Saving Cooloola (and the dam that wasn't built)

Just north of Noosa lies a field of dunes, and by mid-century that bright, apparently worthless sand had become something a company wanted. Titanium drew them, locked grain by grain in the dunes, and sand-mining leases loomed over Cooloola. The irony, which took the wider world a while to see, is that the sand’s poverty is the reason it matters. Ridge by ridge, the dunes hold a nearly million-year record of how a soil is born, grows rich, grows old and finally runs down, a natural experiment that has taught soil science the world over. To a miner it was a heap of clean quartz. Its worth was the record itself: an age-ordered soil archive nobody could build.

The fight to save it was led by two founders of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland (see Mount Tinbeerwah). Kathleen McArthur was central to the long public campaign that followed, the kind of patient, unglamorous work that wins slowly or not at all. They won. Cooloola was gazetted as national park in 1975. The margin was thin. One of the most irreplaceable soil archives on the planet was very nearly dug open for the titanium in it, and survived only because enough people had learned to read its value against the grain of the times.

That campaign became one of the founding fights of the Australian conservation movement. A generation on, and a little inland, the argument came round again.

In 2006 the state proposed to dam the Mary River at Traveston Crossing, to water a fast-growing South-East Queensland. On the plan, the Mary’s broad flat valley looked ideal, an old, quiet, unglamorous river, the sort of country a water planner reaches for. What the plan weighed too lightly was who lived there. The Mary is one of the last strongholds of three animals found in it and almost nowhere else on Earth. First, the Australian lungfish, a heavy, big-scaled survivor of a lineage so ancient it was gulping air in rivers like this one long before the first dinosaurs. Second, the Mary River turtle, a distinctive local endemic once sold in ignorance as a hatchling “penny turtle” in pet shops, able to stay underwater for hours by breathing through its hind end. Third, the Mary River cod, among the rarest freshwater fish in the country. All three breed in the shallow, flowing, gravel-bottomed reaches that a dam would have stilled and drowned.

A long, dogged campaign by Mary Valley landholders, scientists and conservationists made exactly that case. In 2009 the federal environment minister refused the dam under national environment law, on the ground that it posed an unacceptable risk to those species. The river runs free today because enough people could read what a spreadsheet could not.

Both stories say the same thing, and it carries out into the field. Reading this coast turns most interesting at the exceptions, where a place is worth least on somebody’s plan and most to everyone else. The poorest sand. The most ordinary valley. A stretch of protected heath behind the beach, or a river still running where a dam was drawn, is the record of a moment when people worked out what the country was actually worth, and acted on it before it was gone. Most of the history written into this coast is recent enough to still be reversible; these two places are what it looks like when the reading is done in time.