In neither the post, nor any of the comments, is any mention of the ideas advanced by Peter Andrews, and given extensive publicity by the ABC on Australian Story, and his two books "Back From The Brink" and "Beyond The Brink". Peter's ideas, and those not dissimilar ideas advanced by Permaculture, demonstrate that it is possible to restore natural hydrological systems to what they were before man's activities destroyed them.

Few Australians know that before the white man came, much of the Australian outback was covered by swamps, and casuarinas. Rivers flowed steadily and constantly for most of the time. on 28 April 2012, Jennifer Marohasy wrote at her blog: "And along these same lines I’ve written that if the current water reform process is truly about giving back to the environment, then we should be thinking back to a period before rivers and creeks became constricted by sheets of water running off compacted soils, before swamps were diverted, before river de-snagging and before the blasting of rock bars for paddle steamers.

As historian Bill Gammage notes in The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia back in the dreamtime shallow streams and overflows flushed more of Australia, filling billabongs, swamps and holes, and recharging springs and soaks.

That was a time when the health of a landscape was measured less by how much water was in a river, and more by how many kangaroos it could support.

In 1901 James Cotton, a Cobar pioneer, wrote that before the district was stocked with sheep and cattle it was covered with a heavy growth of natural grasses and that the ground was soft, spongy and very absorbent.

Overstocking was a problem throughout the Murray Darling Basin particularly during the late 1800s resulting in significant land and water degradation. Overstocking transformed soils in many districts from soft and spongy to hard clay that, instead of absorbing water, caused the rain to run off in sheets as fast as it fell – to again paraphrase Mr Cotton." To be continued....

Continued. Peter Andrews (and others) argue that to restore the outback to what it once was we need to stop draining swamps, and stop engaging in artificial irrigation activities that drain the landscape. Instead we should be seeking to restore the natural hydrological systems that once existed out there and supported prolific life.

To do this, we must encourage vegetation. Whatever vegetation that will grow. Including what are called "weeds". Weeds are actually nature's way of restoring the landscape to what it should be. Once the weeds have played their role, the landscape develops healthy pastures and trees. Vegetation causes dramatic improvement in the soils, increasing the sponge-like nature of the soils, enhancing their capacity to hold water.

In healthy hydrological systems, rainfall is held in the deep sponge-like soils and vegetation, running off gently and constantly, and in a useful way. This is in contrast to the massive floods that now occur, releasing all of the water downstream in a very short time.

Peter Andrews ideas, and those of Permaculture, have been demonstrated at Gerry Harvey's Hunter Valley property, and also Tony Cootes' property near Bungendore.

The ideas are valuable, and worthy of consideration. They have been assessed by the CSIRO. Strange that all the discussions on the Murray Darling (for example) seem to ignore these proven alternative ideas.

Herbert Stencil,
That is absolutely correct & what it boils down to is that smarter people need to be put in charge. As I said earlier keep the consulting engineers & bureaucrats away & things will be achieved.

Herbert Stencil, Peter Andrews’ ideas are all well and good, up to a point.

But there are a number of problems.

Firstly, his advocacy of the use of any plants that will hold the soil and grow in saline environments is a little unfortunate. He should be restricting the use of such plants to native species. Non-native species utilised in this manner are precisely the sort of hardy plants that could become widespread ecologically damaging weeds.

Secondly, there is only so much that can be done to recover the terribly badly damaged rangeland country and salinated agricultural belt, especially while they remain under cattle grazing, irrigation or dryland intensive agriculture.

Thirdly, the sort of remediation that Andrews wants to see is very long-term and only partial. We’ll never get the landscape nor the hydrological patterns therein back to how they were, nor anything like it.

And fourthly and most significantly, it requires us to pull well back on the magnitude of human usage.

How do we do this without causing a great deal of social disruption and vehement opposition?

How do we do it while we have a very rapidly growing population and hence a rapidly increasing demand for water, food and export income?

Peter Andrews’ / permaculture / sustainability-oriented ideas are definitely the way to go. But we need to be smart and develop a total sustainability program.

And one of the most fundamental points is to strive to make sure that the ongoing secure rate provision of water, one of our most basic and important resources, remains safely well ahead of the demand.

In the current circumstances of seriously stressed water provision, it is simply lunacy to be rapidly expanding our population.

Ah well, as someone who was in the public record advocating Peter Andrews ideas, possibly before he thought of them, I agree with most of what he advocates. I've seen the visible evidence of those plans put into practise, turn run down salinated farmland, to more productive and fertile areas than at any time in the past, and against the express wishes of ponderous, pompous, pedantic petty-frogging ecologists and others, who claim that things, like willow are imported woody weeds. Even though nothing native comes close, in holding and binding loose ground together?
To my knowledge Peter never subscribed to the idea of not draining marshes per se; but rather, to create side by side mounds and channels that allow mechanised farming; and, utilise the water as ultra reliable water supply.
By and large wetlands, whether man-made by pioneers like Peter, or naturally occurring and made into productive farmland by raising the productive areas above the water table, are good ways of working with nature and cleaning water of both pathogens and alluvium!
Plant produced oxygen cleaning up the pathogens, and ponding dealing with suspended matter?
As for the Murray.
I've seen some excellent examples, where covered storage and underground only applications, allow double the food production with just half the water!
We can lose more than half the Murray every year, via evaporation rather than overuse.
We can't un-engineer just about the most engineered waterway in the western world.
But we can and should get the engineering right; by filling in open channels and replacing them with pipes!
We can and should deepen most of the current water storages; or cover them, to reduce the huge evaporation numbers, which are sometimes even higher than the storage capacity!
As is sometimes said, let's not throw out the baby with the bath water.
Lets not drown towns or leave wetlands wet for so long, that we kill them!
Rhrosty.

Look, under glass food production uses just a tiny fraction of open irrigation. [Between 5-10%?]
Closed cycle algae framing in large clear plastic pipes,i.e, uses just 1-2% of the water, of traditional irrigated crops.
Pound for pound, spirilina, a blue green algae, is the most nutritious and complete food on the planet.
And other generally toxic varieties, could contain as much as 60% oil!
Algae also absorb 2.5 times their bodyweight in carbon emission, and under optimised conditions, double that bodyweight and carbon absorbing capacity every 24 hours.
Interestingly, there are around 6,000 alga varieties?
Some of the less/non toxic varieties, can be used to clean up the toxic varieties, which they cannibalise!
Ain't nature wonderful?
Rhrosty.