On Sunday afternoon, Steve Posselt and Graeme Gibson will set out in a small tinnie from Ballina to travel as far upstream as they can go, beyond Kyogle. The idea is to highlight the shocking state of the Richmond and Wilson Rivers, and spark community conversations to demand change.
These two self-described ‘old blokes’ have had enough, they say. Countless reports since the 1980s have noted the problems and the answers, while the river quality steadily gets worse.
The title of the tinnie trip is ‘Restore the Richmond’. The men say no one has the right to destroy the amenity of the river and to take away the livelihood of others, and are calling for a single authority responsible for the health of the whole river, with adequate resources and accountability. They will also be measuring the water quality along the way.
Their boat has been beautifully painted by students at Casino High School.
If you want to give the intrepid tinnie travellers some encouragement, they’ll be leaving Fawcett Park at Ballina on 2.30pm this Sunday, and plan to be going under the bridge at Casino at 4pm next Wednesday afternoon.
Epic challenges
Retired engineer Steve Posselt is no stranger to epic challenges designed to draw attention to environmental issues, having paddled and dragged his kayak down the length of the Murray-Darling and then crossing three continents to reach Paris for COP21. He wrote and published books about both of these adventures.
Graeme Gibson has a background in social science and community education. He told The Echo he got interested in the Richmond nearly 10 years ago when he moved to Kyogle. ‘Just to look at the river is to wonder what’s going on. It’s that bad. I spent a lot of time looking at it, thinking about it, talking to people about it, reading about it, writing about it.’
Then he started paddling on the river. Mr Gibson has since travelled on the water from Grevillea to Coraki. ‘You see a lot of devastation, but occasionally nature still has its capacity to enchant you, and that makes it all worthwhile.’
Steve Posselt explained that they wouldn’t be paddling this time as they are both in their 70s, and the tinnie is actually lighter than his double kayak, which will make it easier to get across obstacles.
‘Someone asked the other day how we were going to get over the falls at Casino,’ said Mr Gibson. ‘And I said, “well, with difficulty”, but the tinnie is light and Steve is strong.’
‘Or stubborn,’ said Mr Posselt.
‘The thing is, I’ve paddled up the Mississippi in a flood, I’ve paddled through New York, I’ve paddled through London, I’ve paddled through Paris – and all of those places don’t look as bad as the Richmond River. This is almost the worst place I’ve paddled.
‘The only worst places are in western NSW and western Queensland, but it’s all in Australia, which is just diabolical.’
The journey of an engineer
Mr Posselt now lives at Swan Bay, where he’s planting thousands of trees, and sees what’s happening to the Richmond River every day. He has a history of looking at the movement of water across the landscape, and years ago invented a system of water control gates.
‘Yes I’m a civil engineer with a specialist interest in water, as well as a conscience about the river,’ he said. ‘When we talk to people, I let them know why I became a civil engineer, and that was because I watched the flood mitigation on the Clarence River in the ’60s, and I loved the bulldozers and the drag lines and everything big! I thought, this is for me.
‘So I studied engineering, and 10 years after I finished that, I realised I had to rethink what I knew. I used to love dams and dam construction, and then I found out that wasn’t too good either. So there’s been an awakening a couple of times in my life about how important it is for engineers not to destroy the environment.
‘Engineers become engineers because they want to do good, and when you tell them that they’re doing harm, it’s really difficult.’
Graeme Gibson, who now lives in Maclean, shares Steve Posselt’s passion for rivers.
‘I tell people the Clarence has got problems, but compared to the Richmond, it’s pristine. That shocks people, but a lot of people have no idea what the river was once like,’ he said.
‘In the estuary here in Ballina, it was an abundant fishery which collapsed in the last couple of decades. In the upper river, the first Europeans on the river recorded it as clear water over clean sand and pebbles.’
The great forgetting
‘Even 20 years ago, people say you could see to the bottom of the river around Kyogle. I guess it’s almost like inter-generational amnesia. People just don’t know what it was like, or in some cases, sadly, people don’t want to know,’ said Mr Gibson.
‘They prefer not to know, and they just think it’s always been like this, but I have a strong belief that a healthy river is a public good, the same as hospitals and schools are public goods. And things that are public goods deserve community and government support at a much greater rate than is currently happening.’
The ‘Restore the Richmond’ tinnie trip is affiliated with Riverfest, while also being an independent venture. As Steve Posselt puts it, ‘We can say whatever we want to say, which may well be a little bit different to what Riverkeeper says.
‘From my perspective, I really think it’s nice to celebrate the river and what it should mean. However, if it’s dying, somebody’s got to say that. We’ve got to call out the fact that it’s dying. Almost all organisations want everybody to work together and not to blame anyone.
‘Well, I feel a little bit different to that. If you’re actually contributing to the demise of the river, then you should be blamed, and that’s not going to be popular.’
Public discussions
The tinnie travellers plan to have conversations with locals and other stakeholders all along the route, as well as conducting public forums in Kyogle on 7 October, and Casino on 14 October.
