Return to Borumba

"2009? I was in prep then."

That was the reply, from one of the Minister's young staffers, when the Mary River Catchment Coordinating Committee — summoned down to Brisbane at short notice — mentioned that a dam on this same river had been stopped once already.¹

I have some sympathy. I have written elsewhere about how briefly anyone can actually do that job, and about what happens to a staffer once marriage and children and ordinary tiredness arrive. But the Minister was not in prep in 2009, and neither were the officers sitting along the table from him. They knew exactly what had happened on the Mary River. The forgetting was not uniform. It was selective, and it was useful.

I. What the valley was for

The Mary Valley has never been rich. It was dairying and timber, and it was subsistence: not the kind of farming country where people wear R.M.s and drive a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar LandCruiser and pay somebody else to do the work. It was the kind where families lived in sheds, and where the farm did not survive unless the children milked before school and again after it.

The first settlers were Scandinavians who came in the 1880s, some of them leaving religious persecution behind, and their descendants stayed. Anglo-Celtic families followed and stayed for generations too. If the valley had a claim to fame before anyone outside it had heard the name, it was a world record set in the 1930s for the most butter produced in a month. The co-operative sent it to Britain, in the middle of the Depression; my great-grandfather supplied it, and sat on the board of the Caboolture Dairy Co-Operative.²

It was not an insular place. Noosa is close, and Brisbane is two or three hours by road, or was, by the electric train. But it was not a place many outsiders chose. What it was, and this is the thing I have never been able to prove and have never stopped believing, was evidence that poverty and social collapse are not the same phenomenon. There was very little crime in the Mary Valley and very little of what a Brisbane sociologist would call dysfunction. Perhaps that is what happens when you cannot commit an offence against somebody without it being somebody whose grandfather was best mates with your grandfather, or whose aunt taught you in Grade Four. I do not know. I only know that it was true, and that it did not survive the dam.

None of this was legible from Brisbane. What was legible from Brisbane, in 2006, was that the valley had water and did not vote Labor.

II. Traveston

South-east Queensland had been in drought and on water restrictions for the better part of a decade. Serious people were saying publicly that the dams supplying the capital might never fill again. An election was coming. The Government announced a dam at Traveston Crossing, on the Mary.

The assumption in Brisbane — and it was an assumption, made early and held hard — was that this valley would be a pushover. It was a place where resumption notices had to be read aloud to some of the people receiving them, because they could not read them for themselves. It did not look like a place that could organise.

Two things had been missed. The first was that the valley had been quietly filling up for years with people retiring out of Brisbane and Sydney, and some of them had spent their careers doing precisely the kind of work that was about to be needed. The second was the Imbil State School, small and unfashionable and very good, whose former pupils had scattered into positions of influence across the country and had not stopped being from the Mary Valley. A merchant banker and a Brisbane dentist among them put real money into the fight.

And the campaign acquired, without any fuss being made about it, one of the CSIRO's most senior scientists on oceans and climate. He came to it the way most things happened in the valley, by a tap on the shoulder, and the hand on the shoulder was my father's.³ Whatever else could be said about the opposition to Traveston, it could not be said that this was an ignorant farmer, a NIMBY, or a National Party apologist.

What the campaign then did was the thing I still find remarkable twenty years later, and it is the reason this chapter is in a book about heritage. It took the environmental law — the body of regulation that country people had spent a generation experiencing as an obstacle, as the thing that stopped you clearing a paddock or shifting a fence — and turned it around. The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act was the weapon. The witnesses were the Queensland lungfish, the Mary River cod, and the Mary River turtle, the one the newspapers could never resist describing by the way it takes oxygen through its cloaca. Turn a flowing river into a stagnant impoundment, the science said, and you finish all three.

In November 2009 the federal Environment Minister, Peter Garrett, refused the dam on exactly those grounds.⁴

Cate Molloy, the member for Noosa, had by then already gone. She lost Labor endorsement in June 2006 over her opposition to the dam, sat on for a time, quit the party in August, and was beaten at the election that September.⁵ Whatever else the valley cost, it cost her a seat.

It also produced the only account we have from inside the government that announced the dam. In February 2007, by then the former member, Molloy went public with what she called a political decision: the State Government, she said, chose the Mary Valley because it was a non-Labor electorate, with an election coming and a Premier who wanted to be seen addressing the water crisis.⁶ I am not in a position to prove that, and neither is anybody else. What can be said is that she was the first Labor member Noosa had ever returned, in a seat that had been Liberal for decades, that she gave that reason publicly and at the cost of the seat, and that nothing in the government's conduct over the following three years contradicted her. People do not generally give up a seat over nothing.

