“You can’t grow a crop because the water’s all gone
Starin’ at a desert where there once was a farm
People doing nothing while they’re crippled by fears
Cos you can’t grow a crop when it’s watered by tears.”
From the song Give the Water Back
Doug Kerr, 2009
Australian kayaker Steve Posselt has mounted a campaign to raise awareness of the Murray-Darling river system by single-handedly paddling or dragging his kayak thousands of kilometres through the river basin.
“Our river systems are precious. If they die, we die. And they are dying,” Mr Posselt said.
The Murray-Darling Basin extends across one-seventh of the continent and contains 20 major rivers, including the two largest—the Murray and Darling rivers. The Basin produces about 40 per cent of Australia’s agricultural income and contains about three-quarters of the nation’s irrigated land.
Competing interests of individuals, businesses and the four states that it flows through have combined with the increasing heat and declining rainfall effects of climate change to produce a crisis of national proportions.
Major storages in the Basin are now almost empty, the government scientific group the Wentworth Group reports. Irrigation allocations have been slashed and emergency plans have had to be put in place to provide town water to Adelaide, the capital of the state of South Australia.
First Expedition
A civil engineer with 38 years experience in the water industry, Mr Posselt first launched his campaign for the Murray-Darling in 2007, when he began a 3000km kayak trip down the length of the iconic Australian river.
Leaving from Brisbane in the northern state of Queensland and finishing in Adelaide, Mr Posselt says he started out his trip as a water engineer “with an open mind and some concerns”, and ended up “alarmed, ashamed and determined to change”.
Much of the river was dry and he was shocked to find that it no longer reached the sea.
Mr Posselt documented his experience in the subsequent book Cry Me A River, concluding: “The way we use water and treat our rivers is despicable.”
No one has really taken the time to understand what is going wrong with our river systems, he says. Government engineers and farmers are too focussed on the amount of water in the river channel and are not looking at the whole picture.
“What I have come to understand is that the river will die unless the wetlands that support it are protected.”
Second Expedition
“This Government plans to take 75 billion litres of water each year out of a river system that is dying from the mouth up. The water simply is not there,” he said.
Mr Posselt spent 16 days paddling and dragging his three wheeled kayak some 216km up the Goulburn River, over The Great Dividing Range and into the capital Melbourne, stopping and talking to people in towns and water facilities on the way.
“It is a gruelling pace,” he told radio journalists by telephone from the river, “but I feel compelled to do something to get the message through. The river has no options.”
Victorian Premier John Brumby, who initiated the Pipeline scheme, says upgrades to the rural irrigation systems will provide for the pipeline flow, but Mr Posselt says that assumes there is water flow in the beginning and from what he saw, that is just not happening.
Mr Posselt believes that cities need to reuse water a number of times to reduce their environmental footprint.
“There are much better and much more sensible solutions. We have really got to invest in water efficiency in Melbourne—much more stormwater capture and recycling, retro-fitting of houses across Melbourne—to be truly water efficient.
“Almost as much rain falls on Melbourne as Melbourne uses and what are we doing about that?”
Singer-songwriter Doug Kerr has donated half the royalties from his song Give the Water Back to Steve Posselt’s campaign. More info on the campaign can be found at www.kayak4earth.com .
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