Graeme Gibson says, ‘These are moderated panel discussions, which will go from 6pm to 7.30 in the Kyogle Bowlo and the Casino Golf Club. But after that, we want people to stay on and just keep talking. That’s why we’re in the clubs. It’s more conducive to carrying on the conversation.’
He said they want to talk to everyone. ‘We don’t just want to talk to the converted. Whether or not those people come remains to be seen, but we’re hoping that they will.’
Everyone around here is connected to the river, even if they don’t know it. This area is called the Northern Rivers, and the river is crucial to our identity, isn’t it?
‘Yes it is,’ said Mr Gibson. ‘I wrote an essay about the river a few years ago, and we talk about the Northern Rivers with pride, but one of those rivers is not a source of pride, not at all,’
And why is the Richmond in such bad shape? What are the key drivers?
Steve Posselt says, ‘Mainly, I would suggest that it is a relatively small river with a very big flood plain, whereas the Clarence is a big river with a smaller flood plain. So the Clarence will catch up, but they’ve got a lot more buffer than than we have.’
‘It’s also the conversion of natural floodplain grasses to imported pasture grasses that can’t cope with being inundated that leads to blackwater,’ added Mr Gibson.
‘There’s lots of different causes of the problems on the river, on the flood plain,’ said Mr Posselt.
‘It is the inappropriate vegetation that goes rotten and takes all the oxygen out of the river. It’s the fact that we’ve dug drains through acid sulfate soils, and we continue to do that. After the floods, there were excavators all over the floodplain digging drains through acid sulfate soils.
‘We’ve got sediment, some of it that comes from very close to Ballina, some of it that comes from up the river. We have a multitude of problems, all of which have been written about, documented for the last 30 years, and no proper action has been taken.
‘We need a single authority responsible for the health of the river to do whatever it takes to provide a river that gives us proper amenity; that in the headwaters is drinkable, that you can swim in, particularly in the middle of the river, and that you can catch fish down the bottom in Ballina or anywhere else,’ said Mr Posselt.
‘So, drinkable, fishable, swimmable is what we believe is the right of everybody.’
What does a river need?
‘When people say, what does a river need? Just two simple things, keep the cows out of the creek and the river, and let a swamp be a swamp,’ said Graeme Gibson.
And deforestation of the upper catchment has also contributed to sediment issues? ‘Yes, in the 1890s a wharf was built just east of Casino in Irvington,’ said Mr Gibson. ‘By about 1910 it was decommissioned because the river had silted up, because of all the soil coming down from where the cedar and other trees were cut on the river banks upstream, which wiped out the usefulness of the wharf.’
So how do you turn around the prevailing attitude in some quarters that rivers and streams are basically drains?
‘It’s a problem,’ said Mr Posselt. ‘One of the disappointing things with the CSIRO NEMA study is that they’re not looking elsewhere. For example there’s already been a lot of work done on the Brisbane Bremer catchment, and that’s shown the benefit of nature-based solutions in reducing flood heights at Ipswich. And these guys haven’t even considered that.
‘We need to look at other work that’s been done and not try to reinvent the wheel here.’
River health, mental health
What sort of reactions are you getting so far as you try to draw attention to the state of the Richmond, post-flood?
‘What we’ve uncovered is a sort of latent depression with some people in that they don’t particularly want to go on the river,’ said Mr Posselt. ‘They don’t want to get their outboard fixed. If they do, they’d rather take their boat up to the Tweed or down to the Clarence, because this river depresses them.
‘Of course, people have lost their livelihoods. That’s causing serious depression, and the effect of an unhealthy river is pretty profound on all of the people who depend on it, for tourism, and fishing, and recreation, and so it’s sort of an insidious thing that you can’t really define, but we’ve got to face it.’
Mr Gibson said, ‘People still call it the beautiful Richmond River, but it’ll never be what it was, at least in the headwaters.’
Both men say the river only has any chance of recovery with a concerted, whole of community effort. If the river can be made healthier, the mental and physical health of those who depend on it will also improve.
They are dismayed at the hard engineering solutions currently being discussed by the CSIRO to mitigate floods in the Richmond.
And what about the constant calls on social media to dredge the Ballina bar? What would that achieve in practice?
‘Nothing,’ says Steve Posselt. ‘Because when you have a flood come down here, the velocity picks up the sand and scours the bottom. So it’s only going to do what a dredge does anyway. Another options is to move the wall another few 100 meters south and make it much wider. That might work, or might not. I think that’ll sand up a lot more.’
Itinerary
If you want to join the conversation about the Richmond and meet Steve Posselt and Graeme Gibson, this is where and when to find them along the way:
- Mon 29 September: Tuckean Barrage, Rocky Mouth Creek, Bungawalbin Creek
- Tuesday 30 September: Lismore
- Wednesday 1 October: Coraki
- Thursday 2 October: Casino
- Friday 3 October: Kyogle
- Sunday 5 October: Wiangaree and further…
Find out more about ‘Restore the Richmond’ and Riverfest here.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
