Allan Macpherson and Mt Abundance

The first European in the Maranoa was likely either Thomas Mitchell or his son Roderick in 1846 (though Finney Eldershaw claims he beat both Mitchells by four years in his journey of 1842).

Roderick Mitchell was the deputy Crown Commissioner for Lands in NSW who charted several branches of the Balonne River and may have got as far as the Bungil and Bungeworgorai Creeks. His journeys, and probably his maps, undoubtedly helped his father Sir Thomas Mitchell, then surveyor-general of NSW on his trip to the Maranoa in 1846. Sir Thomas Mitchell took the same route up the Darling River system into Queensland. He was the first person to describe Mt Abundance and the rich area around it.  He called it the Fitz Roy Downs in honour of the then Governor of New South Wales, Sir Charles Fitz Roy.
It was no coincidence it was Mitchell followed his son, nor was there a coincidence about the man that followed Sir Thomas to become the first white settler of the Maranoa.

His name was Allan Macpherson.

Macpherson's father William was the clerk of the NSW parliament and just as important as Mitchell.
They were both from Scotland and good friends too. Mitchell was also fond of William’s son Allan, a determined and ambitious young man. Allan was an adventurer who ran cattle and sheep on his Keera property in the remote Gwydir district of northern NSW. While the hilly country reminded him of his native Scotland, it wasn't profitable. Macpherson was captivated by Mitchell's description of Mt Abundance as "champaign country" and was determined to claim it for himself.

Knowing that "first come first served" meant possession under British law, he set off north-west along the river system for the promised land in July 1847. Macpherson had more than just Mitchell's maps, he had an armada of help: ten thousand sheep, hundreds of cattle, dozens of horses and drays and twenty men. The going was slow - they travelled just 60km in the first two weeks - but by the end of September his team was at the natural ford or "rocky bar" on the Balonne that Mitchell (senior) called St George's Bridge because he arrived there on the saint’s day,  April 23.

St George was not just the patron saint of England, it was also the last settled part of the English realm.
Not a single white man or woman lived north of the bridge. MacPherson crossed his Rubicon but was forced to halt for lambing season. Leaving the sheep behind, he finally gazed on Mt Abundance on Friday, October 15, 1847. Macpherson found Mitchell had not exaggerated about the quality of the land. "A glorious prospect!" he enthused.

He claimed a farm 30km across from the Cogoon River (now Muckadilla Creek) in the west to Bungeworgorai Creek in the east. The sight of the first natives two weeks later scared his men witless. Macpherson shamed them as cowards and he spent the following months building huts, cattle and sheep yards and fencing. Macpherson built several outstations including a cattle station on the spot of what would later become Roma.

The distance to the port of Newcastle was forbidding and Macpherson hoped to find a closer route to Brisbane via the Darling Downs. Urgent farmwork tied him down at Mt Abundance and after Christmas he went back to Keera for more supplies and drays. In January 1848, Macpherson got caught up in what would be a formidable foe for all who would live in the area: summer floods. Macpherson was constantly wet and bogged in heavy and impassable country with swollen fast-moving creeks.

He eventually made it to Keera but his return to the Maranoa was also delayed by floods. It was again a fleeting visit as Keera and Sydney demanded his presence on urgent family business. It was on his third return to St George's Bridge, Macpherson received the bad news Mt Abundance had been attacked.
Two men in outstations were speared to death and the rest were fleeing south.

Macpherson found them where the Cogoon met the Balonne but was able to convince only one of his men to accompany him back to Mt Abundance. The blacks were gone but there was a lot to be fixed. The experience redoubled his efforts to find a more direct route to the Darling Downs. The furthest he got was to a nearby station east of the Bungil owned by James Alexander Blythe.

Blythe was one of the earliest travellers to the Maranoa after Mitchell and had come back to establish a property between Roma and Wallumbilla. Macpherson was also fortunate to survive a skirmish with Aboriginals on his return home to Mt Abundance but his servant Charley was missing presumed dead. By the end of 1848, Macpherson became convinced it was too unprofitable to run sheep due to "blacks, losses, native dogs and overcrowding."

He turned Mt Abundance into a cattle property but the native attacks continued and three of his workers were speared in March 1849.After two more wool-carriers were killed, Macpherson and the new Commissioner of Crown Lands John Durbin patrolled the area with mounted troopers gathering the wool and taking it south. But Macpherson had had enough.

