From riverbank to ruin

Every now and then a comment lands that stops the scroll dead. Under David Tyler’s recent article, Australia’s Environmental Policy Crisis: A Closer Look, reader Canguro didn’t just reminisce – he delivered a miniature elegy for a continent’s wildlife, spanning seven decades of firsthand witness. What began as a teenager’s bird-list grew into a devastating chronicle of ecological wipeout: ducks that blotted the sun, wallabies erased by goats, red gums traded for almond milk. We’re republishing it unedited – because some truths deserve more than a reply box.

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As a young teenager in the early-mid sixties living in the Upper Murray district in SA and just getting started in a lifelong interest in birdwatching, out hiking along the river’s edge heading west from Waikerie, I struck up a conversation with an old fella, a man in his nineties; he’d lived in a double-decker bus in the edge of the river at Ramco for years and had a small patch of citrus.

At that time, it was still possible to see Musk Ducks on the river, along with Grey and Chestnut Teal, Pacific Black Ducks, Australian Shelducks, Freckled Ducks, Wood Ducks, Hardheads, Australasian Shovelers, even, occasionally, Pink-eared Ducks and Blue-billed Ducks, along with other waterfowl like the Royal and Yellow-billed Spoonbills, Straw-necked and Glossy Ibis as well as the ubiquitous (white) Sacred Ibis, also Bitterns, Herons, Cormorants, Darters, Egrets, Pelicans – all added to this rich exposure to the feathered wildlife on the river… and for a kid who was still within his first year of birding it was a wonderland and a thrill to have this resource in the backyard.

The old fella spoke of his childhood. He’d lived on the Murray his whole life, which meant that he knew that river as a boy and young man in the last twenty or thirty years of the 1800s. He told me of the flocks of ducks that would pass by, teeming in their hundreds of thousands, so many that it would take half an hour for the flock to pass, so dense in numbers that they would occlude the sunlight, like a cloud does. I think I sort of understood that those days were over, that we’d never see anything like that again.

And indeed, the passage of the subsequent sixty years has only been more of the same, a turbocharged razing of the natural world and an apocalyptic (and the word is used here correctly) decline in species numbers as habitat is destroyed. Many if not most of the species cited above are now vanishingly rare. In less than a century, wipeout. Replaced by almond orchards that suck enormous amounts of water out of the system, consigning the mighty River Red Gum (Eucalyptus camaldulensis) forests to terminal decline. Almonds for eucalypts, and nobody blinked. Lose the forests, lose the inhabitants – birds, mammals, reptiles, insects – swapped for almonds, for almond milk and lattes for the city set who have zero awareness of the environmental cost of their choice of lifestyle beverages.

Australia’s largest river system… ruined. Who knew? Who cared?

Around that same time, mid-sixties, I visited the Flinders Ranges for the first time. Chambers Gorge, specifically, along with a bunch of schoolmates and a couple of teachers who were our mentors in this business of learning about the natural world of plants, animals, birds and more. We saw Wallaroos, (also know as Euros), as well as the highlight marsupial, the Yellow-footed Rock Wallaby, but we did not see feral goats. Rabbits, yes, but no goats. I revisited that district in the 1980s… only twenty years later. The damage due to goats of the flora in that region was appalling to behold. Twenty years, wipeout.

In the early seventies I’d worked on pastoral properties in the upper northeast of SA. I learned of the damage done to landscapes through the overstocking with sheep in the early years of colonial expansion, that the fragile saltbush and bluebush regions had to be carefully managed to prevent total species loss and to minimise the erosion that followed the razing of plant life across the landscapes. I saw regions that had suffered this fate in the 1800s and never recovered, and I saw regions that had been well-managed and the contrasts were painfully evident.

I also saw D7 bulldozers paired together with a humungous chain tearing down pristine wilderness on the western edge of the Darling Downs in Qld; another apocalyptic vision unfolding before my eyes; a complex ecosystem that existed for possibly millions of years, replaced with a monocultural crop, cotton, an exotic species that required massive amounts of water, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides in order to grow; dollars in the bank for the multimillionaire farmers and the irreplaceable loss of hundreds if not thousands of species from micro to macro.

Insanity, really, at all levels, whether it’s the ruination of river systems – not only the Murray but most of them in this country – or the wholesale clearing of land for the purpose of farming or grazing – and let’s not overlook that the farming community in this country is not large, there’s only around ~135,000 farm enterprises, only around 420,000 people employed, including fisheries and forestry, a bit over 1.5% of this country’s population. Doesn’t quite seem right, does it, that that small number of people, the custodians, as it were, of the natural landscapes of this country, have been given licence to wreak the extraordinary amount of damage inflicted across the continent.

All the while, politicians seem in thrall, the great mass of citizens ensconced in their coastal homes with their urban concerns and their cost of living and other pressures preoccupying their outlooks on life and their ‘don’t talk to me about what’s happening out there across the country, it’s not my concern’ attitudes… it’s not hard to be despondent and in despair. Albanese willingly sacrificed the Maugean skate, endemic to and only found in Macquarie Harbour in the southwest of Tasmania, in preference to the continuation of the salmon farms in that body of water, knowing the consequences vis-à-vis deoxygenation, knowing the extreme risk of extinction, for what? To save a few jobs, to ensure an ALP member’s position, to allow a foreign-owned corporation to continue its toxic and far from best practice industry continued operation. One can only derive from these examples that the political classes – at all levels and of all colours – just don’t care. Business as usual, and we’ll all go down in a screaming heap when it’s over and done with.

To ram the point home, in my first year at uni studying Agricultural Science, one of our subjects dealt with the history of agriculture in this country. We were told of the development of what became the MIA, the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area. The federal government around the time of WWI commissioned agricultural scientists to survey this district in the southwest of NSW, then majorly unpopulated, as a potential site for returning soldiers, who were to become what became known as soldier-settlers. It was the government’s position that this was to be some sort of recompense, to recognize their service and provide a pathway back to civilian life.

In due course, the report came back. The designated area was unsuitable for the proposed purpose. Duplex soils, underlying salt, poor drainage, risk of salination of the native trees were removed… in short, unsuitable.

The government shelved the report, ignored the scientific advice of experts, and shipped thousands of returned soldiers into that region. It was a disaster… within a decade or less, most of these returned servicemen walked off their land and returned to the cities. So much for the ‘Lucky Country’ and its second-rate society of so-called ‘managers’.

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