Persistent low flow is the cause of Murray Mouth closures.

 - [Pictures Courtesy of  The Murray-Darling Basin Commission ]
  Ok! If you think the state of the Murray Mouth as depicted in the photographs above is indicative of a pretty sick river. Well! In 2007, in spite of millions of taxpayers dollars having been spent on 'band-aid' fixes, nothing has changed! –Feel free to CLICK HERE and read how, in the intervening years, others have reported on this environmental disgrace; viz, ... 2006: A lot of talk, a lot of promises, a lot of agreements in principle, but NO additional water flows down the Murray. ... 2007: The lowest rainfall in 80-plus years, zero water flow is registered in the River Murray, water restrictions implemented, suburban gardens suffer and people start to think, "Geeees! Maybe this is serious". 

And! While they think about it. The Murray continues to teeter on the brink of extinction and the Murray Mouth lurches towards permanent closure, which it's already doing part-time, as it did in 1982, and numerously threatened to do so through 1995-96; - it's only a matter of time before it closes full-time. When that does happen, and it's only a matter of time, the Coorong will be a stagnant saline backwater devoid of marine life. -- No longer can anyone argue against this unmistakable fact. Throughout 2005-06, the salt content in the Coorong increased dramatically, the region's food-chain cycle was thrown into turmoil causing several local fish species to become extinct and annual bird migration pattern that had endured for centuries, vanished! The river itself is destined to become a long chain of billabongs that sometimes interconnect and flow into a salt lake named Lake Alexandrina; in a similar manner to how nowadays Cooper Creek sometimes flows into Lake Eyre. - And! It is ENTIRELY due to the unsustainable volume of water, which humans continue to bleed from the Murray/Darling system, each and every year.

If we humans were to loose a similar percentage of our blood supply. We would be a long time dead.

It is an astonishing inditement on the race Homo Sapiens to face up to. That we, the only creatures on this planet who are naive enough to believe that we posses "intelligence", cannot learn from past mistakes and recognise the long-term disruption to our community and the devastating costs that will inevitably be incurred when we bleed a major river system to death.

The 'Yanks' tried it to the Colorado River and now have a mammoth environmental problem on their hands. That's right! 'The Colorado River', the one that was responsible for carving out the world renown Grand Canyon, the one that 'once upon a time' had its delta at the head of Golfo de California Mexico, where nowadays it sometimes 'trickles' into the sea: - Also the Soviets did-it. But they didn't muck-around, they didn't only shrivel a lake they catastroph-ised a whole damn "Sea". That's right, the 'Aral Sea' in Kazakhstan, Eastern USSR, a sea that once supported a fishing industry of such magnitude that a cannery was needed to process the overabundance of the fish catch. We're not talking about a 'sardine' size lake the size of Lake Alexandrina here! We're talking about a SEA that compares in size to the total area of Spencer & St Vincent Gulfs put together. A sea that supported a town, not a small fishing village like Robe SA, but a Town more akin to Port Lincoln SA, with a look-alike fishing fleet & fishing industry, where the tide went out - and never came back in! - What was once a popular beachfront holiday-resort & port facility is now a ghost town decorated with numerous derelict and rusting hulks of vessels the size of tuna boats, which are now scattered along the edge of a dusty, arid and windswept desert that extends beyond the visible horizon.

- - And! What was the cause of this disaster? - Cotton! - That's right, the former USSR bled the Aral Sea's two main tributaries, the Amu Darya & the Syr Darya, to death, so they could irrigate their cotton crops. The situation was made worse by the fact that the Soviets' used chemical fertilisers and DDT insect control measures that left a cocktail of deadly toxins in the sediment of the now arid seabed. - Prevailing winds nowadays blow across the waterless seabed whipping the sediment up into dust storms, which so contaminate the atmosphere that Tuberculosis is now endemic in the region and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. As soon as a patient is cured they are reinfected from the ever-present airborne contaminants. Human life expectancy in the region has dropped to around 40 years of age, and declining. The 20-odd million people, equivalent to the entire population of Australia, who live in the countries that surround the Aral are suffering from serious health problems. It's not an environment where anyone would choose to live; NOT if they want to live past 45 years of age, that is! And! You wouldn’t even want to drive through the region without wearing a surgical mask. – You think I’m kidding? Well it’s about time you did some catching up my friend!!! – It took the USSR only 50 years, from start to finish, to accomplish this irreversible destruction of a region’s environment.

- Thankfully! In Australia we are much more cautious about using potentially harmful chemical insecticides and fertilisers. There remains, however, that unwelcome fringe benefit of irrigation, the salt problem, which will not go-away and, of course, there's the on-going gluttonous over-use of our Murray water resource. Give us another 50 years and Australians, too, will join that dubious club of environmental assassins; and it will again be due to the nearsighted, blinkered vision of greed at the expense of the environment! - Disguised, of course, as "National Productivity" & "Job Creation" as it ALWAYS is and always has been in the past.

It's a hollow argument, however. The expense incurred in reducing by 20% the amount of water currently sucked out of the Murray River, along with the cost of a 10-to-15 year plan to relocate, e.g. 50% of the cotton growing infrastructure currently bleeding the Darling River to death; to one or other of the underground freshwater sources lately located in outback Western Australia, or further north to access water from Lake Argyle. Will amount to peanuts when compared to the ultimate cost WE ARE GOING TO PAY for continuing with our present strategy of over-usage of Murray/Darling water. - The absurdity is, it's either RELOCATE or 'wither on the vine'; -FOR THESE ARE THE ONLY TWO CHOICES WE GOT!! - Whether it's a planned relocation of some agricultural interests NOW! - Or an enforced relocation LATER when the soils and rivers are so polluted they'll no longer sustain anything like the current level of agriculture.

Any other 'band-aid' fixes are a waste of money and, more importantly, A WASTE OF time.

The nearsighted cotton growers, of course, argue that they only take "floodwater" from the Darling, which would otherwise "go to waste". Which only underscores their blinkered, self-serving vision. For it is that very "floodwater", "going to waste" as they put it, that creates the essential "flushing" mechanism, which washes huge quantities of salt and other pollutants out of the Murray/Darling system. While at the same time it reinvigorates the freshwater lagoons and backwaters that are so essential to the flora, fauna and general environmental health of the whole river system.

In South Australia today there are still, a few, elderly Riverland residents who remember when, as teenagers, they could stand up to their waist in the River Murray and still see their feet on the bottom. By comparison, if you dip your arm into that same river today, the river is so muddy that by the time your wrist touches the water surface you can no longer see the tips of your outstretched fingers. And that's only the visible pollution! Dissolved pollutants cannot be seen with the naked eye, as in seawater, where you cannot see the salt but you damn well know it's there when you taste it.

The cotton growers are, of course, not the only vandals of this water resource. They are merely the most recent arrivals. Also the Darling floods are traditionally the "muddiest" of all and they are that way due to the terrain through which they flow. There's precious little humans can do about that. What the river needs, most of all, is more of the clean water from the snowmelt off the NSW and Victorian highlands. And! that will only come about by a REDUCTION in the quantity of water currently bled-off for irrigation and township supply. Irrigators on the River Murray have traditionally used demonstrably excessive amounts of water to irrigate their crops. And Yes! There are at the present time research programs going-on in most of the Murray's irrigation districts, aimed at improving the efficient use of water for irrigation and thereby reduce the total usage. We Hope!!!! --- But these efforts are not nearly progressing fast enough to counter, much-less turn-back, the mounting depravation being committed on the river NOW!

As for the townships. Country residents generally are a fairly rainwater conscious bunch of people and river-community dwellers are no exception. Saving there are likely to be marginal in the short term at-least. Nevertheless, on this "the driest continent on the planet". A "Smart Australia" OUGHT to be "leading the world" with innovative "best practices" for sustainable living in a semi-arid environment, and we are NOT!!! Yet every Australian citizen, who is capable of pondering this problem, KNOWS!!! We all ought to be making much better use of domestic rainwater storage and reticulation systems. We also know that modern biodegradable toilet systems provide a much more water-efficient means of hygienic human waste disposal, than our current water-guzzling flush toilets. These options, though there can be no-argument about their water conservation advantages, would, however, require a significant shift in social attitudes to implement. - Nevertheless, in country communities there is scope for substantial saving in water used in effluent disposal, and there is enormous scope for saving mains water used in city areas.