He went off to Scotland to get married and Mt Abundance remained an expensive and unprofitable out station. He sold it on his return “for a song". As Macpherson said, "it was by no means the first pioneers that reaped the golden returns, but those who were prudent enough to follow in their wake."

Major Mitchell and the Maranoa

The Maranoa is far from Stirlingshire but it was the fertile woody lands west of what is now Roma that most appealed to the Scottish-born surveyor-general of NSW, Thomas Mitchell. 

Sir Thomas Livingstone Mitchell was a Lieutenant Colonel in the British Army who earned his stripes with Wellington in the 1811 Iberian Campaign against Napoleon. The Duke was so impressed by the young Scot, barely 19, he commissioned him to survey the battlefields. After 16 years of military service he was head-hunted by the Crown to perform the same duties for the young colony of New South Wales as Deputy Surveyor-General.

Mitchell’s boss was John Oxley who had opened up several areas to white settlers including the Lachlan, Macquarie and Tweed Rivers. With Allan Cunningham, Oxley beat an inland path to what would become Queensland via the Brisbane River But the difficulties of his explorations led to an early death. John Oxley died in 1828 aged just 45. Hired just a year earlier, Oxley’s ill-health was always at the back of Mitchell’s mind and suddenly he was promoted into the role he would keep for the next 27 years and four major explorations.

The first of those in 1831 took Mitchell directly due north of Sydney towards Tamworth. He found the Gwydir River and turned inland till he found the Darling. After natives killed two of three helpers, Mitchell returned to Sydney to plan his next sortie. It took four years to return to the Darling but he was determined to find out where this long meandering river emptied into the sea. His botanist Richard Cunningham was killed by the Aborigines and Mitchell was forced to withdraw again after a skirmish.

Undaunted, he was back a year later to try again. There was more battles with natives and he killed seven of a large posse of 200 that were attacking him. This time he followed the Darling until it joined the Murray near Wentworth. Mitchell went on to see the Grampians and he followed the Glenelg River to the Bass Strait coast (where Nelson is now). Mitchell returned to Sydney a hero after opening up this vast stretch of Australia Felix to the Europeans.

It led to a relative semi-retirement and there was no more expeditions for nine years. Having mapped much of what would become Victoria, he would do the same for what would become Queensland. With fellow explorer Edmund Kennedy he set off north on December 15, 1845, aged 54. Mitchell called on familiar routines striking out north-west for the Darling, as he had done three times before. But this time he continued north to the Narran River, to the Balonne, and to the Culgoa. Near the junction of the Maranoa and Balonne rivers, Mitchell found a natural bridge on April 23, 1846. He named the bridge for the auspicious saint's day he found it, St George’s Bridge.

Crossing the bridge Mitchell followed the Cogoon Creek which he renamed what he thought the natives called it: Muckadilla Creek. This took him into great pastoral country west of what is now Roma. He christened a hill in the region Mt Abundance and from its top, marvelled over what he called a “a champaign region, spotted with wood, stretching as far as human vision or even the telescope would reach.” Mitchell would continue west to find the Warrego and Barcoo Rivers but it was his description of Mt Abundance that resonated. By champaign, Mitchell meant undulating country, but many who followed in his path were made drunk by his vision. It was to be his final exploration.

When he returned to Sydney, he told his friend and fellow Scot William MacPherson about his discoveries. His son Allan MacPherson held lands at Keera in New England and Mitchell encouraged him to try his luck at Mount Abundance. Heading north-west and crossing St George’s Bridge in the path of Mitchell, MacPherson was the first white settler of the Maranoa in 1847 just a year after his mentor, bringing with him his workers, cattle and sheep.

Watched closely by the Mandandanji whose lands he craved, MacPherson was fearless and carried guns to enforce his law. Ultimately he was not successful but he laid open the path for others to follow both from the south and from the east to the Darling Downs.

Thanks to his mentor Mitchell, MacPherson had changed the region forever.

Goodbye Bussamarai: The Mandandanji Land Wars in the Maranoa

I have just finished reading Goodbye Bussamarai, about how Europeans displaced the Aborigines in the part of Australia I live in. Subtitled less evocatively “The Mandandanji Land War Southern Queensland 1842-1852”, the book is simultaneously a work of great research, and a difficult, dense and sometimes dull read. Author Patrick Collins laments the fact that most Australians have heard of the Apaches heroes like Cochise and Geronimo but few have heard of tribes such as the Mandandanji and their leaders such as Bussamarai.

