Angledool
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday November 3, 2007
ANGLEDOOL is 60 kilometres north of Lightning Ridge and 12 kilometres south of the Queensland border. It was founded in 1870 and used to have 3000 people, locals say. It also had five pubs, two stores, a memorial hall, a school, a police station and an Aboriginal mission. It now has 36 people, 20 occupied dwellings and two open rubbish pits. The hall is still there, sort of. It is very decrepit. The police station, the stores and the school are long gone. So, too, the mission. The last pub burnt down 30 years ago.
Something else Angledool used to have was a quite stunning river, the Narran, that fed into the heritage-listed Narran Lake wetlands 140 kilometres south-west. Now the river's gone, too. The cotton farms upstream, across the border, have taken its water.Quite legally, it seems.All that is left of the Narran River near Angledool, if you walk far enough upstream, is a series of steeply banked, shrinking waterholes, dead freshwater mussels, and choking weed growth. The water stinks but some things still live in it, including "protected" long-necked turtles. Angledool's Alan Guihot found a 12-kilogram Murray cod dead in the mud a few weeks ago. It had tried to slide from one pool to another. Sun-baked slide marks and turtle tracks are still visible in the river bed.A 2002 "fact" sheet, issued by Commonwealth bureaucrats, lists the Narran Lakes as "a wetland of international significance well-known for its water bird populations". It adds: "The area is particularly important for Aboriginal people, and graziers depend on floods for their livelihoods." Well, not any more they don't. What the "fact" sheet delicately calls "off-river storages upstream", have reduced the Narran River's "median annual flows" by 74 per cent. That was five years ago.The authors should take another look.Two years earlier, in July 2000, ABC television's 7.30 Report told viewers: "The water has been trapped upstream, where huge Queensland cotton farms have been licensed to harvest floodwaters. Just a few months ago, the bulldozers at Cubbie Station were working flat out, finishing off massive dams which can now store twice as much water as contained in Sydney Harbour."Queensland's state environment minister at the time, Rod Welford, told the program: "The bulk of scientific opinion now acknowledges that in Queensland, in the Condamine-Ballone [river] system [that feeds south into the Narran River and NSW's Darling River system], we're overtaxing the system. The question is, how do we make an effective and satisfactory adjustment?"That was seven years ago.Seven years later and the three governments - federal, NSW and Queensland - are still fiddling while the rivers and the wetlands die. Coalition interparty politics and Labor inertia have have found no "effective and satisfactory adjustment" to "unblock" the "over-taxed system" north of the Queensland border. Drought and climate change have only compounded the "problem".However, what Angledool does have is Michelle Pymble. She has two preschool daughters and works two days a week in Lightning Ridge. Her husband works on a property three hours away and comes home every fortnight. They moved to Lightning Ridge from Sydney's Peakhurst 13 years ago and they've been in Angledool since 2001. They have a two-storey mudbrick house, with television, air-conditioning and a home computer, and they wouldn't live anywhere else.On October 17, Pymble, as secretary of the Angledool Progress Association, wrote to (among others) Senator Bill Heffernan, in part: "The Narran River, which the residents of Angledool rely on for water for washing, has approximately two weeks water left. In the past it has been released from St George [dam] in Queensland. We have not received any water for more than 580 days. We are hoping you would be able to help us." People rang people, emails were exchanged, and the Brewarrina Shire Council, already alerted, organised for a water tanker to truck in water once a week. Each Angledool residence is to get, on average, 882 litres a person. Each house pays, with a 90 per cent state subsidy, $3-plus per thousand litres. The first water arrived last Sunday.Heffernan arrived on Tuesday. But like the rain, nobody knows when the water from upstream might arrive in the Narran River. Moving Queensland's politicians is as difficult as moving its cotton farmers.
© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald