Past Programs
Travel and Tourism - 2008
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On the river's edge: the life and soul of the Clarence River
20/04/2008
The quest to find enough water to sustain a bulging coastal population on Australia's east coast has thrust an untouched wild river in northern NSW into the politics of water sharing.
What starts as a trickle in the wilderness near the Queensland border ends 400 kilometres away as a broad and majestic river system flowing into the Pacific Ocean. The Clarence River channels five million megalitres of water out to sea each year. A federal government proposal is on the table to dam its flow and pipe its fresh water resource to south east Queensland, to ease water shortages there. There are also demands on Clarence water from the west of NSW, which continues to face the dilemmas of drought.
Along the banks of the Clarence are generational fishermen and farmers, Indigenous elders, tourism operators and lifestyle retirees who make their income and draw inspiration from its flow.
In the upper reaches of the river system, Steve and Sharon Ross have carved out a living from a remote property that boasts five kilometres of river frontage. They earn their income guiding tourists down the flow of the Clarence in canoes and plan to have their ashes cast across its surface when they die.
Russell Farmer is a third generation cattle and timber producer. He remembers chasing turtles, catching eels and racing corrugated iron canoes down the river at Cangai. He has also worked on the Snowy Mountains scheme as a teenager and cannot help but compare the health of the two river systems; one managed and one wild.
Many of the Indigenous elders along the Clarence grew up on one of 109 islands that are nestled within the flow of the Clarence River, as it transforms from a mountain stream to a broad estuary. They reminisce about raking prawns from the shallows, chiselling oysters from the mangroves and the dramatic evacuations during floods.
Vince Castle grows sugar cane on the edge of the Clarence estuary. He is predicting that water sharing will be a feature of the future and that the community will be disappointed if it wants to claim the Clarence water resource as its own.
Judith Melville has no car and describes the river as her road. She lives in Yamba, a coastal community on the southern edge of the Clarence River. The community of Iluka sits on the northern bank where the Clarence flows out to sea.
Renee du Preez followed the course of the Mighty Clarence to bring us the story of a river.
