HOW TO FLOAT ZANZIBAR
For the Canberra Times, Tuesday 10 October 2006


It's only two generations since my family was on the land. Pop sheared other people's sheep. (My partner installs and maintains mainframe computers.) My Nan warmed her flat-iron on her wood stove. (Ours has 14 settings, makes its own steam and beeps if you leave it plugged in.) Their daughters rode several miles to an isolated, one-room school, and the eldest married the teacher when she was 16. (I'd have him arrested.)

TV often carries you away to a land where you don't have to think. But I'm finding that Two Men and a Tinnie (ABC Thursdays 8 pm) is making me think - a lot. The basic premise is that John Doyle (writer of the Changi mini-series and JJJ's character Roy Slaven, comedy partner of HG Nelson) and Tim Flannery (paleontologogist, best-selling author, environmentalist and serial flirt with nuclear power) are travelling down the Murray/Darling river system in a metal dinghy (and by car, when it gets dusty instead of flowy).

The Two Men venture into, for me, an unknown land - the, er, land. They're finding, pretty much, that people are stuffing up the rivers. If all the people upstream keep using most of the water that nature meant to flow down the river to the sea, the people who live downstream will be deprived of their livelihood and lifestyle. And the introduced species of weed and carp aren't all that flash, either.

The introduced species of 'whitefellers' is being forced to see, as indigenous people the world over already understood, that being custodians of the land (and waterways) means more than plundering all you can out of everything that crosses or lands on your property. This moral requirement is usually best understood by the people downstream.

One of the startlingly-proportioned country folk met by Doyle and Flannery was a local official, quite happy to have choked off a river and diverted squillions of gigalitres to a cotton industry in the desert. Which just seems barking. (Another thought: lordy, blokes in the country wear a lot of khaki.)

I've been kind of aware that we have a major water problem in this country, because of garden-watering restrictions. (You can only water in the middle of the night on a Wednesday, or something.) here in the suburbs we've got an irrigation system, although I hesitate to even use the term, now the Two Men have shown the obscenely humungous dam systems which irrigate the two most ludicrously water-hungry industries this country shouldn't have: the aforementioned cotton and, get a grip, everybody: rice.

I hadn't really thought about what the water crisis means until they showed me the creek beds of dust, the eroded banks, the dead and dying river gums along what was once a river's edge. In less than one generation, people have been allowed to engage in a murderous conspiracy to kill our rivers. And other selfish buffoons, the sort who don't believe rules apply to them anyway, are allowed to ride noisy, instrusive, dangerous jet-skis around the bits that are left. That's another thing the show makes me think: I bloody hate jet skiers.

Jarringly for a city slicker, John and Tim call each other maaate every five seconds and stumble across berzillion year old giant kangaroo jaw bone fossils, which initially made me awfully sceptical until I conceded to myself I didn't have the faintest clue about anything, much. Nan used to shoot brown snakes off the verandah, and churn her own butter. Pop knew how to put up a fence with his bare hands that went as far as you could see, that would last sixty years, unless another fire wiped everything out (which happened twice). For me, the weather is a matter of sartorial choice, not life and death or crop failure. Every time I turn on a tap, clear water thunders out as long as I want it to. Until watching Two Men and A Tinnie, I hadn't really bothered to think about where that water came from.

The show's pace is as slow as a choked up river; it makes its points laconically, with enough time for a viewer to ponder.

It made me think that we're starting to understand, ever so slowly. Now we pay for the water we use, and we have to change what's in our gardens. The show reminded me that even though nobody from around here pops on an akubra-style hat, or wears a floral pinnie without any domestic goddess irony, there are real people who do, and good on them.

It wasn't until watching Two Men In A Tinnie, and a recent Four Corners about the criminal lack of medical services in the bush, and a 7.30 Report about how corporations like the Macquarie Bank are buying up farmers' water rights, that I realised how much the rest of us have, well, hung the country folk out to dry. Telstra couldn't give a bugger about them, the National Party is about as useful to them as a tick, there's some sort of eternal drought on, and the people up-river are siphoning off enough water to float Zanzibar. I'm glad my taxes are paying for this river scandal to be revealed on the ABC because frankly, up until now, I've been drowning in my ignorance, without a paddle.