I live in Kangaroo Valley and the Kangaroo River, which is a large river with it's headwaters near Knights Hill in the Southern Highlands, runs through the Valley gathering with it Broger's Creek and Barrengarry Creek and numerous other smaller tributaries. It meets with The Shoalhaven River and Bundanoon Creek at what once must have been rather a dramatic junction and which is now a large dam wall; Tallowa Dam. Constructed in the seventies it was always stage one of a rather more grandious scheme to flood the entire valley, concocted in the twenties as a future source of Sydney's water supply. When I return home from Sydney some mornings the entire valley is full of fog and it is not hard to see what a massive supply of water it could possibly be.

Since that time a new plan was developed to build a second dam downstream of Tallowa on the Shoalhaven in an area known as the Ettrema. This dam was christened Wellcome Reef Dam. Only problem being that whilst Kangaroo Valley and the mountains running north and south of it benefit from the uplift of moist air coming in from the coast and dumping heavy rain, the Ettrema is that much further inland that it doesn't recieve the coastal rain and instead relies on weather from the west, which in the last twenty years has tended to not bring rain.

Apart from the geographic modelling which tended to suggest such a dam would never fill, the political backlash for the concept of Wellcome Reef dam was another factor in the delay of the project.

Cost of course was another factor. Only one major road feeds into this wilderness and it is the Turpentine Road linking Braidwood with Nowra. It is a dirt road and if you travel it at night as I have many times you tend to encounter a terrific amount of wildlife in the form of kangaroos and wombats, owls etc. Only the insane try it at speed and many have come off the worse for it.

Enter a joint regional, state and federal initiative to upgrade the road to bitumen and multi lane. Why? To link the nation's capital, Canberra, via Braidwood, with Nowra of course! What is not said is that the turpentine road as it is would be under water if Wellcome Reef ever went ahead and you cannot take the large machinery and all the concrete needed for a dam down a corrugated dirt road but you can on a good one. Also, "Main Road 92" as it is known is surveyed to higher ground above the level of the dam if it ever were to go ahead. It gets interesting doesn't it. Remember that the modelling suggests the bugger would never fill.

Now we are in a prolonged drought and water has become a political issue, with the levels of Sydney's dams in the papers, the rainfall we receive here has been most beneficial to the state government in Sydney. You see the rainfall patterns have changed and the dams built for Sydney just don't get the rain that they once did. Instead it falls in the city itself and up and down the coast. However water can be pumped from Tallowa dam uphill to the Wingecarribee Reservoir. It is then let down rivers and creeks to find it way into Sydney's dams. Tallowa Dam has kept Sydney just in crisis mode rather than full scale disaster mode. Without it the city would be really struggling.

So as well as a desalination plant on the coast at perhaps Botany Bay, complete insanity in my mind, we get a plan to raise the wall at Tallowa by five metres so that more water can be caught as well as a pipeline linking Sydney directly to Tallowa dam. This will put an incredible strain on a river system which already has a burden in the form of the existing dam. Still water kills a river. The Ettrema wilderness upstream on the Shoalhaven river will be no more. The Kangaroo River will not flow through the township of Kangaroo Valley and no one can really predict what will happen in a major flood event.

What really needs to happen is for Sydney to have a complete mindset rearrangement. You cannot flush clean water down a toilet anymore. It just does not make sense. Driveways cannot be hosed off with drinking water. Tanks must catch the regular rain the city experiences. Storm water must be caught and treated so it can be re-used in toilets and gardens. Building another dam or raising this one just prolong the inevitable and cause irreversible damage to our environment.

That is the song. It is my first protest song. Written in the idiom, it has a dialogue with the songs of Bob Dylan, The Byrds and I even hear a little David Bowie in there, he was a folkie once.

The Kangaroo Valley residents are not idle. Here is a website where you can find more information about the dam proposal and our feelings about it: Tallowa Dam

Cheers

Andy

4 September 2005

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