Water in the desert. Imagine what that meant to the early inhabitants of inland Australia in one of the harshest and most arid places on the planet for them to know that they had permanent access to fresh water and wetlands. No wonder Australia's natural spring systems became so sacred for so many. But when the lakes turn to salt pans and the rivers are sucked dry, where does the water come from? Okay, get your head around this.
About two million years ago, it rained on the Great Dividing Range in Queensland. Today, that same water bubbles up in... in South Australia.
Think about it. The last time this water saw the light of day, giant hippopotamus-sized diprotodons were grazing on the coast. The Tasmanian tiger was alive and hunting, and Australia was the home of a lion called the thylacoleo that had the strongest bite of any mammal in history, living or extinct. So, this water has been travelling at a painfully slow pace through porous rocks deep underground. Sometimes it bubbles and soaks its way to the surface through natural springs.
At other times we've found ways to dig down and find it. Either way, it is the key to life to about a quarter of the continent. We call it the Great Artesian Basin.
To explain how the Great Artesian Basin works, you need to know how it came to exist in the first place. So here it is, the past 250 million years in a nutshell. Back in the Triassic Age, Australia was joined together with the other southern continents, including Antarctica, South America, Africa and New Zealand, in a land mass called Gondwana.
Now have a look at the top right quarter of Australia. Can you see how it kind of forms a natural dip? That's the area that will eventually become the Great Artesian Basin. Over the next 140 million years, huge events like... Ages in Europe and tectonic plate movements caused the ocean level to rise and fall.
When the ocean levels rose, water became trapped in that natural dip and formed a sea. But when the ocean levels fell, the whole area became land again. When the seas drained away, they left clay and silt deposits behind, which hardened into impermeable stone.
Remember this. So now we're back to dry land again, but it's not desert yet. And there are rivers crossing it.
The rivers carried sand and gravel with them, which later joined together to form sandstone. And that sandstone is the key to how the basin works. Okay, let's get on to the fun stuff.
Siltstones and mudstones are what scientists call impermeable. There's no way water can get through them. They're like plugs.
Check this out. Okay, we've got our impermeable rock. Our sandstone. That ain't going through. Soaking it up.
Now we wait. Okay, imagine our layers of impermeable and permeable stone deep underground. I'll demonstrate. This sponge is our sandstone, our permeable layer.
And if you see the water, it goes straight through it. But if we put an impermeable layer, this frisbee, underneath... The water has nowhere to go except forward to the sides.
When that happens, the layer of sandstone is called an aquifer. So that whole basin area we saw earlier now has aquifers running all the way through it and has become the Great Artesian Basin. It's a massive area.
It stretches from Cape York to Dubbo. and Coober Pedy to the southeast corner of the Northern Territory. That's almost a quarter of Australia.
When it rains on what we call the recharge bed areas of the basin, the water seeps down and collects in the aquifers. Scientists estimate that there's around 65,000 million megalitres of water in the basin right now. A megalitre is a million litres. 65,000 million of them would be enough to cover all the land on the planet in almost half a metre of water.
What's the point of all the water in the Great Artesian Basin if it's buried underground? Well the point is it doesn't stay underground. For thousands and thousands of years, Artesian water has been bubbling up to the surface in spring systems that appear all over the basin area.
These spring systems bring life to parts of Australia that would otherwise be barren desert. They are home to a host of native plant and animal species that have evolved in these unique ecosystems. Many of these can't be found anywhere else in the world. What's more, water from the basin springs around the recharge zones, often seeps into natural creek and river systems, helping to keep them flowing when the rains don't come. The species themselves are typically locally very abundant.
in where they are, but their habitat is threatened. If you lose water pressure from the basin, then you've got no more free water and those species will go extinct. There's also organisms that live on the springs, microstromatolites, which are a really ancient form of life form.
There are other species where the entire home range is a puddle of water about a metre in diameter, and that's the extent of where that species may be found. The indigenous tribes that lived on the Great Artesian Basin were the first to make use of that water source. In fact, it was critical to their survival.
The springs not only gave them fresh water, they also were a valuable food source. Birds, mammals, reptiles, crustaceans and insects all lived at the springs, creating an abundant hunting ground for local tribes. And the plants and trees around the Artesian Springs were used for food, medicine, materials, and shelter.
And the Indigenous tribes were smart about using the basin. That way when drought and hard times hit, the wetlands would be full of food and water. Indigenous people should be good at using the basin. After all, they've been living on it for thousands of years. I've been privileged where people have shown me certain springs and you can always find some sort of occupation or usage of Aboriginal people.
