The first 24 hours of this holiday was bloody awful. We drove away from Maningrida tearfully with poor old Max chasing the car and caravan down the dirt road. Although firmly in the dry season in mid June we drove out the day after a very unexpected dump of rain in the middle of West Arnhem and the roads were muddy with rather full creek crossings all the way to Jabiru. The trip which takes just over 3 hours with the car alone in good conditions took 6 with the caravan in these conditions. By the time we arrived at Cahill's crossing around midnight the tide had turned too far and by torchlight the rushing waters confirmed what our ears had told us: we could not safely cross. We found a flat place not far from the East Alligator river and surrounded by these very boggy plains to set up camp for the night by the light of a full moon. It turned out to be the mozzie capital of the world. Ed (usually delicious to all blood thirsty creatures) was in a state that would have been hilarious to watch were I not so distracted myself, trying to open up the caravan extension and get the kids into bed while whacking the raging swarms. We slept fitfully after killing the majority though Ed intermittently rose to hunt another sneaky bastard. In the darkness around 5am a car pulled up right next to us and banging doors stirred us from our beds again. Police had decided to set up for early morning breath testing next to the river. We decided that there was no good rest to be had and set off for our holiday very bedraggled and miserable.
Things slowly looked up form there. There was our favourite cafe in Katherine for brunch (The Finch) and then a very long but very beautiful drive to the border. Charlotte decided to tell the border patrol that she had a cough but luckily the middle aged woman heeded my advice that the child was just attention seeking (seriously she coughed once all day!!). They made Ed pull into a wash bay to remove the huge amount of mud before we could move on. While he did that I took the opportunity to call ahead to every caravan park in Kunanura only to find that they were ALL FULL! We drove in for some quick Chinese dinner then headed back out of town. We set up by the side of the road on the turn off to Lake Argyle for another fairly miserable night and were woken at dawn again by a passing truck. We arrived at Lake Argyle very tired and probably smelly but well and truly early enough to get a berth for the night and begin to have some fun!
Lake Argyle is a very beautiful symbol of agricultural failure, ecological mismanagement and cultural incompetence. Although no white explorer reached this area until 1879, it took less than 100 years to establish huge cattle stations in the region and by 1973, to complete the damming of the Old River. The Miriuwung Gajerrong people who had inhabited this region for perhaps 60,000 years before this, were not consulted at all. I can't articulate the tragedy better than Alana Hunt from Artlink.com.au:
"In the largest non-nuclear explosion in Australian history, a mountain was blasted apart. These smashed pieces of stone were destined for a dam wall that now incarcerates a once‑roaring river at a capacity of twenty times the size of Sydney Harbour. Today tourists marvel at its grandeur and apparent beauty. But violent dreams shadow this development. In December 1971 the West Australian Wildlife Association launched Operation Ord Noah, a stunt as absurd as its title and the tragedy of the “operation”.
As the waters of Lake Argyle rose for the first time, a few white Australian men spent over a month whizzing around in tinnies rescuing animals from the waters that submerged huge tracts of Miriwoong country permanently. Colonists marvel at these images—which have entered the lexicon of local settler-history—just as we marvel at more recent photographs from 2019 of teapots and windmills and power lines submerged by Lake Argyle at the old Durack Homestead. Kununurra, whose real Miriwoong name is Goonoonoorrang,[2] is a town established in the 1960s to realise colonial dreams of a northern food bowl fed by this monumental lake.
But what of the cultural knowledge, homes, graves, crops and food stores that belonged to Miriwoong people, now submerged by these waters of “development”, distinct trade routes forever cut off from one another? More than 3,000 square kilometres of Miriwoong country and parts of the surrounding Gajirrabeng, Gija and Malgnin countries were impacted. Both the top and bottom dam walls were built on Ngarranggarni (Dreaming) sites; one culture’s dreams of development inundating an entirely different kind of Dreaming. At the official opening of the top dam in 1972 Peter Tonkin, then Premier of Western Australia, said the dam wall was as “unobtrusive as a goanna on a rock”.[3] At this same event, Miriwoong people were crying as though they’d lost a family member."
The project intended to create an agricultural food bowl in the Kimberley is, by any objective measure, an abject failure. Initial crops of cotton failed because of insects and rice paddies were stripped of their seedlings by Magpie Geese faster than they could be sewn. Only a fraction of the irrigated land is productive (fruit crops and sandalwood have been more successful) but the government continues to sink money into the project with multiple stages of irrigation extension ongoing although only 260 jobs have so far resulted from over $2bil investment. Chinese investment in recent years keeps the projects afloat.
A dam wall extension occurred in the late 1990s at which time there was also the addition of an impressive hydroelectric power station which powers Kunanurra and several surrounding towns with clean energy so there is some ethical compensation. Of course the 60 year history of the lake means that a new ecosystem has developed there, which is increasingly recognised as special in its own right. Whether this outweighs the ecological disaster unfolding downstream from Lake Argyle where the seasonal water glut no longer occurs, is difficult to argue.
I could enjoy the view and marvel at the strange landforms from the comfort of my boat or kayak as much as the next person but in the back of my mind the whole time I kept wondering what species were wiped out that were never discovered? How many cultural sites of significance were flooded and artworks washed away forever? We caught our breath here and began to shrug off the last stressful weeks but I couldn't really relax and enjoy Lake Argyle. It just felt wrong.
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