It’s been like the summers he grew up with, The Boss says, when the river flows were much closer to the natural regime before dams and irrigation came along. Campers enjoyed access to the sandbars over Christmas, new year and the Australia Day holidays for the first time in many years.
Before water trading came along, the river would be high from run-off during winter and spring, then slow right down over summer and autumn until the rains came again.
It turns out this summer was mostly luck: according to the catchment management authority, the high flows from the Murray and Darling rivers, not to mention the Murrumbidgee, have meant there is plenty of water heading to western NSW and South Australia.
This has meant there has been no call for those damaging inter-valley transfers of water that have kept my river high over the past 10 summers.
The IVTs meant the banks of the river have never had a chance to dry out properly, causing bank collapses and eating away at many of the low clay benches and eroding sandbars along the lower Goulburn.
The vegetation along the edges would get a start during the brief periods of low flow between the monthly IVTs, then get swamped and killed off with the next big pulse.
The Boss doesn’t think the good news will last. It was a rare thing to see the Darling in flood and the Menindee Lakes full again last year, at the same time as the Murrumbidgee flooded and the Hume Dam at Albury was so full it had to spill.
It also means the Environmental Water Holder has a huge amount of water stored upstream — maybe 600 gigalitres or so, The Boss thinks — that needs to go somewhere. There is an environmental flow coming down in March but a massive amount of environmental water will still be carried over.
The Boss reckons the Murray-Darling plan might have been good for the Murray but it has been bad news for the Goulburn — and will continue to be while water trading continues in its current form, using the river as a channel and a drain.
Everyone thought water trading was a good idea at the time, he says, but we can now see the downside after huge irrigation projects have moved too far downstream from the source, thrusting large unseasonal flows down the river and wasting water through seepage and evaporation. Then there’s the vast amount of water being bought and sold by investors who don’t actually grow anything.
And the environmental water is pretty well useless to the Goulburn, The Boss says, unless we can get some decent overbank flows now and then to rejuvenate the floodplain. Governments are terrified about being accused of deliberately flooding private land — despite the fact that it is taxpayer-funded structures such as Eildon Dam that save farmers from being flooded much more regularly.
“Who speaks for the river, General?” he asks me. He reckons the needs of the river are obvious but have been rendered complex by layers of rules and bureaucracy and self-interest.
He thinks the CMA has been having a real go for a long time but it is going to need a groundswell of community energy and support to save our heritage river and floodplain from a slow and irreversible decline. Woof!
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