Queensland water management: sold down the river

However, it now appears the dam is dead, at least as an item of public infrastructure. The Beattie government put a fairly cursory effort into justifying the dam to the Commonwealth, which declined to cough up any funding.

Ironically, the dam building frenzy in the area has seen a storage of suspiciously similar dimensions put up on the preferred site in the last few months. It is not yet clear how the consortium on what is now known as "Little Cubbie" propose to fill a 70,000 mL storage and grow cotton with an average annual water allocation of just 10,000 mL.

But then, many stranger things have happened at St George.

Former Water Resources Commission senior engineer Ken Pearce worked at St George when the system was finely balanced and was assigned in the early 1990s to try and sort out the mess. He was taken off the job in record time after suggesting that problems of over-allocation were being compounded by incompetent local management.

Mr Pearce is now a consultant to distressed irrigators all over Queensland, including the St George channel farmers. "You'd have to say that governments have created a lot of problems around St George and Dirranbandi and they have since washed their hands of them," he said. "We keep putting up ways to make the system work better, and find that the department keeps walking around in circles."

Another former Water Resources Commission officer has done somewhat better. John Grabbe went from being an advisor "on irrigation layouts for farmers" to being responsible for the largest privately owned irrigation layout in Australia - Cubbie Station.

The rise and rise of Cubbie Station

Cubbie Station, the largest privately-owned irrigation layout in Australia and with few rivals anywhere in the world, has long had a controversial existence in a dry land

Cubbie's waterworks are impressive from any angle, but look their best - or worst, depending on your point of view - from the air. Huge storage dams stretch for 28 continuous kilometres down the trickle that is the Culgoa (or later Darling) River.

Feeding this 12,000 hectares of merrily evaporating water is a diversion channel wide enough to take a landing light aircraft, perched like an open mouth above a weir over the river.

There is enough capacity here to more than swallow the waters of Sydney Harbour although, as general manager John Grabbe says in its defence, "it is only when we have a flood where the Caribous are out dropping fodder to stock that they would all be full - this is something the environmentalists just don't understand".

Cubbie grows about 13,000 hectares of irrigated cotton and brings in about $50 million a year. But cotton industry experts estimate that Cubbie could comfortably do that with about 150,000 megalitres of water.

"We could do that if we had the 150,000 mL in storage at the beginning of the season but we would have no reliability going into a drought, and our river system can have drought periods of up to three years," Mr Grabbe said.