1788 and right up to constant contemporary today. Archaeologists have found sites on the basin in Queensland where Indigenous tribes have lived consistently for 20,000 years. Water in the desert feels like a pretty powerful magic and the spring wetland areas became spiritual centres for the indigenous people. They were places for the songs, stories, ceremonies and dreaming tracks of our country's ancestors. And once settlers and explorers began to push their way inland, they discovered the spring systems too.
But they didn't always know what to make of them. John Oxley was the first white explorer to cross part of the Great Artesian Basin in 1818. But his team was defeated at the Macquarie Marshes by one of the recharge beds without anyone even knowing what it was. June 28. We proceeded nine or ten miles when the morasses almost assumed the appearance of lakes.
The country was a barren scrub, and in places very soft, the horses falling repeatedly during the day. Circular pools or hollows covered the whole plain, and seemed to be formed by whirlpools of water, having a deep hole in the bottom, through which the water appeared to have gradually drained off. We seemed indeed the sole living creatures in those vast marshes. July 8th.
Tomorrow morning we will set out on our return eastward. Everyone feels no little pleasure at quitting a region which has presented nothing to our exertions but disappointment and desolation. And in the years that followed, many other explorers uncovered clues that began to point to the basin's existence. Charles Sturt got further than Oxley ten years later and found springs along the bed of the Darling River. Other explorers soon discovered more springs, salt mounds and wetlands.
These are all pretty good indications of underground water. Driving stock in Australia is tough work, but we keep on pushing inland. And at last we've found a way to conquer these harsh plains. The freshwater springs are the key to the desert for us stockmen. It's the only way man and beast can have a drink and keep on going.
And don't think we're out of touch. The springs are being used as sites for telegraph repeater stations across the arid centre. But the thing is, the early settlers still didn't think the Great Artesian Basin existed.
Sturt had this theory that hidden in the middle of Australia somewhere was this vast and mysterious inland sea. And a lot of people believed him. They were half right.
The water was there, but it was hidden deep underground. And then in 1878 a shallow bore was drilled on Kalara station near Bourke and it produced fresh and flowing water and nothing was ever the same. Welcome to the New York City City of A hundred years ago, drilling for artesian water wasn't an easy job. The old bore drillers were as tough as nails. They used to work through 50 degree heat in the summer and freezing cold conditions in the winter.
Well, when Dad and Mum started off, they would have had There were three off-siders for the drillers. There would have been two drillers. There would have been a cook.
That's just for the drilling rig. Then for carting water, there would have been two people carting water because there were no truck or centrifugal pump in those days. It was only tent accommodation.
at best. When my mother went out and first got married it was all camp oven cooking. She had to make her own yeast out of potato peels and things like that. Now this is the steam engine that used to drive the drilling rig which is in front of us here and when they're using it they would have had to very often had to keep throwing wood about this side. into it and then shutting it up to keep the steam power up.
To transfer action from the steam engine to the actual drilling action, they used to have a wooden conrod coming down onto the crank here. This crank turns all the time the engine's turning. And it goes onto that big walking beam above here and that gets the up and down movement. They faced real danger of dying from dehydration, starvation, exhaustion, heatstroke and accidents. But when they did reach water, and if that water was good, imagine how they'd celebrate.
It must have blown them away. The engineer tried to turn it off, but it was no use. I tell you, that all that water shooting up into the air couldn't be wiped out, and you wouldn't want to.
It was glorious. There's so much water now, we have a lagoon, and the cattle wade in it up to their bellies. The boss put our town on the map.
People have travelled hundreds of miles just to have a look. And not much has changed. While today's bore driller might find life a little easier, the thrill of still finding fresh water in a parched land is enough to give you goosebumps.
Now the stock have started dying, for the Lord has sent a drought. But we're sick of prayers and providence, we're going to do without. With the derricks up above us and the solid earth below.
We're waiting at the lever for the word to let her go. Sinking down, deeper down. Ah, we'll sink it deeper down, as the drill is plugging downward at a thousand feet of level.
If the Lord won't send us water, ah, well, we'll get it from the devil. Yes, we'll get it from the devil, deeper down. Boar drillers came to Australia from all over the world to make money from this new industry. To keep the water flowing, teams of horses and bullocks dragged heavy delvers through thousands of kilometres of open channels, clearing away dirt and debris.
We'd use what we called a one-man plough to plough a furrow to loosen the ground up. Then we'd hook onto these machines and drag them through the loose dirt. Nip would make a V-drone. Once people started drilling into the Great Artesian Basin, life in inland Australia changed for good. They called this the Artesian Age and everyone felt invincible, as if they could finally conquer the outback.
