I swam the Paroo River once on the way back from the Birdsville Races. It was a photography trip with the Queensland College of Art.
After sitting in a little bus for hours I needed solitude and that wide, brown river looked perfect.
That little river must've been about 500m wide back then. Thanks to the Queensland floods in recent months it's running towards the Murray-Darling River system in NSW/South Australia.
The Paroo has only ever flooded that far twice before - according to tonight's 7pm ABC news. (April 10, 2010)
The rains are bringing life to the outback after a long dry spell that's seen communities dwindle away.
I was reading all the reports on the Murray-Darling Authority's website and it seems that aging farmers with little help are keeping the place running out there.
Communications, hospitality and leisure services have left isolated regions to die off - we're talking about Australia's salad bowl here.
Young people too moved away to study and find jobs. Banks and schools closed.
Some communities in the Murray-Darling Basin still thrive but they are only the ones near big regional towns like Toowoomba - one of Australia's fastest growing regional centres.
Now the State Government's mooted this idea of having two capital cities in Queensland Townsville and Brisbane to stop the clutter of suburban spread, traffic gridlock and overpopulation in our capital.
I reckon we need to build grids of cities across the Great Dividing Range: Brisbane, Charleville, Charters Towers, Townsville - cities that are near rivers. Rivers always mean life.
Then you connect them up with a river of broadband and we build communities - not residential suburbs with no public transport, jobs or opportunities - we can accommodate that big population the Federal Government is talking about building - the one that the community doesn't want.
When I drove through the mountains of NSW at Christmas time I found some of the most beautiful country I've ever seen - on both sides of the range. All that land.
It's funny isn't it. We who live here don't actually appreciate the opportunities we have here.
But the refugees who keep arriving in leaky boats and who are now cramped on Christmas Island - all they see is opportunity. That's why they're willing to risk it all on the toss and pitch of the ocean to get here. Would you pack up your kids and hop a broken down hovel of a boat for a holiday?
I attended my first Screen Producers of Australia Queensland branch meeting this week. And this topic of broadband - as far as I'm concerned it's like the HOLY GRAIL!
We debated the fate of Australian film - it's on on-going debate that started decades back - but this was an interesting session because experienced feature film producers are now talking about doing interactive stories and asking the question: Does Screen Australia (Australia's main funding body for film) need to change its funding criteria to support 360 productions - not lump the interactive stuff in the budget for a "feature" film but actually fund Transmedia Productions. I know... HELLO! But it made my heart sing to hear established practitioners raising the question I've been thinking about for years.
The problem is still BROADBAND. Australia can't support transmedia storytelling because we have God-awful broadband - even if the people here are the world's most prolific users of social media. This ain't Korea.
And there's another problem! People still want to do co-productions with Hollywood when we have Korea on our doorstep. Have you seen Korean films? They are AMAZING storytellers not to mention the production quality.
The installation of National Broadband Network (NBN) will be like the flooding of the Paroo and the Murray-Darling River - life-giving properties. But business and politics are still slugging it out over that one too. Never mind the national interest. If they had to build the Snowy River Hydro-Electric Scheme today it would still be a pipe dream.
Are Australian values dead? I think those values I see in my 92-year-old grandmother who lived on the land without electricity or running water for a significant part of her life has different values.
Perhaps those values do still exist in the hearts of those refugees on Christmas Island.
Do we really know what Australian values are any more?
And don't say mateship! Say cronyism.
Say all for one and... "gee how does that go again?"