Since taking their beautifully decorated tinnie up the Richmond, from Ballina almost to Kyogle, Steve Posselt and Graeme Gibson have appeared at a series of forums to share what they’ve learned and to continue the community conversation about what needs to happen next.
There was a full house at the Kyogle Bowling Club for their recent forum. The Echo was there too for this detailed coverage of an issue which affects the whole Northern Rivers.
After an educational welcome from Wayne Walker and his son Kye, Kyogle councillor and MC Brett McNamara introduced the panel, which included Landcare’s Emma Stone and Uncle Andrew ‘AJ’ Johnson along with the intrepid tinnie duo.
Steve Posselt recapped his history as a former engineer and dam enthusiast who eventually had an epiphany during the fight to save the Mary River, when he discovered how bad dams are for the environment.
‘I don’t think I’m any less a person for having realised what I was doing or thinking was wrong. So let’s just see if we can change some attitudes.’
Mr Posselt said it was untrue that people weren’t interested in rivers, giving the example of a New Zealand TV series on the subject which became the most popular documentary ever screened in that country.
How to keep our own rivers top of mind?
‘If only there was an answer,’ said Graeme Gibson. ‘ I think there’s a problem with the Richmond because particularly in the upper catchment, it’s largely on private land. It’s very inaccessible, and when you can get there, it’s down a really steep bank.
‘In most cases, it’s somewhat out of sight, out of mind. And a lot of people think it’s always been like that. I’ve heard a respected macadamia farmers saying there were never trees on the banks in the upper river, for example.
‘People need to get engaged and stay engaged,’ said Mr Gibson. ‘Okay, we’re aware there’s a river there. We’re aware it’s dirty. We’re aware there’s dead trees… We need better understanding about what’s caused the river to be as it is, and what can be done to improve it.
‘Paying attention and being interested is what we need to do.’
Graeme Gibson said Steve Posselt first had had the idea of paddling a kayak from Ballina to Kyogle as part of the first Kyogle Readers and Writers Festival. ‘I told him he was mad.’ Because Mr Gibson’s kayaking skills ‘weren’t up to scratch’, the tinnie idea gradually evolved in its place.
So why go upstream? ‘Average people go downstream,’ said Steve Posselt.
What would the river say?
MC Brett McNamara next turned to Uncle AJ, a man with long experience of the Richmond. ‘If the river had a voice, what do you think the river would say to us today?’
‘I’m crook. I’m sick,’ he said. ‘For Aboriginal people the river was a complete cultural focus. Everything about life was associated with the river. And it wasn’t all that long ago when these rivers were pristine and pure. Something’s obviously changed in that regard.’
Uncle AJ spoke about flood disaster funding which has been used locally to create awareness of the need to heal the river, and giving people a better understanding of its challenges.
‘It’s the lifeblood of the country, the arteries,’ he said. ‘But also I like to bring attention to the wetlands and the riparian sections, which means all the vegetation growing up and down the creek banks and river banks.’
Uncle AJ said the Richmond once had one of the largest set of wetlands of any river in Australia, with the vegetation on the banks acting like a filter, and reducing the amount of mud getting into the river, as well as slowing down the movement of the water.
He said his concerns went beyond the Richmond to the connected systems. ‘I’m concerned about the health of all these rivers… I see that we have people from the fishing group, and that reminds me of a change I’ve seen since the ’70s. You could go down the river for half an hour, two hours, and catch a big feed of fish. Now there’s no fish in the rivers. That could be to do with water quality.’
Confirming this, the tinnie travellers measured the suspended oxygen in the river as they went. On their detour up to Lismore, against the tide, they found so little oxygen in the river that most fish would be unable to exist there.
Brett McNamara next invited the audience to imagine the Richmond as it was two centuries ago.
‘It’s late winter, early spring, the year’s 1828, and a chap called Captain Henry Rous sets eyes on the lower reaches of a rather picturesque river. This is what he saw:
‘”The general outline of the neighboring country appeared to be flat, open forest and thick jungle to the eastward, with fine timber. And as you ascend the river, the tea tree, mangrove and swamp oak give place to Morton pines, cedar, yellow wood, palms and gum trees on the bank, generally not exceeding ten feet in height, rich alluvial soil.”