Industries that had struggled now thrived. The early settlers used bore water to run steam trains, finally making it possible to travel through the desert in relative speed and safety. Farmers sunk bores on their properties to help fight drought and make life on the stock routes easier.
Boar water was used to clean wool before it was sold overseas. This boosted the value of fleece and saved money on transport since farmers were no longer paying to ship dirt. A lot of inland towns were relied on bore water for their everyday needs. Let's do it.
Since the 60s, bore water has been used to mine copper, gold, lead, zinc, uranium and silver, as well as oil and gas. And tourists travel from all over the world to explore the incredible landscapes of the Great Artesian Basin. I'll meet you out there and do the... You want to do it first or did you want to drink first? No, I'm just going to...
You do it first? Okay. Yeah, most of the people that come through here, you meet a lot of nice interesting people.
Yeah, it's pretty good actually. Yeah, you know, it's a good little hotel and it's nice to see people coming through and taking that plunge by actually coming out here in the outback and enjoying it. And it is an experience. And if you love space, this is the place to come to.
And let's not forget about the basin's role in health and relaxation. People come from all over the planet to soak in these hot mineral baths. It's like a liquid multivitamin you don't have to swallow. The town of Moree in northwest New South Wales is another town like Ellis where they shrug off the lack of a sea breeze in the Olympic pool. But it's the artesian baths which have been a major tourist attraction since 1895. The warm bore water is claimed to have great therapeutic value.
Morey is one inland centre of Australia where a little help from nature puts a warming break on the winter freeze. The bubbling waters from the Morey bore are always at 110 degrees. If you're on the other side of 50, the mineral waters give you the urge to throw away those walking aids for good.
And as any local bird watcher will confirm, there's something about Morey that really buoys you up. The artesian pools in Moree, the baths, bring a lot of people to our town and they bring a variety of people as well. We get a lot of those visitors who come are from Eastern European backgrounds.
You can sit in the pool. in Moria and here a variety of languages that you know very strange for someone from an Anglo-Celtic background but the vibrancy that comes from that multicultural experience is something that you can't buy. This story is not just history. The Great Artesian Basin is key to life to about a quarter of the country, but it also impacts Australians from coast to coast. So much so, that if it was to dry up, Australia would be a very different place.
For starters, the 70 towns that still rely on the basin for their water would disappear overnight. Our beef, wool and sheep industries would lose about a billion dollars a year, and a lot of us would go hungry. A lot of mines would have to close down, leaving the country short another three billion bucks each year. Not to mention a lot of people out of work. And then there's the tourism industry.
Obviously the bars that have to close, but there's lots of other tourism activities as well like camel treks, indigenous heritage sites and the Gann Railway. None of these would survive without the Great Artesian Basin. With the Artesian Basin, just to take on to attack an unknown resource, not knowing what was there, you know, and to bang these holes down, the number of holes from... I just can't remember what when it was, from about...
1892 there were only 35, no it must have been after that, 1898 there were only like 35 bores and then in the next 10 years there were over 400 or something. We drink rainwater because we're all used to drinking rainwater and got rainwater tanks. But if we ran out of rainwater we could just drink the bore water and hardly notice the difference.
For some bore water is pretty hard to drink. But this here is very good. Makes sheep's teeth fall out, too much fluoride and all that sort of stuff.
That might have been what happened to me. With such a vast expanse of water under our feet, it's easy to get complacent about conserving the basin. That was the case when settlers first discovered they could drill into the basin for water.
They got a little bit overexcited and didn't really think too much about the future. Let me explain. Let's say this hose is the Great Artesian Basin and the sprinkler at the end is a natural spring. What would happen if I was to poke a hole in the hose?
I'd have water over here, and I wouldn't have to go all the way over there. But what if I also wanted some water over here? Now I've got holes everywhere but I haven't got the pressure to get the water I need.
This is exactly what's happening in the basin. I travel with Aboriginal people a lot and one of the great things about it is they can recall. certain areas that used to be abundant with not only water, but I think the term people use is crawbobs, which are used in tail for bait for another source of food, which is the yellow-bellied cod. And also they've noticed the decline in animal bush tucker, such as the echidna and the guana, because the water sources are no longer there.
Not only just around us, but within the whole of the basin, there were bores that were drying up. And if the amount of wastage of water kept going on that was being wasted, I could see that the basin would get to a stage where the level of water, the level of pressure... the basin would not be bringing the water to the surface and a lot more bores would be drying up. It's so bad that a lot of bores and natural springs have simply stopped flowing. And hundreds of bores that do flow are out of control.