The problem is the record is patchy, written by whites and with the most awkward bits left out. It doesn’t help that a sense of Bussamarai the man does not emerge from Collin’s book. What does emerge is that early Europeans were tolerated as adventurers but not as a permanent and disruptive presence. When explorers Mitchell and Leichhardt drifted into what Collins calls East Maranoa in the colony of NSW (the current Queensland local government region of Maranoa plus all of the Balonne shire north of St George), they were followed by a handful of whites determined to take advantage of the fertile lands suggested by Mitchell’s descriptions of “mount abundance” and a “champagne region”.

Mitchell and Leichhardt also described their meetings with “the blacks” so the settlers knew the land weren’t empty. But they were not occupied in a way the new settlers understood. So with a sense of entitlement allied to superior firepower, it gave carte blanche to mass murder as the competition for territory expanded. The white arrived with “too many dreams and two many cows”.

After NSW surveyor-general Thomas Mitchell came to East Maranoa in 1846, he recounted his adventures in Sydney to William MacPherson, secretary to the NSW parliament and William's son the grazier Allan. Mitchell gave Allan maps and encouraged him to set up a land claim there. Macpherson Junior would be the first farmer in the Roma region setting off with men and livestock from his headstation in the Gwydir in 1847.

Without an inspection of the land, MacPherson was taking a large leap of faith with Mount Abundance near Muckadilla some 200km from the nearest white settlement at Moonie. Mitchell and MacPherson weren’t the first whites in the area. Clarence River area squatter Finney Eldershaw described his search in 1842 for suitable land after he heard of “luxurious downs” in the region. But it wasn’t the Aboriginals that stopped Eldershaw, it was economic conditions. Australia was in depression and East Maranoa’s remoteness from white settlement made it a difficult financial prospect.

Five years later, conditions were improving. While MacPherson was setting off, another friend of Mitchell, Edmund Kennedy was back in the region to do more exploration. He was joined by Archer, Blyth and Chauvel who explored the region from the north. MacPherson started his run in October 1847 with 20 men working the property. While we know a lot about the early whites, the Aborigines are more inscrutable. The character of the warrior “Bussamarai” who gives his name to the book is particularly problematic.

Collins claims that a tribal leader called variously by different whites as old Billy, Eaglehawk, Possum Murray and Bussamarai was the one and the same person but the evidence is not always convincing. Collins said the elder who helped Mitchell find Muckadilla Creek and the Maranoa River was “probably” Bussamarai. All Mitchell said was the blacks were not covetous and asked for nothing. But by the time Kennedy got to the region, relations had gone downhill and he had to use “one or two shots in the air” to frighten 200 Aborigines away from his camp. As the decade went by the Mandandanji lands became untenable as more whites entered the East Maranoa motivated less by fame and discovery then by land acquisition.

MacPherson recorded the first cattle killing at Warroo station near Surat in late 1847. By December 1848 there was all out war between the blacks and the settlers affecting every station the area between the present day towns of Roma and Chinchilla. Station hands working for absentee landholders dispensed rough justice in retaliation for attacks on their livestock while authorities in faraway Sydney and even further London turned a blind eye.

Finally a new force gradually restored “order” by 1851. This was NSW’s northern division of the Native Police, who served the economic ends of the pastoralists. Pastoral superintendent Frederick Walker led a team of 20 Aborigines up from the Macintyre River district dispensing rough justice wherever they went. Walker was renowned for his good relations with Aborigines but he showed no mercy in East Maranoa.

Scanty evidence exists of the genocide that followed. Pastoralist Gideon Lang testified to an 1854 parliamentary select committee on the native police that he wanted them to protect his Darling River runs. But Lang also knew of the “wholesale and indiscriminate killing” and “cold blooded cruelty on the part of the whites quite unparalleled in the history of these colonies”. Walker’s men used “fair means or foul” to bring about a lopsided peace in East Maranoa. There were significant massacres at Yuleba Creek in March 1850 and Yamboucal station near Surat in May 1852.