‘Henry Rous went on to say that nearly all the creek water in the scrub land was so beautiful and clear that it contained “eels, cod, lobsters and perch”. Later, in 1847, pioneer James Ainsworth, who pioneered down towards Ballina, described the river that he saw: “It was just as nature had planted it.”
‘Remarkable description, I think it also says a lot about the European eyes, that he saw nature as a garden.’
Beyond a drain
Mr McNamara next turned to Landcare’s Emma Stone, to talk about the influences on the modern Richmond.
‘Thanks, AJ, for opening the river up to beyond just the drain,’ she said. ‘The arteries are just one line, but the river is connected to everything else, and so the changes across the broad landscape have influenced the health of the river’.
Ms Stone said it wasn’t just about the stock or the banks being damaged or the vegetation along the waterways that’s been lessened or removed, but about what’s happening right across the catchment.
‘So, the way our our slopes are managed, the inability for soils to soak in the moisture, the run-off, the surface erosion that brings sedimentation; the loss of vegetation on steep slopes, which results in big rain events with big slips that deposit massive amounts of soil into the river, that then makes it really difficult for the little things that live in the river to survive.
‘Those little things are so critically important to maintain the health of the waterway, the aquatic life, and that means the whole system just starts to break down,’ she said.
‘We have to mention the carp too. They’re a really significant problem. I’ve seen river banks where stable trees are falling in because they’ve been undercut by the carp.
‘But it’s so much more complex than just one issue. It’s a wicked problem, and it has many layers. Sediment input is one, nutrient import is another; coming from a range of different sources. It’s complex.’
A decades-long conversation
Brett McNamara went through some of the previous attempts to do something about the health of the river, from the 1920s, through to post-1954 when there was a catchment management authority, and beyond.
‘If it was an easy problem to solve, we wouldn’t be sitting here tonight having this conversation. It would have been solved,’ he said.
‘We’re not going to walk away here tonight with all the answers either. But I think it’s about trying to maintain the focus on the river, the river’s health.’
Turning to the lessons from the tinnie trip, and their observations of the river’s health, Graeme Gibson said straight away how struck he was by the steepness of the banks at the point where they could no longer continue up the river, because of the constant obstacles.
Kayaking veteran Steve Posselt said, ‘I’ve travelled on worse rivers, but they’re in western NSW and western Queensland. I haven’t travelled on a worse river anywhere else; the Mississippi, the Hudson in New York, the Thames in London, the Seine in Paris. They all shit all over our river.
‘So I don’t know whether actually doing this trip was good for me, because particularly as you travel up the Wilson’s River, it’s mud, mud, mud, mud, and coral trees and weeds, it’s just crap. And it doesn’t have to be like that. As Emma, said it’s complex, yes. But we don’t have to understand a complex system to manage a complex system, and we know what the issues are.
‘There have been, I don’t know, over 30 papers since 1980 setting out the issues and no action. So somehow we’ve just got to act.’
Graeme Gibson continued, ‘From the start, at Ballina, if you look down in the water, it’s nice and clear, and there’s some oyster shells on the rocks there. There’s no oysters any more because they all died.
‘You go upriver, as Steve said, it’s mud mud mud and coral trees…
‘We saw very few signs of people actively regenerating or revegetating river banks. We saw very few areas where cattle access was restricted. Basically, it was unlimited cattle access over the great majority of the 200 odd kilometers we did,’ said Mr Gibson.
‘I’ve paddled from Grevillea to Coraki, not all in one day, and paddling you see a lot more than you do in a tinny, because you’re going a lot slower, but it’s the same sort of thing, and it’s almost depressing, but you need to see it to understand it.’
Are you optimistic about the future for the river?
‘If you surrender to pessimism, it’s all over,’ said Graeme Gibson. ‘You’ve got to believe that change is possible. To do that, you’ve got to understand the river. People need to care about the river a lot more than they do. And you can’t really care about it until you understand it.
‘So how do you get people to understand it? They’ve got to engage with it in some way.’
Steve Posselt next talked about his experiences in southern Queensland.
‘The Mary River was headed the same way as the Richmond system, but the people up there decided to do something about it. In the meantime, they fought off five dams, but they are very, very passionate about their river, and the feeling when you go down the Mary River is one of joy.
‘People paddled the river a lot slower than me, because they were stopping, putting their face masks on and watching the turtles under the water. Imagine trying to do that in Lismore! If they can do it on the Mary River, I don’t see why we can’t do it here.