"1996 HOW TO FIX-IT!!!!": - In the case of agriculture, the task of implementing a "no-exception" freeze on the quantity of water currently extracted from the Murray\Darling system, in collusion with the task of relocating agricultural interests nationally, across state borders, would necessarily requires Federal Government legislation: - The "Smart Australia!" therefore needs to identify alternative pioneering type farming, irrigation and aquaculture projects around the nation. A workable starting point would be the Ord River project in WA, where the freshwater lake, Lake Argyle, created when they dammed the Ord River, holds nine (9) times the volume of water in Sydney Harbour. Also, more innovative and challenging alternatives for dry land farming (such as farming kangaroos) should not be capriciously dismissed prematurely; congratulations need to go to United Game Processors at Charleville for their foresight in this area: ~ ~ A calculated number of "sweetheart deals" needs to be made available to those farmers/irrigators who are prepared to relocate, involving a property-for-property swap and five, hell! why not fifteen, tax-free years. ~ ~ Potentially interested irrigators could then choose to swap their current Murray/Darling Basin enterprise for whatever of the profitably viable relocation options that were made available to them: The "traded-in" real estate would, thereafter, be rehabilitated back to bushland or be available only for 'dry-land' farming. The forfeited water allocation be added-to, and thereby increase forever, the "no exception frozen" quantity of water allocated to mainstream flow; this process to continue until no more then 60%, instead of the current 80%, of Murray/Darling water was being diverted to townships and for agricultural usage.

As for domestic usage: - No doubt, the old 10,000-litre backyard water tank can be a bit of an eyesore. But the scope for design innovation re how we collect and recycle wastewater and dispose of our effluent is vast. And! Australia does posses the home-grown engineers, architects  etc., capable of designing and building a range of new-era Conservation Conscious Domiciles; and in the process show the rest of the world how to live conservatively in the 21^st Century. We already know that Spanish and Mediterranean influence domiciles are considerably more suited to our Australian climate than are the "boxes with peaked roof" models we inherited from northern Europe. As it is, architects nowadays include things like en-suite facilities, a study, a garage, carports & patio, under the main roof; and they're doing it in much greater numbers than was the case 20-or-so years ago. Why then can they not also integrate a water storage capacity into the floor plan of new homes? Done at the design stage it would not be a hugely expensive thing to do. The CSIRO and\or Australian National University has the expertise to design such 'utility-integrated', aesthetically attractive, competitively priced structures. The main object being to make Australian homes more "water economical" than they currently are. An industry sponsored new-era "CCD home display centre", erected somewhere within the ACT and periodically updated, open to public inspection as a walk through and/or via cyberspace, would be a very interesting Public Relations Exercise: - As for 'updating' social attitudes? All of us, by some-means or other, are currently PAYING DOLLARS for the extravagant water-wasting lifestyle we lead. The quickest and best way to change that is to provide a clear and obvious cost saving in favour of the alternative. A National Mains Water "Pay for what you Use" scheme is a sure-fire way to do it. The current "water rates" system is arduous to comprehend; and fails to provide any real incentive to conserve water. A politically unpopular "National Conservation Tax on Mains Water" will achieve it. The object NOT being to raise more TAX dollars, but to reduce water wastage "for the Greater Good of the nation": - Obviously, ALL political parties would have to support such of proposal. But, historically, political bipartisan agreement in Australia on matters other than parliamentarian's salaries and benefits is dismal! - "THEY'LL" still be debating this issue in 2050 and the Murray will be dead by then!!!!

Nonetheless, a scheme such as the above could only materialise from Federal Government Initiatives and, as change in "social attitudes" takes considerably longer than the elected term of any single Government, the on-going management of such a scheme would have to be invested in a non-politically affiliated Commission. Much like the old Snowy Mountains Authority Commission, or perhaps a re-vamped and re-badged Murray Darling Basin Commission. With a mandate to manage and coordinating the overall plan, for the betterment of the nation, and have the muscle to override the self-serving interests of regional groups and/or individuals: - In conjunction with the various band-aid schemes currently being undertaken, including tree planting projects, etc., etc... Australia could become the first Nation in the World to successfully resuscitate a mortally ill major river system. - It would, however, require continuous, vigilant and diligent policing to keep it that way: - Me thinks! the River Thames rehabilitation project fades by comparison.