In retaliation, Collins said Bussamarai united the Bigambul people and two or three other groups with the Mandandanji to drive out the whites. They engaged in battles with the Native Police with inevitable conclusions. On November 1852 a Sergeant Skelton noted a skirmish at Ukabulla between the Aboriginals led by Bussamarai and armed troops in daylight. Two Aboriginals were “shot in the attempt to apprehend them,” Skelton said. “Likewise four more of the Blacks were shot before I could drive them to the station.” The East Maranoa front was “tamed” and the war and the atrocities moved on to other areas of Queensland.

The surviving Mandandanji settled into a life of fringe dwellers in their own territory. Many were forcibly removed to settlements at Taroom and later at Woorabinda and Cherbourg, scattering the memory of their sacred link to the land. The Goodbye to Bussamarai is not only to a warrior but to a way of life that had no chance against European civilisation.

Cotton On: Politicians crawl through the Cubbie Hole

The war of words over the future of Cubbie Station has started. The Foreign Investment Review Board has recommended to Treasurer Wayne Swan the sale of Australia’s largest cotton grower and holder of water licences to a consortium dominated by Chinese textile producer Shandong RuYi. The sale, currently in the hands of administrators, required FIRB approval as it was in excess of the $244 million takeover trigger for investigation. While the FIRB has not made its decision public, Swan has used it as a political attack to wedge the Opposition after the State Government backed the sale while local LNP senator Barnaby Joyce said it was not in the national interest.

Swan explained his reasons for the approval in an August 31 media release. Cubbie had been on the market for three years and the joint proposal by Shandong RuYi and Aussie wool company Lempriere had given him several undertakings. These included RuYi selling down its interest to 51 per cent within three years while maintaining “appropriate” board representation, having Cubbie managed by a Lempriere sub-company and offering jobs to all existing Cubbie employees.

Swan points to the National Food Plan which is in draft form and seeking public submissions until September 30. That Plan also vigorously defends the need for foreign investment in Australia which it says is critical for the agriculture and food sectors. “Foreign investment in agriculture supports production, creates jobs and contributes to the prosperity of rural communities and the broader economy,” the Plan green paper said. The paper said foreign investments undergo a rigorous national interest test and are subject to the same laws and regulations dealing with competition, tax and governance. 

So why should anyone care about the future of a company that employs only 50 people with another 120 contractors?  It was not a simple case of xenophobia against Chinese investment (though in truth, it would be hard to imagine a similar furore if it were Seattle RuYi buying Cubbie).  It is because as Senator Joyce said today it was the loss of “prime agricultural land to an overseas interest.”  As well, the sale would involve Australia’s biggest water licence going to an overseas interest and 13 per cent of the nation's cotton crop.

Barnaby lives in St George some 80km north of Cubbie so is well aware of how big a deal it is. Its massive scale and its potential to impact on the entire Murray Darling Basin, is most impressive from the satellite image. In the middle of parched brown western Queensland landscape, lies this darker patch of fertile ground following the Murray-Darling plain. Due west of Dirranbandi, (100km north of the NSW border) is Cubbie Station a patchwork quilt of storage dams, stretching along 30km of the Culgoa River. At 93,000 hectares, Cubbie is Australia’s biggest irrigator and most of the water is used to make cotton.

Cottonseed came to Australia in the first fleet and was an early cottage industry. It took the shortages of the American Civil War to set Queensland cotton up on a commercial basis but the industry ebbed and flowed according to inconsistent 20^th century demand. With the help of subsidies from the newly elected National Party government, SW Queensland got in on the act in 1960 but has been badly affected by droughts in 1995, 2004 and 2008. In 2010/11 there was a record Australian crop of 4.1 million bales showing an industry in resurgence after almost a decade of drought.

The recovery came too late for the owners of Cubbie, Australia’s biggest cotton plantation.  Cubbie had always got away with paying a pittance for its water much to the disgust of its neighbours and NSW irrigators downstream. Slack government processes allowed Cubbie to gradually suck in more of the region’s scarce water resources. As one commentator noted about other parts of the world, “water diversion on the scale of Cubbie could easily be the cause of war.”

Despite all the favourable treatment, the company still went broke in 2009. Cubbie Group chair Keith De Lacy – a former Treasurer in the Wayne Goss government - blamed the drought for the company’s woes. De Lacy said the station had only had one good season in five and the company was selling up to reduce debt and recapitalise the business to pursue other farming opportunities.  At the time SA independent senator Nick Xenophon said Cubbie going into voluntary administration proved the station was not a sustainable use of water. "What it does indicate is a failure of water policy at the Queensland Government level and it indicates even more strongly that you need to have a federal takeover of the river system," he said.