‘Although it’s depressing to look at, when you think about what it could be if we just pulled our finger out, I do think it is possible,’ he said.
Uncle AK then talked about his passion for wetlands, not just the fish but the birds, which have also largely disappeared.
‘I try to find hooks to engage Australian people into being interested in this, and I think the wetlands might be a key. Because, apart from the outcomes that I was talking about earlier, they become places of beauty. And thanks Brett for saying what a beautiful place one time Country was, not all that long ago, a virtual paradise really.
‘It’s only a couple of hundred years of colonial history compared to other parts of the world, so you feel like there’s still a bit of hope there.’
Time to get busy
Emma Stone said she was all about action, and invited the audience to join her at a 500 tree planting in Ettrick the next day.
‘This particular wetland, Uncle AJ and I visited a little while back, and it’s just quite remarkable. We had the Bird Life Australia people come along and do a survey. There were 320 individual birds with 63 species in just two hours,’ she said.
‘These places are really, really important filters to enter into the river. In terms of the pessimism and the optimism, I just feel the Lorax in the back of my head saying, “unless somebody like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing’s going to change.”
‘We have to give people access in order for them to care. There needs to be an emotive element to draw people out of their own space and into the bigger picture of what the river is. It’s time to get busy!’
Brett McNamara agreed that wetlands might be a way to engage the interest of the wider public. ‘When you think of wetlands, you think of Kakadu, a multi-million dollar tourism attraction. Many years ago, a lot of those areas were going to be drained for rice paddies, then they realised that crocodiles were breeding in that area. So the crocodile industry saved the wetlands today.
‘Perhaps the first step here is to revive the wetlands? That’s the hook. Who knew about the epic wetlands around here? Show of hands? Couple of people. Yeah. Ettrick wetlands, an extraordinary puddle.’
Knock down the barrage?
Steve Posselt then took the idea further. ‘If you could knock down the barrage on the Tuckean Swamp and start to restore it, it could be better than Kakadu, in that Kakadu is tropical.
‘This is the only major wetland that had tropical, subtropical and temperate rainforests all in the same place.
‘People said, as you approached it, you could hear the wings of the birds. We could re-establish that and take people up the river from Ballina in a tourist boat, and say, “Hey, this is what it could be.”
‘The other thing is, if we can stop the sediment going into the river, we will have sandy beaches everywhere. Graham and I heard that in the 1920s the kids who lived on the opposite side to York Marina used to ride their bikes into Woodburn along the sandy beaches, because that was the smoothest ride for their bikes. Imagine trying to do that today!’
Uncle AJ added, ‘You may or may not know, but one of the reasons why they drained the Tuckean Swamps is because they were hunting our people, and they escaped into the swamps there.
‘So they went, “What do we do about this? Drain them.” And now there’s this reverse thing where you got fresh water where you should have salt water, and salt water where you have fresh water.’
Brett McNamara next turned to audience-member Shaun Morris, from Coffs Harbour Local Land Services for his impressions of the river.
‘Uncle is right. It’s sick, and that’s what it would say. It’s very obvious,’ said Mr Morris.
‘What’s left of Big Scrub country is now two per cent of what was originally covered. So when we have a big flood that covers the entire catchment, what’s the two basic things that slow flow down? It’s the interaction with trees across the floodplain or across the slopes, and it’s the interaction with snags within that river channel, and those are the things that we’ve lost.
‘The flood that we just went through was significantly high, but if we had trees that were four or five times that height, that could perform an enormous level of softening, tempering, attenuating of flows, which allows material to be dropped out sooner, and nutrients to be consolidated, where it gets the most use before it hits the waterway, where we then have algal blooms – there’s this tumbling effect of ecological spiralling out of its natural state,’ explained Mr Morris.
Money
‘So I understand what you guys are talking about when it comes to care, but my experience is – and I work with a lot of farmers different landscapes and different rivers around this country – and it’s money,’ he said.
‘They’re running businesses. They are also our friends, our mates that we have a beer with down the road. They’re our brothers and sisters.
‘But what we don’t appreciate for them is how difficult to scratch any incomes out of this country, because policy, whatever else, our ancestors before us, didn’t set them up for success. And so here we are. We’ve found ourselves in a situation where we’re trying to make people care about a river, but really they’ve got to pay a mortgage. They’ve got to get their kids to school. Some of these guys are working two or three jobs,’ said Mr Morris.
