It’s been under water for well over two months now so the authorities have been dropping it slowly, having learned the hard way that a rapid fall in river levels will cause bank collapses when it has been high for some time.
They were slow learners — Goulburn-Murray Water, the Environmental Water Holder and the Goulburn Broken Catchment Management Authority. The Boss and I can’t really tell who was the slowest but we’ve complained before about how they kept their training wheels on for too long.
And The Boss thinks they might still be on. On Monday afternoon we had advice from the CMA that our river is being treated to a “spring fresh” in just a few weeks’ time, continuing right through September — when it hasn’t even dropped to uncover the sandbars yet.
The CMA started its statement by acknowledging there had been a pile of water down the river since mid-June — enough to unsettle people about the prospect of another flood. If it had kept raining like it did in June, it could well have happened.
While G-MW was releasing up to 12,000 megalitres a day from Eildon, the run-off from all the tributaries, such as the Yea, Stevenson, Rubicon and Acheron rivers, meant we had 20,000ML a day flowing under the Murchison bridge.
The Boss reckons it gave us the kind of “winter fresh” the floodplain needs every few years to stay healthy. But it was primarily a natural flow and the Environmental Water Holder hasn’t been able to reproduce it during drier times.
The reasons are complicated, The Boss says, but it means the Goulburn doesn’t get the real benefits of environmental water. Instead we get this sporadic watering that doesn’t make any sense.
The CMA said this week: “Even though the Goulburn River experienced a long duration of high winter flows, a spring fresh (as conditions warm up) will provide benefits to native fish that are becoming more active, instream productivity and vegetation.”
The Boss thinks this is a pretty lame sort of statement. The fish have had plenty of benefits already and they’ll last a while. As for the vegetation, well, the river banks are dead now, as you can see, and grasses and ground covers will sprout over the next few weeks — just in time to be killed off by the new artificial flows.
As for “instream productivity”, well, who knows what that means?
Meanwhile, earlier Monday, the Victorian Fisheries Authority announced its Goulburn Fishing Festival at Eildon on Saturday, September 2, to mark the release of 1500 fat rainbow trout along the upper Goulburn. Another 500 fish will be released at the Eildon pondage.
The VFA does this every year at the start of the trout fishing season. It’s part of the Victorian Government’s $96 million investment to improve fishing, boating and aquaculture over the next four years and get families out to enjoy the rivers.
The announcement was proudly made by Outdoor Recreation Minister Sonya Kilkenny, who will no doubt be miffed to learn that the CMA’s “spring fresh” starts the same day, quickly ramping up to 9000ML a day — more than enough to wash the 2000 fish away before anyone gets a chance to catch them.
It’s a repeat of what the Environmental Water Holder first did when he got his hands on all this water and timed his spring fresh for the opening of the cod season on December 1, a hugely popular time when people camp out along the river. The spring fresh ruined it and, after a few years of complaints, he eventually realised he could time it better.
Then the same thing started happening with inter-valley transfers along the river over New Year or the Australia Day weekend, without any thought for the families camping out and enjoying the river’s beautiful sandbars during school holiday times.
The Boss tells me these people fishing and camping and enjoying the river are called taxpayers, whereas the people at G-MW, the CMA and the Environmental Water Holder are called public servants. Doesn’t that mean servants of the public? Woof!
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