Seminal article by Amanda Hodge (ABC) first published March 2001, warning of the likely impacts of  water-harvesting in the Murray-Darling Basin. Sadly, her fears have proven to be well-founded.

Up in Queensland's land of cotton, downstream water woes are soon forgotten. And, as Amanda Hodge reports, the state Government is still looking away.

Even 600m above ground level, no map reference or global positioning equipment is required to pinpoint exactly where Queensland's cotton country lies. Amid the natural chaos of an Australian horizon looms a bizarrely ordered patchwork of hazy white cotton interspersed by vast belts of water. Euphemistically called "ring tanks'' or turkey nest dams, these water storages, which look like lakes, mark the beginning of the St George and Dirranbandi cotton fields.

Cotton, as the industry is at pains to point out, is far from this country's thirstiest crop, using less water than rice, maize, soybeans and citrus. But it's clear that the breakneck development in southern Queensland has indelibly altered this landscape. About 400km from Brisbane and an ideological world away from the troubled Murray mouth, the region's claim to fame is the largest collection of privately owned dams in Australia.

Covering 40,000ha of coolibah country, the dams vary in aspect from big to colossal, rushed to panicked. At least half of them were pushed up in the past two years. More tellingly, most were constructed after 1994, when Queensland's southern neighbours signed on to a water cap restricting diversions from the Murray-Darling river system.

Knowing that water regulation was looming, Queensland's burgeoning cotton industry hit the accelerator on development. Some growers cleared the trees before bringing in bulldozers to gouge tonnes of soil from the ground in their quest to harness great volumes of water. Others, in their haste, just left trees where they stood, to be drowned by the oceans of captured floodwaters.

Before the creation of these vast reservoirs, the water used to spread out from the narrow river channels of the Darling system and on to the floodplains. In both cases the result was the same. Widespread inefficiencies in the storage systems result in as much as 44 per cent of all water stored lost to evaporation and seepage every year. No one is immune from the problem, not even Cubbie Station, the Camelot of the Australian cotton industry.

As the largest private irrigation venture in Australia, Cubbie has enough dam capacity on-farm to more than swallow up Sydney Harbour and boasts one-third of the total storage in the region. Farms such as Cubbie have reaped the benefit of the Queensland Government's refusal to fall into line over water policy. Queensland governments have long bent to the will of the powerful farming lobby. Indeed, the Condamine-Balonne region's over-allocation problems can be traced back to the last days of the Queensland National Party when 20,000 megalitres of water were distributed to influential graziers. "Flood harvesters'', as the farmers describe themselves, argue they pay a fair price for their water, given they foot the bill for the cost of building their own infrastructure.

Yet Cubbie's annual licence fee of less than $4000 for a Sydney Harbour-full of water seems like an awfully good deal. Local cotton grower and Cubbie Station director Tom Siddins says it's not just the farmers who have flourished from the big drink. Towns have, too. Dirranbandi was dying before cotton came along,'' he says."As the cotton industry has snowballed, and the use of water with it, the town has come alive again.'' Siddins acknowledges the water waste problem and says growers are working to mitigate the losses by lobbying to build deeper dams. But he points out that the NSW Government, with similar problems at its Menindee Lakes storage, is no closer to resolving the issue.It is that proclivity for finger pointing that epitomises the water argument in Queensland, both on a private and a government scale.

Queensland is the only state still refusing to sign on to the Murray-Darling water cap. When the cap was set, it argued it should not be bound by the agreement, which limits water use at 1993-94 development levels, because development along Queensland's water courses amounted to just a fraction of NSW and Victoria. Queensland argued that it did not suffer from salinity or the water scarcity problems experienced in the southern reaches of the Murray-Darling system and therefore should not be bound by the same restrictions.

Instead, Queensland offered to produce its own water allocation management plans to determine sustainable levels of water extractions. That was seven years ago. In that time a panic grab for water in the Condamine-Balonne area has resulted in a four-fold increase in extractions. Even now, almost six months after the Queensland Government finally placed a stop-gap moratorium on dam building in that region, the water allocation management plans are still nine months from completion.

These days it's quite common for aerial visitors to the region to mistake the vast irrigation channels for the Balonne River. The snaking, narrow river with its unpredictable flow and propensity to spread its occasional largesse over a grateful floodplain is all but invisible among the network of engineered channels and laser-levelled paddocks that suckle on its resource. By the time it crosses the border into northern NSW and trickles into the almost perpetually thirsty Narran Lakes, an ancient common ground for Aboriginal tribes, there's little left to see.

In 1993-94, 60 per cent of the median natural flow from the lower Balonne River still reached the internationally significant Narran Lakes wetlands. By last year the median flow had dropped to just 26 per cent and the Narran Lakes at the bottom of the system are recognised as a wetlands in deep trouble. The birds that, by their sheer numbers, once deafened visitors to the remote region are almost silent. Rarely does enough water reach the lake reserve to sustain the birds long enough to complete a successful breeding cycle.

