The G6, we called ourselves, shirazed to contentment on our second evening in the Aroona valley. Tired from a warm day walking parts of the Flinders Ranges. Arguing the taxonomy of wattles, the field identity of white mallee and bastard coolibahs, the habits of lizards and snakes - and at day's end, the big questions of our time. Water. The Murray. Assorted Armageddons.

The Engineers talked bold. Canal building north from Spencers Gulf to create an inland Mediterranean to 30m deep at Lake Eyre. Tidal turbines in the canal supplying Adelaide's water from desalination plant. No, the Sceptics and the Poets declaimed. No one would dare take Adelaide's population out as a first step in the Murray solution. Has it been said aloud? Mind you, it's a logical first move if you ignore rights. The rights of people over agriculture; states rights; rights of food production over native wetlands. Rights as a hierarchy from human thirst down to acid mud. 

'We all love the Murray, darling' cried an Engineer in his cups. And we do love both of them. But it is a love constrained. A frustrated love. We sometimes wish upon ourselves our own Ba'ath Party or Central  Committee to attend to the major decisions that need to be made, so that they are swiftly and surgically enacted. 

Instead, as a vocal and interested democracy, we discover that claim and counterclaim results in fearful inaction from our politicians. Under strong pressure within electorates, the local members petition their premier to not give in - even if he does nothing more. The Feds decide it's politically unwinnable but very easy to make the fault of recalcitrant states. Like waiting for rain, waiting for solutions becomes an exercise in frustration. Politically the Murray seems impossibly gridlocked. Meanwhile all our instincts tell us that somewhere close, but disconnected from real power, toil good men who have many of the solutions to water use and the future of the Murray. Will they will be heard, howled down or ignored?

It strikes me that here in the Flinders, as I sleep under the stars in some comfort, there is a much greater struggle for survival going on. The participants may be what the Darwinians call the fittest. Durable eucalypts that out-survived other genera. Acacias, hakeas and grasses that proved hardier than other species. Yet though they are winners, even in the warm bask of a springtime day they reveal the very nature of the constant struggle they all have. To find enough water to survive.
 

Fat-butted E. camaldulensis roots deeply into apparently dry creek beds to find its greedy share. On the creek line it has eliminated most of its larger competition and dominates the smaller species that it shares water with. It is the very chaos of occasional flooding and creek torrents that allows river red gum to dominate. Fallen log and debris accumulations are its nursery. It means of propagation. On the baking slopes above, E. intertexta taproots into a drainage line and left into a shale bedding plane. If it guesses correctly it gets to live. Nearby, thin seedlings of native Callitris wonder who among them will grow to full maturity. On these slopes adulthood is represented by a 7.0m specimen with a 250mm-diameter butt. Branches swooping low to sunshade the root base. Up here you get your water where you can. Deep, shallow or surface dew.

It occurs to me is that these trees are heroes of a sort. I offer this sans being needlessly epic on the issue. We obsess about the comparatively luxuriant sclerophyll forests but we ignore woodlands. Woodlands and the open forests of the inland. An instance is our native cypress. Callitris Glauca. This tree can be readily husbanded to produce much valuable timber on dry lands and is a frontline choice for mixed species regeneration of arid and downgraded lands. Where does it say only tall, closed canopy coastal forests sequester carbon dioxide? Produce oxygen? 

It leaves me believing we don't need to find winners in any mode of re-aforestation of landscape since they have picked themselves. Current native forestry practice should essentially be the art of sustaining the present patterns of occurrence, species and densities where the template is present. Where it has degraded or disappeared, the hardier and indigenous species should be preferred to exotics or monoculture planting. And if it is true in the outback, it should be true everywhere.

  

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