Australian floods end 1960 s drought

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32568, 30 March 1971, Page 17

Australian floods end 1960 s drought

(N.Z. Press Assn. —Copyright) ADELAIDE. A mammoth flood is sweeping the Australian outback, bringing the promise of revival for much of the country’s

dead heart. Floodwaters are racing across western Queensland, north-western New South Wales, and north-eastern South Australia. Cattle and sheep stations brought close to bankruptcy by drought are expecting a bumper season. Properties in an area of 350,000 square . miles have been drenched by falls described by one pastoral authority as the best in at least 15 years. Some stations around the junction of the three state borders have reported falls of

lOin or more, twice the annual average for the last 100 years, and enough to break a seven-year drought. Others in western Queensland have received the first rain their school-age children have ever seen. “It looks like- being a marvellous new start, for

people in the area,” said Mr J. K. Ayers, chairman of directors of S. Kidman and Company Pty, Ltd, one of Australia’s largest pastoral firms. The company owns four cattle stations of up to 4000 square miles in northern South Australia and northwestern New South Wales. The stations are in the centre of the rain belt that extends about 1000 miles south from the Gulf of Carpentaria and about 700 miles east from Alice Springs. Mr Ayers said that the rain recorded on the Kidman

properties was “a godsend” and represented the best general falls in at least 15 years. Now it’s a matter of waiting for the flood to clear before restocking of ( the stations begins.. Pastoralists would try to buy stock from Northern Territory properties still desperately in need of rain, Mr Ayers said. Many of the stations now lost beneath the inland ocean were left with only the nucleus of a herd as the scorching sun and rainless skies of the 1960 s turned the land into a tortured dustbowl. Sheep and cattle were sold in thousands to meet mounting station debts or because there was no hope of finding feed for them. The "good” ratio of one head of cattle or 10 sheep a thousand acres was forgotten as the drought worsened.

. Thousands of head died in the search for food and water. Incredibly, sheep became trapped and died trying to climb stunted, spindly trees to eat the leaves. Cattle were marooned and died trying to reach water in the bogs that once were river waterholes or man-made dams. Still more perished as their hopeful owners, waiting for the rain that seemed never to come, left their stations and drove the herds along bush tracks in search of any road-side growth that might keep the stock alive. But now the rivers are running wild and the first of the new crop of grass is appearing on high ground, growing almost miraculously from seed virtually unnourished in a decade. Mr George Morton, of Pandie Pandie Station, in northern South Australia, said that he was now as-

sured of 12 months good grass and perhaps two years of big waterholes for his stock. Other stations dotted across the landscape are similarly jubilant, despite the present discomfort caused by the flood. Homesteads have been cut off, inland railway lines—notably those from Adelaide to Alice Springs and Townsville to Mount Isa—have been undermined time and again, bush airstrips are quagmires, and most inland roads are either under water or reduced to impassable bogs. But by mid-April most of the water will have drained away into South Australia’s Lake Eyre, leaving rich new pastures in its wake. Lake Eyre, normally a dry, dazzling white salt-pan of more than 3000 square miles, drains almost 500,000 square miles of central Australia. Conservationists say that it might fill to its estimated 17

million acre feet capacity for the first time in 21 years and for the third time in a century. The rivers and creeks that feed the lake, normally nothing more' than ribbons of sand strung through necklaces of trees, are in full flood. The Diamantina River running through the heart of the flood country is 10 miles wide along much of its 400mile course and the Cooper Creek, east of the Diamantina, soared to a height of more than 20ft before the rain stopped falling. The progress of the rivers is being followed by daily reports from homesteads in radio contact with the Royal Flying Doctor Service. And while the rivers surge onwards, faith and hope are returning to the inland where courage has been the onljj byword in the long years of} the drought