LAST week I took a long-awaited trip to Darwin, where I spent a few days looking around and visiting friends, before hopping on The Ghan for a transcontinental rail trip to Adelaide.
It was an eye-opening trip on several fronts, starting with the flight to Darwin, which took us over the fabulous Channel Country of south-west Queensland, now in good heart following rains earlier this year.
One wonders what Sir Sidney Kidman would have made of the spectacle – from 10,000 metres – of the three great river systems that underpinned his cattle empire, as they fan out into the network of channels that naturally irrigate this unique fattening paradise. From there, we passed over the vast grid of exploration wells denoting the potential gas fields of the Top End, where it’s estimated gas reserves equivalent to 180 years’ domestic supply lie untapped because of a Northern Territory moratorium on fracking. Darwin was interesting, chiefly for the grim reminder of our northern vulnerability. In 1942 the puny artillery batteries set up to repel a seaborne invasion proved no defence against the Japanese bombers that attacked Darwin on the morning of February 19, killing at least 243 people and destroying 23 aircraft and eight ships. The government hushed-up the raid’s seriousness for fear of damaging civilian morale, and it was decades before the truth emerged. Even today, it’s little realised the February 19 air raids were just the first of 70 attacks on Darwin alone, not counting others on Broome, Katherine and other northern targets.
It was therefore of some comfort for me to choose a day to inspect the wartime military sites on Darwin’s Dudley Point when F/A18 Hornets from the local RAAF base were thundering overhead. One hopes that if there’s a “next time”, we’ll be better prepared. Travelling south on The Ghan – today truly a world-class train travel experience – we awoke on the final day to behold the fertile fields of South Australia’s mid-north wheat country, around Snowtown.
And then, for many kilometres, we looked upon Australia’s biggest wind farm, the 137 towers of which are dotted along the bare spine of the Barunga and Hummocks ranges running north to south, parallel with the rail line. It’s a perfect site for a wind farm, harvesting as it does prevailing westerly winds, but as Crow Eaters now know from recent blackouts, not perfect enough to guarantee their electricity needs. Whether the long-awaited chief scientist Dr Alan Finkel’s review will provide a way out of the present impasse of national energy policy, only time will tell, but time is running out. The longer our energy crisis is unresolved, the more pressure there will be on energy-intensive, employment-generating industries to scale down, move offshore or shut the doors, and the longer it will take to ramp up new power sources and update the grid.
This issue surely demands a bipartisan solution, which requires compromises from fixed ideological positions.
- Peter Austin
