Remember when: Tweed Canegrowers held the key to saving millions of fish from river death

CANEGROWERS held the key to saving millions of fish from dying in the Tweed.

Gold Coast History: Gold Coast Bulletin 1991, December 2. Front page.

Gold Coast Bulletin, Monday December 2, 1991

CANEGROWERS held the key to saving millions of fish from dying in the Tweed.

A research team from the CSIRO and the University of NSW installed instruments in a cane field at Duranbah in a bid to pin down the causes of massive fish kills in Australian estuaries.

They said a simple solution could lie in farmers raising water tables in their fields.

CSIRO scientist Dr Ian White said it could help avoid a repeat of an environmental disaster in 1987 which killed millions of fish in the Tweed River.

That fish kill caused some professional fisherman to move from the district.

Canegrower and Tweed River Advisory Committee chairman Robert Quirk said local canegrowers were already employing a couple of fish-saving techniques — raising their floodgates and adding lime to their soil to neutralise it.

He believed that they had their first success around two months before earlier in October 1991 when no fish deaths were recorded after a flush of rain — which in the past had brought on mass fish deaths.

Gold Coast Bulletin 1991, December 2. Front page.

“All the canegrowers in the area are already raising their floodgates to let water back into their fields and this seems to be saving the fish — but letting too much water back in could kill the cane,” said Mr Quirk.

“We are doing our best to save the fish but we have to be careful.

Meanwhile, Gold Coaster Georgina Denhy celebrated her 20th birthday being crowned Miss Universe Australia.