After an exhausting couple of days I drove only as far as Moree today.
I booked into a reasonably priced, clean motel close to the Moree Artesian
Aquatic Centre and caught up on emails etc before heading to the baths.
I changed into a costume that hasn’t seen water for many years, then surreptitiously
slid into the cooler of the two heated pools. The temperature, 38 degrees, was
just right and my skin felt smooth and soft. My body slowly adjusted to the
temperature, then I moved into the hotter pool, 40 degrees. When it became too
hot, I returned to the cooler, more crowded pool. Groups of elderly tourists stood
or sat around the perimeter of the pool, chatting and very few spoke English. Later,
young people arrived at the complex. Some did laps in the Olympic size pool
where the temperature was 26 degrees, then jumped in the spa pool to warm up
between sessions with their trainers.
I’m not used to bathing with a whole lot of people. Usually it’s me and Tim in the bath on the verandah with a glass of red but everyone there was drinking water!
The Moree Artesian Aquatic Centre has an interesting history dating
back to 1895 when a bore was sunk into the Great Artesian Basin (GAB). When the
bore started flowing, 2,700,000 litres of hot water gushed from a depth of 951
metres flooding the nearby stores. The government constructed a pool on the
site using railway sleepers and it was leased as a commercial concern and opened
to the public in 1890 for ‘taking the waters’. Women and children bathed two
days a week and it was open to men and youths the rest of the week. Two
hot concrete pools were built in 1913, one for men, and the other for women. An
Olympic pool and grandstand was added to the site in 1930 and the admission
price increased. By the 1960s the well-known bore baths were being promoted as
having water with curative powers.
The first findings of radio carbon dating of the Great Artesian Basin
were reported in a letter from Professor Green, an Associate Professor at the
Nuclear Radiation Chemistry School at the University of New South Wales to the
Water Research Foundation in 1964. The water at Moree was found to be 20,000
years old.
The baths also came to the public’s attention the following year when
Charles Perkins and the ‘freedom riders’ arrived by bus in Moree. Inspired by
the freedom riders of the American civil rights movement, a group of Sydney
University students protested at segregation and discrimination in New South
Wales country towns’ pools, clubs, picture theatres and pubs. Aboriginal people
were not allowed in the Moree baths complex. Reports in the media and film
shocked city viewers, raising consciousness of racial discrimination in
Australia and strengthening the campaigns to eradicate it that followed.
In
2009 the New South Wales Labor Government auctioned twenty-four access licences
to water from the Great Artesian Basin. This was supposedly ‘made
possible through the water savings gained from the Cap & Pipe the Bores
Program’ and it aimed to promote economic development in the northwest of the
state.
The Cap
& Pipe the Bores Program was introduced in 1990 by the NSW Government. Water
from free flowing bores wastefully flowed down bore drains to other paddocks. Over
the years the pressure dropped and the flowed was depleted. The government
subsidised farmers to cap their bores and install pipes to tanks to store the
water. Many farmers had done this with no subsidy but it was expensive as often
a new bore had to be sunk. In 1999 the Commonwealth and States overlying
the GAB entered into a joint program titled the Great Artesian Basin
Sustainability Initiative (GABSI) to accelerate the rate of capping and piping
of free flowing bores.
Many farmers, who had capped their bores, had complained about the
Moree baths being allowed to have water gushing out of large pipes for tourists
to wallow in. The seven million dollar redevelopment of the Moree baths,
renamed the Moree Artesian Aquatic Centre, had opened in 2008. The objectors
wanted the Moree Plains Council, the owners of the facility, to recycle the
water like most other country town pools. The Centre’s enthusiasts said the
water had medicinal qualities but the objectors, mostly farmers, said it’s just
bore water.
Prior to the auction, strong opposition was voiced by landholders and
others concerned about ‘the management of the resource and the incomplete
knowledge of the hydrology and pressure responses with respect to the Cap &
Pipe the Bores Program. As landholders conserved water the Government sold it
and this was seen as a cash-grab by a financially stretched State Government.’
The morning of the auction commenced with a rally attended by
approximately 150 people, including several State and Federal politicians
opposed to further allocation of access licences. The rally participants
allowed the auction to go ahead uninterrupted on the condition that the State
Government would monitor the impacts on pressure recovery and guarantee that
the proceeds of the sale would be reinvested into capping and piping of
free-flowing bores.’
The auction of 1,200 megalitres yielded approximately $870,000. The
water auctioned went to some primary producers but mostly to the newly opened
$7M redevelopment of the Moree Artesian Aquatic Complex. The free flowing bore
water goes through a heat exchange, depending on the season, and is treated
with chlorine before going into the pools. The discharge flows into the Gwyder
River but will go into maturation ponds before filling ski lakes, built by
Moree Plains Council, when they are completed in 2015.
References:
Moree NSW www.moreensw.httpsuite.com
Australian Postal History www.auspostalhistory.com/articles/1880.php
Western Herald, Bourke, NSW, 24 April 1964 with reference to The Sydney
Morning Herald 30 March.
How Old is Australia’s Artesian Water, Western Herald, Bourke, NSW, 30
August 1963
Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/,
National Museum Australia http://indigenousrights.net.au/civil_rights/freedom_ride,_1965
Moree Artesian Aquatic Centre www.maacltd.com
NSW Great Artesian Basin water auction 2009: Final report
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