Wild river runs free again for the first time in 50 years

Greta Jones

Greta Jones, 70, sits beside the Snowy River near Jindabyne watching the waters rise for the first time since it was dammed during her childhood. Picture: Sam Mooy
Source: The Australian




IT involved 40 years of political wrangles, interstate rivalry and reams of reports, but in the end it took just a couple of hours to restore the Snowy River from a near-dead trickle to the magnificent wild torrent that Greta McGufficke Jones’s great-grandfather would have known.


Yesterday, Ms Jones returned to the country over which James McGufficke won the first land grant in the 1850s, beside the upper reaches of the Snowy, to witness an extraordinary event.

She had come full circle: in 1953, when Ms Jones was 12, the Snowy Mountains Authority bought her father’s spread around Jindabyne for pound stg. 12 an acre, to build a dam that was to reduce the flow in the river to 1 per cent of its natural state.

Growing up beside the Snowy before the dam, Ms Jones said,

her family had a sense of a wild, untamed river that often got the upper hand.

“My mother always thought the Snowy River waters were treacherous. There were a lot of people drowned,” she said. “My brothers used to swim in the river, but I didn’t.”

Ms Jones was the 13th of 14 children, and her brothers almost all worked on the construction of the Snowy Mountains project during the vibrant years that turned the river’s flows west into the River Murray to provide more irrigation for the nation’s bread bowl.

Yesterday, those waters were turned back south, down through Victoria’s Gippsland to the sea near Orbost. Lake Jindabyne’s massive sluice gates were opened for the first full-scale release of water aimed at restoring the river. The flow started on the dot at 10am, building up over an hour to 140 cubic metres a second, and will continue full scale through Wednesday with the equivalent of 12,000 Olympic-size swimming pools gushing over the floodway each day, before being reduced.

More than 100 spectators gathered at a specially constructed viewing platform to watch the spectacle, which saw the waterfall from the sluice gates join a magnificent dome of spray ejected from water pipes.

It produced the greatest flow down the Snowy for 50 years, in a carefully planned exercise aimed at flushing out decades of sickly sediment and carving out a new channel with enough force to toss over stones the size of footballs.

For Snowy Hydro Kosciuszko area manager Kieran Cusack — the engineer in charge of the operation who spent four months planning it — there was relief the start had gone well, although he still has two weeks of release at diminishing levels to supervise.

“We have a gauging station giving us the data to check the flow requirements, and so if at any stage it is a little bit out, we can monitor it,” Mr Cusack told The Australian.

But he admitted to sharing in the enthusiasm.

“It’s exciting,” he said.

The water from Lake Jindabyne will raise the river by up to 4m by its peak tomorrow, depending on the terrain.

The big release was made possible by good rain in the Snowy Mountains and also in the Murray-Darling Basin, which means the loss of water from the Snowy will not deprive irrigators.

After the release is completed, the Snowy will subside to only a fifth of its natural flow but, scientists hope, will remain a live, sustainable river.

John Gallard, the president of the Snowy River Alliance — the environmental group that has championed the cause, against considerable opposition from Murray valley irrigators — claimed a big initial win. “It shows you that community groups with the right objectives can achieve benefits for their environments,” Mr Gallard said. “This is a litmus test for all rivers in Australia.”

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