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

Just north of Noosa lies a field of dunes that get older the further inland you walk — and by the middle of the twentieth century, that bright, apparently worthless sand was wanted for the heavy minerals locked inside it. Sand-mining leases loomed over Cooloola. The irony, which took a while for the wider world to see, is that the sand’s poverty is precisely its value: it grows the wallum’s dazzling spring heath, and it preserves a nearly million-year record of how a soil is born, grows rich, grows old and runs down — a natural experiment that has taught soil science the world over.

The fight to save it began, fittingly, with a wildflower walk. It was on a botanising trip up Mount Tinbeerwah that the Caloundra wildflower painter Kathleen McArthur and the poet Judith Wright — two founders, in 1962, of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland — resolved that Cooloola had to be kept. From 1969 McArthur ran it as a national letter-writing campaign, flooding the country with something like a hundred thousand protest cards. They won. Cooloola was gazetted as national park in December 1975, and one of the most scientifically precious landscapes on Earth was saved from being dug up for the titanium in its sand.

The lesson repeated itself a generation later, a little inland. In 2006 the state proposed to dam the Mary River at Traveston Crossing, and on the plan the broad flat valley looked ideal. What the plan undervalued was who lived there. The Mary is one of the last homes of three creatures found almost nowhere else: the Australian lungfish, a big-scaled survivor gulping air in rivers like this one before there were dinosaurs; the Mary River turtle, a local endemic once sold in ignorance as a hatchling “penny turtle”; and the Mary River cod, among the rarest freshwater fish in the country. All three breed in the shallow, flowing gravel reaches a dam would drown. After a long, dogged campaign by valley landholders, scientists and conservationists, the federal minister refused the dam in 2009, on the ground that it posed an unacceptable risk to those species.

Both stories say the same thing, and it is worth carrying out into the field. The country worth least to a miner or a water planner is very often worth most to everyone else — the poorest sand, the most ordinary-looking valley. A stretch of protected heath behind the beach, or a river still running free where a dam was drawn, is not simply scenery. It is the record of a moment when enough people learned to read a landscape’s real worth against the grain of the times, and acted on it before it was gone.