RUNNING DRY: saving Australia’s most precious resource, water
With severe water restrictions hitting towns across the country and dire warnings about supplies running dry, Samantha Trenoweth meets farmers, scientists and thinkers charged with securing Australia’s water for the future.
There was no shortage of water bucketing from the skies in January 1788 as the First Fleet offloaded its goods and chattels on the banks of Sydney Cove at the height of the summer storm season. Winds howled, thunder shook the tall ships at anchor and lightning set gum trees ablaze like torches, striking dead the barnyard animals sheltering beneath them. There was a general feeling amongst both convicts and military, cowering in their tents, that they had forsaken England’s green and pleasant land for an apocalyptic hellscape. And matters didn’t improve. After two years of torrential and tempestuous La Niña, the colony was hurled into its first drought. Crops failed, streams ran dry, fruit bats and birds dropped from the trees, bushfires blazed through forests. The settlement reached the brink of starvation.
Welcome to Australia, the driest inhabited continent (with perhaps the most temperamental climate) on earth – a land where water security should never have been taken for granted and where, in 2019, it has never been more critical.
Mandy Reid hasn’t showered for a couple of days. The 60-year-old gardener’s White Cottage Flower Farm in Tenterfield, northern NSW, is normally blessed with soaking summer storms and an abundant average annual rainfall of 848mm. It’s received just a fraction of that these last two years.
“I don’t think people understand how bad it is,” she says. “This is the worst we’ve seen it, ever. We met an old fellow on the street the other day and he said he’s never seen it this dry in 72 years.”
Of the seven rainwater tanks on Mandy’s property, which would usually all be full at this time of year, she has just half a tank left. And that’s only because she tips her shower and dishwashing and flower vase water back into it.
Mandy buys as much water as she can afford to keep the farm struggling along because, since her husband, Hamish, retired, it’s their only income. But she’s had to let her much loved, 25-year-old English garden go.
“The winter rose, which would normally flower at this time of year so profusely, hasn’t given us one flower. And all the birches – those beautiful white-bark trees – they’re all dead,” she adds, blinking back tears. “And the conifers. When you walk in my gate, there were 24 conifers there and I’ve lost 17. Conifers that are 40 and 50 years old are dying.”
As we go to press, drought is affecting 97.6 per cent of NSW, 65 per cent of Queensland and vast tracts of south-east Western Australia. The Bureau of Meteorology has declared the current drought in the Murray Darling the most severe on record and NSW Water has announced that the last six months have seen the lowest recorded inflows to the state’s rivers and dams in history.
The water level in the Keepit Dam, normally the size of Sydney Harbour, has dwindled to just 0.5 per cent of capacity. Nearby Split Rock Dam is at 2 per cent, the Menindee Lakes are at 1 per cent. Burrendong Dam, near Dubbo, is at 5 per cent and inflows over the last two years have been just 25 per cent of those recorded during the worst two years of the Millennium Drought. There have been mass fish deaths at Menindee Lakes and the Keepit Dam, and many of the state’s rivers are on alert for blue-green algae. The list goes on and on.
Alarm bells are ringing at all levels of government as ministers scramble to avert the very real spectre of at least 10 towns running completely dry. The NSW Government has poured $650 million into water infrastructure over 18 months and has pledged $1.5 billion more, but there is still so much more to be done. The water supplies in Tamworth, Dubbo, Armidale, Walcha, Nyngan and Narromine are all considered at risk. Murrurrundi has been on Stage Six water restrictions for over a year. And Mandy, like others in regional
NSW, is wondering why, a decade after the Millennium Drought, so much of Australia is woefully illprepared for water scarcity.
Dr Joëlle Gergis, an award-winning climate scientist from the Australian National University, has a couple of explanations.
“To begin with,” she says, “most people forget that around 70 per cent of Australia is classified as arid or semi-arid, and that gives us an inherent vulnerability to water scarcity.”
She also blames old-fashioned Aussie stoicism and optimism.
“While the ‘she’ll be right’ mentality is invaluable in times of crisis and recovery,” she says, “it’s important that we plan for the future with our eyes wide open.” And that future includes a warmer world.
In her book, Sunburnt Country:
The History and Future of Climate Change in Australia, Joëlle traces our erratic climate through the ages. She explains that its natural variability has blinded many Australians to the changes associated with global warming, but it also makes us frighteningly susceptible to them.
“We are the most vulnerable nation in the developed world when it comes to climate change,” Joëlle points out, “but we’re not having this conversation. Instead we’re having this stoic, ‘she’ll be right’ conversation, and saying, ‘Oh well, land of drought and flooding rains’.”
Australia has always been Dorothea Mackellar’s sunburnt country. However, our land and surrounding oceans have warmed by more than
one degree since she wrote her nation-defining poem, and the mercury is still rising. This has serious implications for our water security.
