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It is 70 years since ridicule buried plans by the designer of the Sydney Harbour Bridge to reverse the flow of some major Australian rivers inland for irrigation. But John Job Bradfield, whose landmark bridge turned 75 a few weeks ago, may have the last laugh.
Bradfield proposed diverting the copious tropical flows of rivers of the state of Queensland in northeast Australia, through a vast network of dams, viaducts and tunnels so they percolated into the "dead heart" of the continent. The deserts would become rich farmlands like those of the mid-western United States, and bring to life the colonial myth of an "inland sea" that lured the first European explorers to cruel deaths on the burning sands.
If it sounds as if it could have been set to music, it apparently was. Patriotic songs and "nation-building verse" were immensely popular in Australia between the wars, including grandiose projections about what would happen when the waters that gushed uselessly into the northern seas found their inland destiny in a British Empire version of the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia.
Then, the problem with the Bradfield plan was that as Australia struggled with such basics as city sewage and electricity services, reversing the northern rivers required civil engineering skills and techniques far in advance of those used to bridge Sydney Harbour.
Enter the present Premier of Queensland, Peter Beattie, who says that with a slight change in direction, the Bradfield plan could drive prodigious volumes of monsoon flood waters into the Murray-Darling river system, which flow like a crescent southwestwards through four Australian states - from south Queensland through New South Wales and Victoria to the south of South Australia.
Except it hasn't been flowing at all in recent years, at least not continuously. It has been more like isolated strings of ponds or billabongs separated by long stretches of dry riverbeds and flanked by ruined or struggling irrigators.
"It would require a huge pipeline and it mightn't work, but we need to think about finding more water than cutting back on those who use it," Beattie says.
Beattie's critics accuse him of diversionary tactics in an ongoing debate about a A$10 billion ($11 billion) Federal Government plan to "reform" under one authority the regulation and conservation of the entire Murray-Darling river system. Queensland Opposition leader Jeff Seeney says: "The Beattie/Bradfield scheme is not about diverting water, it is about diverting attention."
If Canberra gets its way, the states involved will lose control over lucrative irrigation allocations which, combined, add up to more water than is sustainable - and that's even without the prolonged drought which has gripped most of the southern half of the continent since 1999.
The cattlemen in New South Wales look north and say the most cost-effective way of adding useful water to the Murray-Darling would be to close huge irrigation licences Queensland has granted to giant mechanised cotton plantations north of the border. One such cotton megaplex already consumes as much water a year as Sydney Harbour holds. And further south, the citrus and grain farmers say much the same thing about the cattle farmers to their north.
However, the Federal Government says it will look seriously at the Beattie version of the Bradfield Plan, while pressing on with its campaign to stop Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria flooding the market, so to speak, with currently useless irrigation rights.
These rights are tradeable. Some farmers use them to escape the forced sale of all their personal assets as their crops fail for the third or fourth year in a row.
They sell up before the liquidators come knocking. Their water rights are acquired by the consolidators, who buy failed farmlands to create much larger and potentially viable estates and can afford to wait out the drought for big rewards when it ends.
If it went ahead, the Beattie version of the old dream would cost either A$3.5 billion, or about A$13.5 billion, if you ask those who regard it as a nonsense.
The firmest scientific support for the revised plan so far has come from Eric Heidecker, a senior lecturer in geology at the University of Queensland, albeit qualified support. "It makes wonderful sense [for Queensland] but it's not going to help people in South Australia or even the southeastern end of this state," he says.
This is because the diversions could dramatically drought-proof large areas of western Queensland, where cattle stations have been in decline because of erratic rainfall in modern times and extensive clear felling of native scrub lands, which have been blamed for causing long-term soil degradation for the short-term enlargement of grazing lands.
But as Australians contemplate a visionary plan that last inspired their grandparents, a cautionary tale is emerging in the Snowy Mountains' hydro-electricity and irrigation scheme in southern New South Wales.
It is within weeks of grinding to a halt, as its dams shrink towards vanishing point, with predictions that the once-reliable snow pack that feeds them will decline catastrophically because of global warming in the coming decades.
- OBSERVER
