Call To Open Floodgates

Newcastle Herald

Saturday June 5, 2004

By IAN KIRKWOOD

WHEN fishermen Dennis Hirst and Reg Hyde look across the Hexham plain, they see the saltwater wetland that once was, and that they hope will be again.

The pair is among a small group of fishermen, environmentalists and activists who are pushing the state and federal governments to honour a 1996 promise to open floodgates along the Hunter River to allow the reflooding of the 3000-hectare plain.

Waving a thick file of letters to and from various state and federal agencies, Mr Hirst said the process had been strangled by bureaucracy.

But he said an ``act of God" last year, in which a floodgate broke away, allowing the reflooding of a small area beside the Pacific Highway, showed how quickly the situation would improve.

Showing The Herald the spot yesterday, Mr Hirst said salt-tolerant vegetation had sprung up around the tidal pools, which were already sporting fish, prawns and saltwater birds.

He said illegal dumping on some of the former wetland would need to be cleared before it could be re-flooded, but he said a concerted ``keep Australia beautiful" effort would be a good way to start clearing the area.

Mr Hirst recalled yesterday how ``the lungs of the river" at Hexham were drained and partially filled in 1971 at the behest of a dairy industry that was hungry for land and in pursuit of export earnings.

Mr Hyde, who in 1945 followed his father and grandfather into prawn fishing, said the fishing industry was never consulted.

``The year they did it was when the Hunter River prawns started going off for good," Mr Hyde said.

He said the Hexham creeks and channels were once so navigable that people used to row boats from Wallsend to the Hunter River.

Mr Hirst said it was only two years after the swamp was drained in 1971 that the first of a series of environmental studies detailed the damage the decision had caused.

More than 20 years would pass before a decision was made ``in principle" to re-flood the plain, which over time had become a mixture of dry land and freshwater swamp.

Mr Hirst said state and federal governments allocated $5.4million in the 1990s to resume land on the western side of the plain.

``It will have to be done in stages, but what's happened in this one little bit shows how quickly and how easily the whole area could be returned to its natural state," Mr Hirst said.

He said rain would not cause flooding on roads and the railway if blocked drains and culverts on the plain were opened up.