Day One - Onto the Goulburn.

Well, it was the big start from Echuca. There is not much water in the river here. The houseboats are all up against the mud, but the flow was not enough to cause any problems at all.

Day1 We had two outrigger canoes to farewell us plus two K1 flatwater racers. They started to drop off after about 5 or 6km but Peter and Mark came back later in their single outriggers and paddled all the way to the junction of the Goulburn River.

A hearty group was on the shore so we got some footage of them and their placards. It seems that they dislike Mr Brumby. In fact I could not find anyone with a good word to say about him. It seems to me though, that it is not only Mr Brumby that they should have issue with. He obviously does not work alone. Their chanting was reinforced by a river boat horn which should have woken people up 500km away.

After a charge up the Murray the Goulburn was a wee bit more troublesome. I had been told that there were “a lot of snags to paddle around”. Unfortunately they should have said “over”, because that is what I had to do. Oh well, it’s not like I haven’t done that sort of thing before.

Just like Melbourne weather it was. Wind, calm, rain, sun, warm, freezing, but I guess that’s Victoria for you. The day finished at 33.8km so that is not too bad with a late start and some tricky bits of strong current against the boat.

From Giovanni

A crowd of around 20 farmers and supporters, a flotilla of kayaks and outrigger canoes and a paddle steamer full of bemused tourists saw Steve off from Echuca this morning.

Steve

Steve was excited but nervous. After the shock of seeing how low the Goulburn was the day before, his concerns about the difficulty of the trip battled with the excitement of actually leaving.

He spoke briefly to the crowd and then headed off to the accompaniment of paddle steamer horns. The flotilla of outriggers accompanied him for the first three kilometres up the river and then he headed off on the first leg of his lonely adventure.

The locals

Most people at the launch were there to express their concern about the impact that the pipeline would have on the irrigators of the area.

“We have had less than one third of the water allocated to us for the last ten years,” said Ian Smith, a farmer who has been irrigating his crops for the last 44 years. “I don’t think people understand exactly what impact this has on the price and availability of food he added.”

Engineers, water authority employees and irrigators present all expressed the view that there is simply not going to be the savings predicted by the government from simply lining the irrigation channels and introducing greater efficiency measures.

Everyone is frustrated that the politicians have only to make a populist appeal to city voters to win the day even if that appeal is not logical. “Where do they think their food is going to come from if they take the water from the people who are growing it?” asked an orchardist growing stone-fruit under irrigation.

Some people had been to Melbourne a number of times to protest about the North South pipeline including one ute convoy that managed to cause gridlock in Melbourne’s CBD with over one hundred utility trucks. None of those utes was donated by a friend of the prime minister.

Environmental issues

The river is low. Unbelievably low. House boats are sitting in the mud below the lowest landing of the multi-storey wharf. The vegetation is well established on the beaches beside the river, indicating that it has been this low for some years, but it is all grass and colonizing shrubs, indicating that it has only been this low for the last decade.

Those people who live on the river confirmed that it is at it’s lowest point in living memory. Everyone accepts Steve’s view that any water pumped out of the basin is a loss to the basin as a whole and will only cause the river to drop further. Many of those people, though, appeared more concerned about the impact of that loss of water on agriculture and individual farmers than on the river as an entity.

The issue of environmental degradation came up in a number of contexts. Clearly farmers care about the long term well-being of the land and many of them have a rich and complex understanding of broader environmental issues. There is widespread frustration, however, that city based environmentalists and bureaucrats have no idea how farmers engage with the land and the environment.

The old school small farmers, wood cutters and other low impact primary producers want acknowledgement of the contribution they have made to land management and the evolution of the landscape and its environmental values under their care. Simply locking up the land will not enhance it but will create unpredictable results.

There are, of course, many farmers who oppose the pipeline simply because they want the water for themselves and have little or no sympathy for the damage being done to the river basin downstream.

This uneasy alliance between farmers and environmentalists will probably be strengthened by the awakening of the man-in-the-street in Melbourne, but it will need to be addressed further down the track as the climate continues to get drier and the landscape becomes less productive as a result.