This week Xenophon spoke out again on Cubbie opposing the decision to approve the sale. “These important environmental assets shouldn't be flogged off to a foreign company that has no connection to Australia, and no obligation to act in our interests,” he said. “There’s also a concern the impact this could have on the entire Murray Darling Basin.” He also called on FIRB to make its report public so that the general public could be confident in its decision to approve the sale. “There must be a much lower trigger point for investigation,” he said. “We need much more transparency in terms of why applications are approved or rejected and we need a national register which lists foreign owned properties so that we know who owns what.”

Watching the Watchman: Swearing and 14-hour days

A couple of weeks ago my mate Glenn alerted me to the next episode of Australian Stories called Letters to the Editor. “Sounds like you,” was Glenn’s succinct summary and he sent me the blurb from the ABC website. It read:  

James Clark enjoyed a successful life in Paris when he decided to put his future, his relationship and the family sheep station on the line to chase his dream of running a little local newspaper in outback Cunnamulla, Queensland. 

I didn’t know the ABC were featuring Clark, but I was intrigued by someone I instinctively liked as a rare beast:. He is the owner and editor of a country newspaper, the wonderfully-named Warrego Watchman.  The Watchman is a competitor to our papers and I’ve yet to meet James but our enormous territories of coverage roughly overlap and we’ll had dealings from afar.  I’ve known him for over a year and he kindly offered his help in my masters on country journalism. Given his knowledge of the topic I regret not finding the time to take up his offer in my last-minute rush to finish.  

Despite Glenn’s reminder, I also regretted missing the show on the night it was broadcast but I was able to watch the 30 minute documentary later in the week on the website. I really enjoyed it and felt a deep connection with most of Clark’s responses to his experiences (though my own experiences were very different). I also felt I got to know him a lot better.

After watching it, I immediately emailed Clark to congratulate him on the success of the show. “Keep up the great work for journalism in the south west,”  I told him. His response was almost sheepish. “All pretty embarrassing but about 1.3 million apparently now know about the rag who didn't previously.” As a journalist, Clark knew well how the journalists at the ABC put together the show to get the most emotional impact – by making his relationship with wife Josephine Birch central to the tale. But having the world see inside your marriage is perhaps a small price to pay, when the Warrego Watchmen’s audience expands a couple of hundredfold – at least temporarily.  

My mate Glenn is right up to a point - his story has many similarities to my own.  I don’t know how old Clark is but I suspect he is not too many years younger than my 48. He left high-paid journalism Europe to (eventually) take on a small South West Queensland paper, while I quit high-paid IT in Brisbane to (eventually) work for a slightly bigger small south West Queensland paper.  Clark and I both believe strongly in the future of country media and our towns and see newspapers as important cornerstones of the community and chroniclers of its adventures.

But there were massive differences between us too. Clark had huge roots to his paper. He grew up on a sheep and cattle property of 160,000 acres near Cunnamulla and his family still farmed 60,000 acres at Pabra ranch south of town. I grew up in a small house in a small town half a world away from Roma. Though 20 years in Australia, I’d hardly ever set foot in south-west Queensland until I started working there. I had no idea of rural issues and I’m still green around the agricultural gills two and a half years later. Clark’s intimate knowledge of the land gives him a real grounding to  his writing that is impossible for me to replicate.

But Clark was no country yokel either. He rebelled against farm life as a young man and lived a full and varied career as a journalist across the world – another difference to me, barely two and a bit years in the craft. He got his break with a year on Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post. “Once you get a bit of experience on a newspaper that's recognised around the world, you're in, you're away,” Clark said in Letters to the Editor. Clark later worked in Fleet Street and was in France freelancing when his brother asked him to come back and look after Pabra.  He and Birch were beginning to forge a relationship and on impulse he invited her to join him in Cunnamulla. That is another major difference – I don’t have a glamorous French actress for a wife.

Birch said her introduction to Cunnamulla was Dennis O’Rourke’s controversial documentary made in 2000 called, simply Cunnamulla. Clark showed it in Paris to a collection of French friends, including Birch. O”Rourke’s film is an Australian classic but is not an easy watch. It is hated in the town itself  for its unflinching hardness and brutal honesty of its portrayal of remote small town life and its torturous race relations. 