Here’s how it works: the one degree temperature rise that’s crept up on us over the last century has increased evaporation over land and oceans, drying our soils, making our heatwaves hotter and our droughts more extreme. That’s not a projection. We need only ask a farmer to hear that it’s already happening.
“The summer of 2018-19 was Australia’s hottest on record,” Joëlle tells The Weekly, “smashing the previous record, which was in 2012-2013, by about .86 of a degree. Over 120 temperature records were broken in the summer of 2013 – the Bureau of Meteorology had to create new colours for its maps – and a further 206 were broken last summer. So Australia’s climate is fundamentally changing, and that’s changing our exposure to drought, flood and a whole range of things. It’s profound.”
Moreover, with some degree of further warming unavoidable, scientists predict more severe droughts and heatwaves, and more precarious water security in the decades to come.
To complicate matters, all that evaporation has also increased the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere, with significantly more to come if the planet continues warming at its current rate. And the wetter the atmosphere becomes, the more likely it is not just to rain but to pour. So we can expect more of the kind of weather patterns we’ve seen this year in Queensland, where widespread drought is followed by devastating deluge. And as a nation, we need to be better prepared for both.
“Extremes are already characteristic of our climate. The issue is that climate change, exacerbated by human activity, is now stacking the odds,” says Joëlle. “We will begin to notice an even more extreme version of our current climate.”
Some of the current water issues in NSW, Joëlle believes, stem from the fact the Murray Darling Basin Plan doesn’t account for climate change, leaving farmers unprepared for hotter, drier, more devastating droughts, and less predictable river and stream flows.
Local councils and state governments have also been taken unawares by the severity of the current drought. In January this year, the NSW Government appointed Cross Border Commissioner James McTavish to a new role as Regional Town Water Supply Coordinator. A man of insuperable energy, unflappable nature and abundant commonsense, he has run from town to town, building a pipeline here, sinking a bore there, adding a treatment plant where the bore water is undrinkable, putting out the aquatic equivalent of spot fires.
“And in those places where we don’t have an engineering solution, where we can’t drop a bore or build a pipeline,” James says, “we’re working on a logistical solution. So we’re talking about trucks and the potential for trains to cart water to some of the smaller centres.”
James insists he has this covered – that he’ll work tirelessly to ensure no town runs dry on his watch. And he’s thinking long-term as well as dealing with the current string of crises. But he concedes that we’re dealing with a new, less predictable climate, and that water security in Australia can no longer be taken for granted.
“People might disagree on the cause and they might disagree on what to call it,” he says, “but I think everyone agrees that we need to adapt to the new environment, where we can’t be assured of the security of our water and we can’t take the profligate approach we’ve taken previously. We need to make sure we value this water as a precious commodity, and in our towns we need to make sure we get the best value from every
“Australia’s climate is fundamentally changing.”
drop. If that means we need to change the way we use water in our towns, the way we water our gardens or take showers or bathe, the way we treat our effluent and reuse the water we have available, including stormwater, then now is the time to be having that conversation.”
It’s not a conversation anyone needs to initiate with Vanessa June Hickey, a Gamilaraay woman and Project Officer for the Dharriwaa Elders Group at Walgett in western NSW. Vanessa grew up at the junction of the Namoi and Barwon Rivers. She swam, she caught fish there, and she listened to her grandmother speak about the importance of the rivers to the community and the environment.
But both rivers are so dry now that the town has had to resort to bore water.
Vanessa, at 44, knows how to care for country. “Our rivers are priceless,” she tells The Weekly. “Water is life. My nan told me that we are caretakers of our country – of our lands and waters. You don’t take too much and you don’t get greedy – never get greedy – and be a protector.”
Her son, Harley, 14, was just four years old the last time he could swim in a “healthy river”. “The knowledge I’ve passed on to him from my mother and grandmother is even more sacred,” Vanessa says, “because the river is dying in his lifetime.”
Vanessa is concerned that, not just drought, but greed and mismanagement upstream are diminishing her local rivers and impacting the most vulnerable in the town.
“Our Elders,” she explains, “are really susceptible to dehydration, especially in summer when it gets up to 50 degrees here. Our babies and children need quality water too. We have a high burden of health conditions among our people, like heart disease, kidney disease and hypertension. The salty water is really bad for people who have those conditions. Australia is supposed to be a first world country, but it doesn’t feel like it for us.”
With more towns like Walgett now reliant on bore water, Anne Kennedy believes it’s critical we safeguard the world’s largest groundwater reservoir, the Great Artesian Basin. Anne is President of the Artesian Bore Water Users Association and a member of the government-appointed Great Artesian Basin Advisory Group. At 72, she’s also a mother, grandmother to 13, and a farmer from Coonamble in NSW.