I came at the fight sideways, and by accident. I had spent 2007 working for a member in the Blue Mountains; he lost his seat at the end of that year and I lost my job with it. I went home to Queensland, and six months later took a position with Senator Ian Macdonald in Townsville. I did not know until I got there that he had sat on the Senate committee that had inquired into the additional water supplies proposed for south-east Queensland, Traveston among them, and that he was still pursuing it.⁷ Ian thought of himself as the senator for North Queensland and rarely involved himself in the southern half of the state. The inquiry itself was over before I arrived. It was pure serendipity that I walked into the one North Queensland office still working the Mary Valley.

What I could contribute was the country. Knowing it, and being able to ring my father about anyone or anything in it, turned out to be worth more than any briefing paper. One of the more satisfying days of my working life was the day I found advertisements on the New Zealand edition of Seek, recruiting workers for a project the Queensland Government was still insisting it had not begun hiring for.

It was a win, and everyone took it. But I have never quite been able to enjoy it, because of what was not in the reasons. The valley had produced evidence that it was a high-yielding food bowl. It had produced the objection that the ground itself would not hold water: the opponents called the site Traveston Swamp, and the sand under the valley was well enough known locally that it turns up in residents' submissions to the Senate inquiry.⁸ None of it decided anything. The dam was stopped because of a turtle. I am glad about the turtle. But a state that will not stop a project because it is bad engineering, and will stop it because of a protected species, is a state that has not learned anything it can apply next time.

III. What it cost while it was undecided

The dam was never built, and the valley was damaged anyway. This is the part that outsiders find hardest to follow, because there is no ruin to photograph.

The buying was not ordinary resumption. It was a strategy. Owners were offered considerably more than most people could refuse, and the effect, and I think the intention, was to make the project too big to abandon: by 2009 the state had spent about $483 million on 464 properties covering some 13,000 hectares.⁹ A government that has bought half a valley is not easily talked out of the dam it bought the valley for.

It was also done under the desk. There was no fixed price per acre, and for a long time people were not to tell anyone what they had been paid. In a district where everybody knows everybody this was not a confidentiality provision so much as a fuse. It emerged, as it was always going to, that neighbours running comparable country had been paid quite different sums, and the arguments that started then were between families who had got on for four generations. That is the part no ledger records. The state did not only buy the land. It bought the terms on which the place had held together.

Look at what that meant on one property. Bollier Park is 863 hectares of the best grazing country in the valley, the block James Nash rode past on his way to crossing the Mary at Traveston, the day before he found the gold that made Gympie. I should declare an interest in Nash, of the kind that is unavoidable in a district like this one: he and my great-great-grandfather Emanuel married sisters, and it was Emanuel's horse Nash rode out on to report the find. The state paid the Gear family $25.3 million for the property in 2009 and then leased it back to them at $20 a week, an arrangement that troubled the Auditor-General. In 2016 the Gears bought it back for $8.6 million, about a third of what they had been paid, and came out of the seven years $16.7 million ahead.¹⁰

I want to be careful about what that does and does not show. It is not a story about a family being ruined; the Gears did extremely well, and good luck to them. It is a story about a state that spent public money at that scale to make a decision irreversible, failed anyway, and then sold the valley back at a loss reported at around $250 million. The cost did not fall on the people who were paid. It fell on the public purse, and on everybody in the valley who was not bought out and simply had to live for a decade inside somebody else's unfinished plan.

Grazing country that had been worked for generations went to weed while the state held it and nobody was running stock.

And where the owners did not stay on as tenants, the state let the houses to whoever would take them, at rents as low as twenty dollars a month. What that produced was an arrival of people out of central Brisbane with no work, no connection to the district and no idea how country properties are held together. This is the part of the story I find hardest to write, because it is where I have to take back what I said in section I. Crime came to the Mary Valley. So did the kind of dysfunction I had spent my childhood believing the place was somehow immune to. It did not arrive because the valley got poorer. It arrived because a government had removed the thing that had actually been doing the work, which was not prosperity but continuity: the near-certainty that the person next door would still be there in ten years, and that their parents had known your parents.

The weeds followed the same logic. Unworked blocks became prickle farms, and prickles do not respect a boundary fence. A neighbour who had spent thirty years keeping his country clean now had a seed source upwind of him, owned by the Crown and leased to somebody with no reason to care. That is what the decade cost, and none of it appears in the divestment figures.

