WATER shortages on properties and in small communities are once again rearing their head as Queensland’s ongoing drought tightens its grip.
One of the places feeling the pinch is the Gemfields region in the centre of the state, where water is being carted to The Willows township, and graziers are urgently seeking alternative water sources.
Gary and Penny Bulger live at Carinyah just to the south of The Willows and have invested a substantial amount into sinking a new bore for their stock and equipping it.
“Our average rainfall is 600mm but we only had 204mm last year and just over 100mm this summer,” Gary said.
“The biggest fall last year was 18mm so there was no runoff.”
His 84-year-old father has lived all his life at Carinyah and never seen the waterholes beside Medway Creek dry before, but now they have seven dry dams in addition to dusty waterholes.
One of those is the house dam, which went dry before Christmas.
The Bulgers resurrected an old bore which, although it killed the lawn and fruit trees, has helped give them water for domestic purposes.
They had to put down three holes before they struck water for their new stock bore, at 360 feet and running about 450 gallons an hour, and they say the government water infrastructure grant will be a big help to offset some of those costs.
In the meantime the couple has sold around 300 head of cattle and plan to lighten off further, and Gary is carting water to other parts of the property every couple of days, taking about five hours each time.
“We’ll just keep carting and selling,” Gary said. “Some of our neighbours are worse than us.”
David Lee owns the caravan park at The Willows and has a twice-weekly 190km mail run east to Anakie and west to Bogantungan, and said everyone he saw was in a bad way.
“The January temperatures sucked all the moisture out of us,” he said.
Others confirm these comments, including Blackall-based windmill repairer Brucene Schurmann, who said she was going to people who had never had a water crisis like they did now.
In recent months she and her husband Kevin have been to Alpha, Muttaburra, Middleton and Corfield and were seeing dams that hadn’t been dry for 20 or 30 years.
“We could work from daylight to dark, seven days a week,” she said.
Aramac water diviner Bob Murphy also has more work than he can cope with.
He has been to places as far apart as Thargomindah, Clermont and Dingo and said the country was getting worse every day.
“I worry about what’s going to happen to us,” he said. “Heaps of people are out of water at their houses, and people’s health is getting worse."
Sally Cripps
Journalist
Journalist
