Time to turn the water flowing into the sea up north and channel it into the parched south

With the north in flood and drought down south, is it time to dust off a 80-year-old scheme to turn back the rivers? Former premier Peter Beattie thinks it is.

Queensland’s former premier Peter Beattie.

THE last few weeks have certainly underscored that Australia is a nation of drought and flooding rain, with monsoon deluges in the north and fish kills in the dry river beds of the south. Many years ago a very clever engineer called John Bradfield came up with a way to tap all that wasted water flowing into the sea up north and channel it into the parched south.

Bradfield, who designed the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Brisbane’s Story Bridge, wanted to divert water from the Tully, the Herbert and the Burdekin Rivers, across the Great Dividing Range into the Flinders and then the Thomson River.

The water would flow to eventually fill Lake Eyre. The idea has been kicked around for the best part of 80 years with pollies including Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Bob Katter and Peter Beattie being proponents of the scheme in various forms.

Illustration of Peter Beattie by Brett Lethbridge.

All to no avail and so the millions of tonnes of water up north are essentially being wasted. Isn’t it about time we had another look at this visionary idea? Former premier Beattie told your diarist this week that he tries to stay out of politics these days but sticks by his support for the Bradfield scheme. Of course, the current crop of Australian pollies think so small they would “focus group” the opening of an envelope so your diarist is not holding his breath.

HEAVY METAL

A BIG broom has been put through the boardroom of mining minnow Metallica Minerals, with Simon Slesarewich, Michael Hansel and Alan Evans departing after a shareholder revolt. The coup, which followed a general meeting of the junior bauxite miner yesterday, saw the appointment of company founder Andrew Gillies, Scott Waddell and Theo Psaros as directors. City Beat readers might recall some shareholders were angry over the company’s poor performance, high spending and bad deals. Chairman-elect Psaros says there is substantial fence mending required with key stakeholders and shareholders. Slesarewich told City Beat yesterday that he was disappointed with the result and believed shareholders would suffer in the long term. The veteran mining engineer had been managing director since April 2018 and chief executive since 2015.

ON THE MONEY

STILL on bauxite and Metro Mining’s new operations up near Weipa continue to ramp up.

Metro Mining chief executive Simon Finnis says the company’s marketing and sales program continues to be successful, with all production for the quarter, and for the year, sold and shipped to a range of Chinese customers. Production is likely to be 3 ½ million tonnes this calendar year compared to two million last year.

BLOODY IDIOTS

WHAT do you get when you mix beer, a searing hot day and your average Aussie oik? Usually an idiot judging by the performance of a bunch of blokes at the Australia-Sri Lanka Test match at The Gabba last weekend.

Your diarist took his young son to watch a nice afternoon of leather on willow only to be assailed by a stream of four-letter expletives and abusive behaviour by a small group in the otherwise well-natured if boisterous crowd.

Things turned decidedly nasty when a young female volunteer for the Red Frog charity handing out lollies was insulted and propositioned in a most disgusting manner.

Within minutes thankfully police and the Gabba security team had arrived to frogmarch the ring leaders out of the grounds. Not surprising they weren’t so lippy when faced with a couple of burly coppers.