Anne’s farm is entirely reliant on bore water drawn from the Great Artesian Basin. If her bores ran dry, the land would be untenable, which is why she is passionate about using it wisely.
“Our Great Artesian Basin,” she explains, “lies under 22 per cent of Australia, and it is the only permanent inland water we have. This water is millions of years old,but it is not an infinite resource. The basin recharges very slowly, which makes it critical that we protect and preserve its narrow intake beds, but we’re not doing that. Bores and gas wells are now peppered through those recharge areas, like the Pilliga in central NSW, causing fractures and pollution. The consequences will be disastrous for our water security – a long-term legacy of destruction for a short-term political gain.”
Anne wants to pass her farm on to her children and her grandchildren and, like Vanessa, she is concerned about the potentially intractable problems that we’re leaving behind for future generations.
“I believe we all have a responsibility to leave the country in better shape than we found it,” she says, “and to think of future generations of Australians. What will happen if we lose our water?”
In Perth, not so long ago, that was a real possibility, and as a result, the western capital has trialled some innovative solutions to water scarcity. In recent years, Perth’s rainfall has been declining by about 3mm annually, the number of months in which the city receives 200mm or more of rain has halved, and the temperature, as elsewhere, has risen by one degree. According to Don McFarlane, hydrogeologist and adjunct professor at the University of WA, all this has conspired to reduce runoff into Perth’s catchments and aquifers.
“Inflows into Perth dams,” he explained in The Conversation, “have fallen from 300 billion litres a year to less than 50 billion.” Evaporation from reservoirs can now exceed inflows in Perth’s driest years.
To solve its drinking water problems, Perth was an early adopter of desalination technology. It is an expensive solution, and there are issues with saline pollution, but other capital cities have nonetheless followed suit and desalination plants are now either operating or on standby in Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane and the Gold Coast.
Perth has also come to rely increasingly on groundwater. And although groundwater levels are falling, the city recently introduced an innovative scheme to recharge aquifers and treat waste water, which, in combination with desalination, should safeguard Perth’s drinking water.
In coming years, scientists expect to see a drying and heating trend across all our southern cities, so Perth’s trailblazing work on water security has been fortuitous. In the north, we can expect more of the drought and deluge theme as the sub-tropical zone expands south and cyclones become less numerous but pack more punch.
There has never been a one-size-fitsall solution to water security across our disparate landscapes. But as fresh, drinkable water becomes a more
“Our rivers are priceless. Water is life.”
precious commodity, not just in Australia but around the world (as recent water crises in Chennai and Cape Town attest), there have been some ingenious developments in water management.
The City of Sydney is pursuing a decentralised plan, where water is conserved, captured and reused locally to meet the community’s non-drinking needs. “With most of NSW in drought, it doesn’t make sense that we’re using drinking water to flush our toilets and water our gardens,” says Lord Mayor Clover Moore. The council’s projects include rain gardens to filter run-off, green roofs, local water recycling plants and efficiency measures.
Another smart innovation is making life easier for the children of Murrurundi. Thanks to a generous donor, the local public school has installed hydropanels which use solar power to create condensation, effectively harvesting clean drinking water from the air. The 10-panel system produces up to 3000 600ml bottles of water per month, which the school shares with the community.
We’ve all heard about our carbon footprint, but Dr Helen Fairweather, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Engineering at the University of the Sunshine Coast, suggests we ought to start watching our water footprint as well. That could mean remembering those water-wise tips – turning off taps while we brush our teeth, taking shorter showers, recycling our dishwater onto the garden and so on. “It might also,” says Helen, “involve doing some research and getting to know how much water is involved in producing the food, clothing, energy and other items and services we use.”
For instance, it takes 214 litres of water to produce a kilo of tomatoes, 1608 litres for a kilo of bread, 15,415 litres for a kilo of beef, and 17,196 litres for a kilo of chocolate. There’s a website called waterfootprint.org that tallies it all up.
However, both Helen and Joëlle stress that all the gizmos, gadgets and water budgeting in the world will not stop the escalating water insecurity that comes with climate change.
“With no reduction in global carbon emissions,” Joëlle warns, “Australia is on track to see a four degree rise in temperature by the end of this century. If we only meet the emission reduction targets that the world has currently pledged, then we’re on track to see global temperatures reach 3.2 degrees above pre-industrial levels. We’ve already seen the hottest summers and the worst droughts in Australia’s history. We’ve already seen the death of 50 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef. So we need to try to put the brakes on. The world is nowhere near where we need to be to avert some of the worst aspects of climate change, including water scarcity. That’s not a happy message, but this is upon us. It’s unfolding right now.”