‘So we can’t just blame the farmers, because we do understand that they’ve got their own challenges. However, we do have to put our big boy pants on and say, “Well, you can’t just have cattle running all over the place. That’s not good practice, not best practice, and you’re not going to make a hell of a lot of money doing it. So where does the loop end?
‘It comes back to government and us trying to prioritise with our partners the best way to approach a very complex problem, but we have to recognise that it’s dollars that at the end of the day are going to put a snag or a rock or a tree in the ground. Other than that, we’ve got to get beyond this concept that what we’ve been doing today is okay and good enough. It’s simply not,’ said Mr Morris.
‘We’ve got to be open and honest with ourselves and say, “Look, we’re not in a position at the moment to be getting the best benefits out of our landscape from a social and economic and a cultural perspective, and they’re the three things that we can use as hooks, as drivers.
‘One hook is money to maintain the value of these great industries that we’ve got here, and the investment of these people that work so hard on on very difficult country,’ he said.
‘Then of course, it’s partnering with our cultural friends to give us the best knowledge of what it was like before we wrecked it up, and to partner with them in in real partnerships with co-design, not taking the concept to them and then saying, “Come and help later,” but building these designs together within the community.
‘Apart from that, it’s also just a change of mindset. We’ve got to get away from what was a really kind of poor, uneducated way of approaching farming, we can do it a lot better. There’s a lot of resources for that, and it’s about tapping into them at the right time.’
Public good
Graeme Gibson emphasised that a healthy river is a public good, like schools and hospitals. ‘Schools and hospitals deserve and get government and community support, and the aim of a healthy river deserves much more community and government support than it is currently getting.’
I asked Steve Posselt about his reaction to the recent CSIRO session he attended at Broadwater, on mooted mitigation options for the Richmond catchment.
Mr Posselt said the session had made him angry, and more aware than ever of the limitations of the models CSIRO hydrologists are using. In his words, they are ‘treating the river as a drain without treating it as a live complex system.’
Mr Posselt went on to say, ‘I really hope that none of what the CSIRO are proposing comes to fruition. The strategy that I have is to not even talk about the madness, but to to talk about the health of the river. And then when they do their proposal and say, “Oh yeah, if we just put some more drains in the Tuckean and a bigger dam across it, we could do this.”
‘Well, what would that do to the health of the river? You can’t just go and dig more channels through acid sulfate soils without a problem. The other big thing that Kevin Hogan and these guys think may work is flooding massive dams in the upper catchment. The size of the dams they’re talking about, the smallest is as big as Rocky Creek. The largest is four times the size, and there are to be between six and eight of them.’
The CSIRO have described these dams as detention basins, which the people at the Broadwater session were told would be regulated by upward opening gates. ‘So imagine huge sluice gates in a huge dam, which would rip the country apart for the years it takes to build it, and a lot of sediment coming down the river during construction,’ said Mr Posselt.
‘The thing that would worry me most is who’s going to control those gates?’ As he points out, one recent example of a similar situation is Wivenhoe Dam, in 2011, which resulted in ‘a ten year court case, lots of lives destroyed, and that’s just one control situation on one river…
‘How much money would these guys like to put away for litigation? I think the whole thing’s madness.’
Graeme Gibson said, ‘We know that the Richmond is the worst coastal River in New South Wales, and the government haven’t got any money, but it’s a matter of values and their priorities. And I think as a community, we need to encourage the government to change their priorities.’
Emma Stone said proper funding was needed for river restoration, and better coordination between the many individuals and groups with a stake in the river’s health. ‘I really believe that the river is an ecosystem service for everyone, and it’s not just the responsibility of the farmer who has that frontage to address it,’ she said.
‘That’s the philosophy of land care, trying to bring everyone together for the better good.’
Steve Posselt said, ‘What we’re after is one authority responsible for the health of the river. I hope everybody agrees with that.
‘Some of the politicians are suggesting that it should be a commissioner or one person, but whatever it is, that authority has to have the legislation behind them. They have to have money and they have to have teeth.’
Graeme Gibson agreed, adding, ‘The river is complex. It’s important. It matters. People need to understand it. If you’ve learned something tonight or disagree with something you’ve heard, it doesn’t really matter, but talk to other people about it. Nothing happens without talk.’
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