‘The living heart of Australia’: fracking plans threaten fragile channel country | Rural Australia

Seven Mile Channel drops into view, running strong. At the water’s muddy edge, spiders and ants flood out from cracks in the dirt and escape up coolabah trees. Round a sandhill, Kidd finds the front of another channel creeping forward, bubbling and fizzing between the cracks.

We are now on the Cooper Creek floodplain. In a flood, the creek can reach more than 60km wide as the Cooper reaches the Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre basin, filling the lake and ushering in an explosion of wildlife.

Back near the bitumen, Kidd nods to a flat section with a line of trees in the distance. “That’s the bit, there,” he says, pointing.

This corner of Kidd’s property is overlapped by one of 10 applications that the gas company Origin Energy has made to the Queensland government to drill for fossil fuels across 225,000 hectares of the channel country.

A federal government-backed program to look at where and how deep the gas is, and the risks of exploiting it, says the fossil fuels in the Cooper basin are more than 2km down and would need unconventional methods to liberate them.

The drills would need to travel through the much shallower Great Artesian basin – the vast underground water source that pastoralists discovered as a way to give water to stock, as well as giving more than 100 towns a water supply.

Kidd’s view on the risks from gas exploration is nuanced.

He’s not worried about the climate impacts of burning fossil fuels like gas because he says climate change is not caused by humans. He is “no greenie” and think most environmentalists “wouldn’t know if their arse was on fire”.

But with all that qualification, he says his main concern – a big one – would be any interference that gas drilling had with the water.

“Don’t tamper with the rivers,” he says. “It’s too bloody fragile.”

‘The living heart of Australia’

From the air, the channel country’s creeks and rivers weave braid-like patterns across the landscape. The basin is not dammed or regulated. Cattle and sheep properties are fenced but the waters run through them.

Angus Emmott is part-grazier, part-naturalist, part-wildlife carer, part-photographer. He calls the channel country “the living heart of Australia”.

His library at Noonbah station – the grazing property that has been connected to his family for more than a century and where he hosts scientists and tourists – is a dusty assault of reference books and drawers of labelled insect specimens.

One drawer of cicadas, all collected by Emmott, includes several he won’t find in any of the reference books in his library because they’re undescribed by science.

What you will find in reference books are nine species – including birds, spiders, plants and lizards – named after either Angus, his wife, Karen, or their daughter, Amelia.

When we met, Emmott was planning a trip to Brisbane to speak to state government ministers in early May. He has sat on many advisory groups for the Lake Eyre basin over the years and he’s worried.

The Queensland government has promised to consult on a new framework to manage and protect the channel country. A high-water mark for protection came in 2005 when a state Labor government introduced the wild rivers legislation that protected the area. Those laws were repealed in 2014.

Emmott says the Labor government has been dragging its feet after promising to reinstate protections for the region. The government also hasn’t made a decision on Origin’s petroleum applications which, if granted, would allow the company to start producing gas.

He says he would be “horrified” if ministers gave the green light to drilling which, he says, would industrialise a “unique part of the world”.

He wants a future centred on ecotourism and sustainable and organic beef production, rather than gas drilling that would liberate more fossil fuels.

“Preventing ecosystem collapse makes us humans sustainable,” he says. “The way we’re going at the moment, we’re going to crash and burn.”

‘The country survives on that water’

Between Noonbah and Windorah is the tiny town of Jundah, with a population of less than 100 and falling. In November Origin Energy carried out exploratory work on a property just outside town.

The Barcoo shire mayor, Sally O’Neil, says Jundah was “buzzing” when the workers were in town. In a town where the pub doesn’t always open and the council has to run the filling station, residents glimpsed a potential economic future in the hi-vis vests buying fuel and coffee. Nobody raised any concerns, she says.

In the modernised filling station, there are nods of enthusiasm from behind the counter about the prospects of a gas company drilling nearby.

Origin told Guardian Australia that the work it was doing in the Jundah area “relates to different activity for which we hold exploration permits and have agreements with landowners to carry out this work.”

“Providing opportunities for local business and the community is something [we] strive to achieve in all of our projects,” a statement said. The purchase of local goods and services for the exploratory work in November is an example of putting that into practice.”

But some 100km away from Jundah in Windorah’s main street, Josh Gorringe is about to close up for the day at the Mithaka Aboriginal Corporation, where he is the general manager.

The applications from Origin Energy were with the Queensland government in July 2020. Gorringe says his group didn’t find out until February 2021 – a few weeks after a story appeared in Guardian Australia.

The energy company challenges this version of events, saying it had been in contact with a legal representative at the corporation since November, but that representation had since changed. “We’re looking forward to meeting with them as soon as arrangements can be finalised,” an Origin statement said.

The Mithaka are among 13 traditional owner groups across the Lake Eyre basin. Mithaka have native title granted across a large area of the channel country and are custodians for an even larger area.

A Mithaka elder, George Gorringe, says on such a flat landscape any infrastructure can interfere with the flow of water many kilometres downstream, starving vegetation and ecosystems.

“The country survives on that water,” the 73-year-old says.

George’s father was a cattle drover and, as a child, he also had a spell moving cattle. Stock routes tended to follow the Aboriginal trade routes that followed the bigger rivers, he says.

Culturally, George Gorringe says, there is even more at stake if roads, pipelines and drills interfered with the rivers and creeks.

“All the storylines follow the rivers and the big creeks,” he says. “If it wrecks that, it puts a hole in all the storylines. We have six different songlines. It breaks that up.”

‘A slew of potential impacts’

Several federal government agencies and departments are in the middle of a wide-ranging $35m program to work out what fossil fuels could be under the ground in three regions, one of which is the Cooper basin.

Cooper Creek has a “long and enduring cultural significance”, says one of several long, technical and dense reports produced through a “bioregional assessment” being carried out by CSIRO, Geoscience Australia, the Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment, and the Bureau of Meteorology.

The Cooper region has eight nationally important wetlands and 26 threatened species, one report says.

Some areas of the basin have been producing oil and gas since the 1970s, using conventional drilling. But the region also has the “potential to produce significant amounts of shale, tight and deep coal gas” in the coming years. Just how much gas could be locked away in unconventional reserves isn’t known publicly.

These types of gas are known as “unconventional” because they’re harder to get to and often need hydraulic fracturing – or fracking – to liberate the gas from the rocks.

Elsewhere in Australia, the report says the energy industry has used 116 different chemicals when drilling for unconventional gas. Some 33 are of “potential high concern” and 41 are of “potential concern”, according to a government report on the Cooper basin.

A consultant’s report commissioned by the government but initially suppressed said unconventional gas exploration should not be allowed in the floodplains…