The institutions went. Several churches closed. So did the Scouts and the Guides, after a century, and they have not come back. A community is a set of things that need a critical mass of people who intend to stay, and uncertainty removes the intention long before it removes the people.

There was worse than that, and I am going to leave it where it belongs, which is with the families. It has been written about elsewhere. I will say only that the human cost of a decade of not knowing was severe, that it fell hardest on people who had the least capacity to move, and that nobody in Brisbane has ever been asked to account for it, because on paper nothing happened. The dam was not built. That is how the file reads.

IV. The return

The proposal now is not a water dam. It is the Borumba Pumped Hydro Project: water moved uphill while the sun shines and let down through turbines after dark. The published cost is around eighteen billion dollars.¹¹

I want to be careful here, because this is a genuine energy problem and I am not pretending otherwise. But look at what is proposed. One dam on this river was judged fatal to the lungfish. The scheme now contemplates a system of several. It is not obvious to me how the arithmetic improves.

And the dams are not all of it. To get the power out, a transmission line has to run north to the Woolooga substation, and the corridor options published for consultation run between fifty-four and eighty-three kilometres. The easement finally cleared would be sixty metres wide for a 275kV line, or seventy for a 500kV one.¹² I had carried a much larger number in my head for years, and it was wrong; the four-kilometre bands on the maps are investigation corridors, not clearing. Even at the true figure it is several hundred hectares, and the country it crosses includes remnant rainforest of the kind Queenslanders assume you have to drive to Cairns to see — the last serious demonstration of what covered much of the south-east before Europeans arrived.

As at the beginning of 2026 the position is this. The project has not been cancelled. The government elected in late 2024 cancelled a comparable scheme in North Queensland on cost, and it was widely assumed here that Borumba would follow; instead it has said it is open to a smaller version and commissioned a refreshed business case.¹³ Commonwealth approval for exploratory works was granted in January 2026.¹⁴ Money continues to be spent — an additional allocation in the last state budget, demountable accommodation already installed, a local GP clinic paid for, some streetscaping done which managed in the doing of it to damage a few old trees.

I notice the GP clinic. I notice it because it is the correct thing to do and because it is also the oldest technique there is, and both of those are true at once.

V. Bedrock

There is one more thing to record before the dam, and it is the reason I have been careful in this chapter not to write anyone as a villain.

When the state sold the valley back, the buyers were not strangers. The man who bought the main part of our old farm on Reeves Road bulldozed the milking sheds that my father, my grandfather and my great-grandfather had built, working together. He had earlier bought a barn I have written about elsewhere and taken that down too, in the early hours, which is a phrase this book has had cause to use before. Then he sold the lot of it on. He is dead now and I am not interested in his character; I am interested in the fact that the sequence was entirely lawful and entirely ordinary, and that the state's decade of uncertainty is what put those sheds on the market at all. Nobody in Brisbane demolished them. Brisbane only made them available.

Borumba Dam itself was built in the 1960s, on a tributary of the Mary. It was wanted. It sits on solid rock. It gave the farmers a creek that ran all year, it gave Gympie its town water, and it took the top off the floods that used to come through on a schedule. People ski on it. Nobody local wants it changed.

I only learned recently, and from a real estate agent, that my great-grandfather was one of three men who pushed hardest to have it built.

I have been turning that over since. It is the whole argument of this book in one family and one river. Borumba was infrastructure a place asked for, built where the geology allowed it, by a government that was persuaded. Traveston was infrastructure done to a place, proposed where the ground would not hold it, by a government that had opened a map. The pumped hydro scheme is the third kind: technically serious, nationally justified, and once again arriving from the capital with the local answer already assumed.

Which is exactly what this book has been describing in the city.

The Belle Vue and Cloudland were not destroyed because anybody hated them. The Regent was not lost because a villain wanted it gone; a line on a register was moved in 1994 and the rest followed. The Gabba will come down after 2032 with a budget line and a consultation process. And the Mary Valley has now spent twenty years being the place Brisbane looks at when Brisbane has a problem.

The common element is not malice. It is a habit of mind in which certain things — a hotel, a ballroom, a theatre, a dairy valley — are held to be available. Available for the larger purpose, the greater number, the capital's need. It is never argued for, because it does not have to be. It is simply the condition under which everything else gets decided.

My great-grandfather got his dam because he could persuade a government that the valley needed one. Nobody in the valley has been asked what it needs since.