Friday, January 14, 2011


Germaine Greer on Qldfloods:
The colour of the water reveals a terrible truth. What is being washed downstream is topsoil. The water moves so rapidly because so much of the land has been cleared. Any wooded land will be, like mine, high in the catchment. As long ago as 1923, Sydney Skertchly, an Englishman who had been working for the Queensland government as a geologist before he retired to what is now the Gold Coast suburb of Molendinar, pointed out that rain that fell in the upper part of the Nerang river catchment that used to take five days to reach him on the coastal plain at Molendinar, now reached him in five hours. When the settlers first arrived on the coast of northern New South Wales and southern Queensland, the rivers were navigable. As the "scrubs" (the settlers' way of referring to rainforest) were ripped out, the seasonal rains carried the topsoil into the rivers, which silted up and then began to flood.



No comments:

Post a Comment