Moocooboola Dam (rev)

For more than a million years we’ve been
nearly out of water; sincerely, a need
repeatedly exposed in reports of the calamitous,
tragic-comic sort glibly cognising collective ‘we’
as principle cause and proposing proscribed
population growth, avoiding taxing resources,
limiting courses for future development.

So who is out of water – whether nearly, almost,
a teeny bit? If you believe it from infected sources,
nothing less than all of us! It can’t include me and
others who live comfortably within our water
limitations, who demur a paternalistic cure which
neither gives comfort nor eases what we do.
Either we agree with their points of view, levied
by this dilemma’s causes, its antecedents, its
precedents, or we deride unliveable tenets
its solution invariably eschews.

I side with residents of Traveston Crossing,
nothing a Moocooboola dam proposes can
please them – so the sad, always greedy, city-
based, water-needy can go hang themselves
with their garden hoses. And that pleases me
in the sense you know which ‘we’ I represent.

I am not reticent for sure – I love a natural
environment, water-needy or not, and a dam
won’t complement any aspect of the free flow
of Mary River out to sea; the consequences
detract from responsible Government but
think back to the vandals who sacked our land
and murdered its earliest inhabitants.

They’re at it again, this time they’re killing a
river and the reasons extant are prescient,
ecological treason. It must be the season
for such dangerous thought. If you bought
your dream home on a canal at Pelican by Sea
and the Council dammed the creek and drained
the waterway you’d self-righteously shriek blue
murder. Don’t wonder, start shrieking,
you’re next...
© 2005, I.D. Carswell