Dry River Writings
After Council connected Quaama to the Brogo Dam supply in 1984, they sent a truck through the village collecting everyone’s rainwater tanks. ‘You won’t be needing these anymore—let us do you a favour and remove them for you!’ They needed people to pay for household water now—the last thing they wanted was people collecting their…
Every year in late August, convoys of semi-trailers converge on two big almond farms outside Mildura on the Murray River. They have journeyed from Queensland, South Australia and from all over NSW and Victoria. The cargo? Bee hives. ‘Almond growers have built a landscape that’s very good at creating almonds but it doesn’t have the…
Australia’s 28th Prime Minister Tony Abbott and his cabinet were sworn in on Monday, 16 September 2013. His first act was to abolish the Climate Commission. ‘We knew it was going to happen and we had a plan,’ said Professor Lesley Hughes, a founding commissioner. ‘We had already registered the name “Climate Council”.’ She was…
‘Most people in Melbourne know who runs around in tight shorts and kicks goals for Carlton or Collingwood but they have no idea where their water comes from.’ Professor David Lindenmayer This is a story about science, but it’s also a story about wilful ignorance, a looming catastrophe, and, to run with the football reference,…
Since the 1970s the Australian electorate has become increasingly disenchanted with the major parties. Lately this has accelerated. At the last federal election, the minor parties (including the Greens) attracted 36% of the vote. But this pattern is not spread evenly across the population; the minor party vote is a lot higher in regional areas….
One hundred percent renewable energy to power Australia? It sounds like a pipe-dream—unless you were in the audience at the Bermagui Institute Dinner at Il Passaggio on 21 September to hear Andrew Blakers, Professor of Engineering at the Australian National University, speak about pumped hydro energy storage.
NSW Environmental Defenders Office CEO Sue Higginson paints a picture of EDO lawyers, haggard and caffeinated, racing between their office on Clarence Street and the Land and Environment Court on Macquarie Street, chasing “mining companies with the deepest pockets you can imagine” and “lawyers who lodge Notices of Motion at 1 am”. It’s comical until…
It was pretty clear to scientists in the 1990s that man-made carbon emissions were causing climate change—it had started with the Industrial Revolution. Two plans of action were mooted. Plan A: reduce emissions (mitigation). Plan B: adapt to the changes. But we weren’t going to need Plan B, were we? The fix was clear, and…
Dr Helen Caldicott, anti-nuclear activist, humanist, physician, returned to Bermagui on 10 February during a week when South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill’s Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission was preparing to deliver its “Tentative Findings”. Dr Caldicott was speaking at the Bermagui Institute dinner; her topic was “Nuclear South Australia”. The speaker shared anecdotes from her…
Upon hearing that the planet had warmed by one degree Celsius, a conservative politician said that he could get on a plane in Melbourne and get off in Sydney an hour later and find the temperature higher by a comfortable six degrees, so what’s the problem? In fact, a global rise of one degree has…