Tapping into the Top End

WARM rain like I’ve never seen or felt before fell for the three days I was in Darwin for an Australian Sister Cities Association meeting.
We also had the good fortune to receive an invitation to a Destination Darwin cocktail party hosted by the Northern Territory chief minister Clare Martin on Friday, 2 March.
This was a side invitation to our reason for being in Darwin, but left no doubt in my mind that Darwin hospitality was as warm as its weather.
Destination Darwin is a campaign set up in August last year to enable Darwinians to sell Darwin and they appear to be doing it well.
They had invited 150 travel representatives to the Top End for a threeday peep at the place and I thought there would have to be someone from my region at such an event.
I eventually found James CarringtonSmith, of Pakenham.
James is an international travel consultant with the Flight Centre at Fountain Gate.
He was able to meet the Northern Territory Chief Minister Clare Martin and hopefully also tell her about this area.
But Darwin certainly let us see what a really good rain was like — I had forgotten. Places received more than one metre of rain and I wondered why couldn’t we channel some of that runoff to Victoria.
I was told that one area received three metres of rainfall in two days and another 1.5 metres enough to fill our dams in one go.
So what is the value of water?
Across the Top End you would think it comes fairly cheaply, while Tasmania values water in the top dam of its hydro electricity system at $7 a litre.
I asked myself about the real value of water in Melbourne when we now know that by summer 2009 we will have run out of water and probably won’t have enough to shower.
We have massive amounts of grey water running into the sea that could be farmed and used for irrigation and we can introduce more tanks to capture roof water.
But we also need to think about piping water down from our tropical areas, despite the cost, because we simply do not have enough rainfall to provide enough water for the way we expect to live.
We will pay one way or the other.