The Queensland Government could solve the problem but has so far shown little will to do so. Its draft water allocation management plan for the Condamine-Balonne appears to ignore the advice it commissioned from an expert scientific panel, which recommended a return of up to 40 per cent of water extracted from the system to restore the health of the Narran Lakes.

Not surprisingly, a report commissioned by the cotton growers disputes those findings and claims the lakes can be sustained on present water extractions. But the level of development in Queensland and, by implication the lack of understanding of the environmental consequences, has dismayed local environmentalists and focused the attention of conservation groups around the country.

Sarah Moles daily counts the cost of what has happened in her jurisdiction. The spokeswoman for the Toowoomba and Region Environment Council says: "Until recently, around St George and Dirranbandi, development was occurring at such a rate that the landscape was changing almost daily. Now, when the irrigators turn their pumps on, they can virtually make the river flow backwards.''

It's not just the dams that have done the damage, however. According to the state Government's figures, tree clearing in the Queensland section of the Murray-Darling catchment grew by 80,000ha from 1997 to 1999 - 94 per cent of the state's overall land-clearing increase in that time. Of a total 425,000ha cleared in that period, 384,000ha of that was in the Balonne catchment and much of it for cotton cultivation.

What impact all this development has had beneath the surface has yet to be quantified.

The Condamine-Balonne region has been identified as one of the 20 catchments most at risk of land degradation by the Prime Minister's National Salinity Action Plan. Yet there are many within the cotton industry who still believe Queensland will never encounter the salinity problem that has enveloped their Murray-Darling neighbours to the south. Cubbie Station's Siddins says he "would be very surprised'' if salinity arose in his region.

Leith Boully, a former grazier turned cotton farmer from St George, is one of the few Queensland believers. For more than a decade she has cautioned in vain that the panicked rate of development in her region, with no understanding of how it might affect the river system, would lead to disaster. As chairwoman of the Murray Darling Basin Community Advisory Committee, Boully believes the Balonne is seriously over-allocated because previous governments gave out water licences hand over fist without understanding how much water was in the system.

"No one did any modelling and I believe it suited a lot of elected governments not to have the facts on the table from a science perspective so they could continue to issue licences and promote development because that's what communities want,'' she says. "That's how elections are won and lost.''

Boully says the Queensland Department of Natural Resources, "never looked at the implications for allowing the development to occur on the scale they issued licenses for. There was no consideration of the needs of the floodplain or the needs of people grazing on the floodplain and absolutely no consideration of the needs of people who live in NSW or Narran Lakes.

"When you go and look at the river, it doesn't hit you in the eye that this is a degraded river system, but I have no doubt we will see it in the next 30 to 50 years.''

For the most impassioned criticism of Queensland's irrigation development, you need only cross the border into northern NSW and speak to those who rarely see the vital small and medium-sized floods that once fed their country and kept their end of the river healthy.

Rory Treweeke, a NSW grazier on the Narran River near Lightning Ridge, has no doubt the massive dams in Queensland are to blame for this change. Like many on his side of the border, the name Cubbie Station epitomises all that is wrong with water politics. Put simply, he says: "Queenslanders are taking more than their fair share of water. Generally out here, floods are slow moving, they take a month to reach here, and now the small ones never do. They're being extracted upstream by huge dams like Cubbie's.''

Logic would suggest that the most effective solution for this over-allocated water resource is a clawback of water licences, and that is exactly what many critics are calling for. But out on the Queensland cotton fields and in the nearby towns the response to that suggestion is near unanimous. There is no way communities such as St George or Dirranbandi are going to surrender their livelihood and new-found wealth without a fight or, at the very least, compensation.

On average, the equivalent of one Olympic-sized swimming pool of water is required to create one bale of cotton. The largest private dam in Australia is on Queensland's Cubbie Station. It is more than 27km long, spans about 12,000ha and holds more water than Sydney Harbour. For that water it pays about $3800 a year. Offstream storages associated with water collection in Queensland increased from 247,000 megalitres in 1993-94 to 827,000 megalitres in mid 1999. In 1989, farmers in the Condamine-Balonne river system extracted 109,000 megalitres of water. In 1999 they extracted 467,000 megalitres. More than 40 per cent of that water is lost to evaporation.

Private dams in St George and Dirranbandi cover 40,000ha. Seventy per cent of the water that once flowed into the Narran Lakes is extracted before it reaches it. The Darling group of rivers contributes 31.7 per cent of the Murray-Darling Basin's mean annual run-off. Cotton is Australia's fourth largest rural export and is worth more than $1.2 billion a year.