farmdoc's blog post number 463

I have many happy and fond memories of Sweetheart Vivienne and me watching films with our young daughters. And of course reading them books. We each had our favourites. One of mine was Storm Boy – the 1976 movie adaption of Colin Thiele’s children’s novel. It’s a marvellous, poignant story of the boy Mike (Storm Boy), his dad (Tom), a pelican (Mr Percival) and an aboriginal man (Fingerbone Bill). As wondrous as the story and characters are, the location defines the film and book: the coastal dunes of South Australia’s Coorong, teeming with birdlife, and fronting the wild Southern Ocean. Watching the film, I couldn’t believe there was a more majestic place on earth. In the late 1980s, celebrating my 40th birthday with a solo bike ride from Adelaide to Melbourne, I rode for kilometres on the road from Meningie to Kingston SE that hugs the Coorong. First-hand, it was as splendid as in Storm Boy. So I’m devastated by this report that the Coorong’s ecosystem’s dying. Gone is the abundance of birds, fish and other wildlife that earned the Coorong national park status, and a Ramsar Convention listing as an international significant wetland. The unique meeting of sea, river, rain and ground waters is gone. For seven years, no Murray river water’s reached its mouth to rescue the Coorong. A 3-year CSIRO study found the ecosystem’s undergone such fundamental change, it can’t sustain most of the species once found there. Only one fish species survives in the lagoons. The Rudd government’s chosen irrigators over the Coorong. To its eternal shame. And my eternal disgust. What are we doing to our home? What?