They can't be turned off and they're wasting millions of litres of water every day. A lot of bore water flows into shallow channels dug into the dirt which encourage noxious weeds and feral animals. And it's kind of pointless because the open channels or drains mean around 95% of the water evaporates or seeps away before it can even be used. Meanwhile, to make matters worse, a lot of old bores were poorly made or the The casings underground are corroding so the water is escaping to the wrong places and damaging the environment. But there are things we can do.
These days there's a strategy in place to fix up the old bores so they can be used in a sustainable way and the water can be distributed more responsibly. This process involves what we call capping and piping. Put simply, capping is just like putting a lid on the bores.
Through a complex tap system, farmers can turn the bores on and off and only use the water when it's needed. Piping involves replacing the old open channels, or drains, with pipes. Now, the water goes straight to the tanks and troughs without being wasted through evaporation. And it doesn't ruin the native landscape by encouraging weeds. and feral animals.
The thing that makes water available now that hasn't been in the past is that capping and piping the bores really restores the pressure in the basin and helps restore the health of the basin and hydrological processes, but it also allows us to make some decisions about how part of that water might be used to provide benefits for the community and to provide industry, provide opportunities for local areas and local people to develop new products. Thank you. products and new things that we can all use. Of course capping and piping has to be managed carefully so that the water now reaching a naturally dry environment doesn't upset the delicate ecosystems.
We started a program of capping the... the bores and that meant that we had to get the water flowing into tanks and troughs and we call them a closed system so that the stock can actually drink out of the troughs and we're not wasting any water. Before we kept and piped it was all flowing bore drains open bore drains in the summertime we often ran out of water in the bottom bottom paddocks and two of our creek ...addicts on the western side had no... water at all so they had dams in them and if it was dry you had no water whatsoever and the stock losses in the bore drains were just horrendous.
We did two runs a day up and down the bore drain in the drought just pulling stock out all day yeah 150 k's minimum a day so yes just pulling out stock so we love the piping for that reason. Lovely clean water, clean water for the cattle, clean water for the house so no it's really great. It costs quite a bit to cap and pipe all those bores. but the expense is being shared by both landowners and the state and federal governments. It's not only grazes that are affected by bore water, it's towns, it's mines, and I think it's proving that water is a scarce commodity.
The more we can do to save it, the better. And if the pressure in our basin is going to rise through a government-subsidised scheme, I cannot see any reason why people shouldn't want to be involved in it. And so far, the overwhelming majority of landowners landowners are saying that capping and piping their bores has saved them money and in many cases helped them make more money.
Tractor repairs are way down because delving drains is hard work. It's hard on the axles, hard on the tyres, the tractor's in the mud all day. Wages of people sitting on tractors delving and getting bogged and walking home or someone having to go and pull them out.
The pressure in this bore will keep the tanks full under its own pressure. You don't have as much electricity pumping water. You can pump hot water straight into the house and do away with the hot water system.
You can pump water straight into the garden sprinklers once you've cooled it down. Also you can get a cool, clean drink yourself when you're mustering. Come to a tap, there's a drink. On top of that it's just the fact that you feel so much better about not wasting such a great resource. Cattle just destroy the bore drains like they cave them in.
And over the years, the drains, the sides are eroding off them and there's a lot more maintenance on them and the trees have grown a lot thicker along the drains and it increases the maintenance. And just for the pure saving of water too, I could water a lot more country with pipes rather than the drains, yeah. The government has committed millions of dollars over several years to help protect the Great Artesian Basin and the states are all starting to cooperate.
Let's face it, they have to. Each state has different laws and legislations, but water isn't going to respect state boundaries. It just keeps on flowing. So, any plans to protect the Great Artesian Basin need to reach across the whole basin.
There's water now that we can use for development over a lot of the area. The only opportunity we have for development is the Great Artesian Basin. That means that some industries that are just starting to emerge, like the hot rocks generating power and some new mining ventures have some water, but also industries we haven't even thought about yet. If you don't have water, you pretty much don't have life. And in this area, being such a dry area, the local communities are absolutely dependent on the GAB and on the water discharging out.
That's from a human perspective. Our industry and the industries of the state. and for a lot of Australia are dependent on the water to actually enable them to continue on and to grow.
One of the main reasons why this area can support the fauna that it supports, support the people and support the infrastructure that it does, is because of the presence of this groundwater. And if it's taken away and it's gone, then you've lost that. The families that still live and earn their living in the bush just wouldn't be here without the Artesian Basin.
Committees and sustainability initiatives now focus on getting everyone involved. Farmers, local businesses, state and federal governments and other stakeholders. It's great to know that people recognise how important the great Artesian Basin is to Australia. If you'd like to know more about the basin, check out the website.
And me, I'm off to sneak back into those baths. Oh