Clark himself wrote an article that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald talking about O’Rourke being lynched if he ever showed up there. O’Rourke’s cinema verite style should have struck with Clark's French audience but all were bewildered by the strange Queensland accents and the apparent lack of action. All that is, except Birch, who thought it intriguing.  She followed Clark to Australia but said her destination wasn’t Cunnamulla but Clark.  The pair took on the paper as well as Pabra and were suffering until they decided they could no longer print the paper themselves. Birch said their printer breakdown saved them from their own breakdown and they face the future with optimism, now printing has been outsourced.

At the “happy ending” of the ABC show, Clark and Birch got married (in April this year). At the very end Birch spoke of their dreams to be “Murdochs of the South West”. While she said it in jest, it reminded me of another difference between Clark and I. He is an owner-editor, I’m just an journalist-editor. I don’t want to be a Murdoch, I’d just be happy to be the Harold Evans of the South West. I don’t have the capital to buy a paper and I don’t have the business acumen and way with money to run one successfully anyway.

Clark would probably also see me as part of the problem, working for the man (the Western Star is published by APN) and producing corporatised papers.  But his goal to make the Warrego Watchman a “lively read” is one I share for the Western Star. It’s just that unlike Clark, I haven’t fully torn myself away from the need to be impartial. And I will never tear myself away from the need to be trusted.  

Yet of the entire documentary, it was one comment, again by Birch, very early in the piece where I most identified with Clark and where my friend Glenn was right on the money. Working on bush newspapers, Birch said, meant “a lot of swearing and 14 hour days.” I squirmed in immediate acknowledgement. Country papers don’t pay much so you must be passionate about them to enjoy them. That means dealing with pressure and long hours. Embarrassed or not, Clark, Birch and the ABC did well to shine a rare light on newspapers in this part of the world.

Gunggari People get native title

It was a joyous day in Mitchell today. The Gunggari people, traditional owners of the land south and west of town celebrated a native victory yesterday with a march down the main street. “Who are we?” they chanted. “GUNGGARI” was the response. Loud and proud, they were celebrating the first native title determination on mainland Southern Queensland.

The marchers were happy a day after the Federal Court of Australia came all the way to Mitchell Shire Hall  to make a consent determination. Justice John Reeves announced the decision immediately shaking hands with Gunggari elder Wayne Saunders as many people cheered and wept. The determination recognises native title rights and interests over 13,600 sq km of land and waters in central southern Queensland. The area is broken up into parcels, the two biggest of which are in the middle of a triangle between Mitchell (east) Charleville (west) and Bollon (south).

In these areas, the Gunggari People negotiated Indigenous Land Use Arrangements (ILUA) with three local councils (Maranoa, Balonne and Murweh),  electricity supplier Ergon, telecommunications provider Telstra and five pastoral properties. Once the ILUAs are formalised, the Gunggari Native Title Aboriginal Corporation will be the prescribed body corporate to manage the native title rights. Their rights are non-exclusive but allow Gunggari people access to, travel, camp, hunt, teach, light fires and use water in the areas affected. They can also hold religious ceremonies and spiritual activities on the land.

The rights are a long time coming. Queensland South Native Title Services principal legal officer Tim Wishart handed up the list of documents to Justice Reeves on which the claim was based. Wishart made a powerful speech documenting the history of the Gunggari “from time beyond memory”. Wishart said the Gunggari land ran west from the Maranoa River and included the headwaters of the Nebine Creek, Mungallala Creek, Wallam Creek and Neabul Creek which together feed into the greater Murray-Darling basin.  They fought to protect those lands “probably before English developed as a language,” Wishart said.

They were uninclined to let the European invaders have free run of the place after Sir Thomas Mitchell first explored the area in 1840.  In 1855 an exasperated Crown Land Commissioner Wiseman wrote “No tribe will allow of the peaceable occupation of their country,” The whites fought back and with superior weaponry killed at least 75 Aboriginals along the Maranoa River up to 1862.  In 1880, George Thorn (who served as Queensland premier two years earlier) boasted the inland Queensland Aboriginals were “pretty well shot down and got rid of”.

Thorn was wrong. The Gunggari and other tribes hung on tenaciously even after losing the war to the colonials.  Monitored by the border and native police, They were tolerated as joint owners of the land until the twentieth century when the patriarchal attitudes of the new Commonwealth brought about the Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of Sale of Opium Acts 1901.  Under this act the camps that existed across the Maranoa were dismantled and hundreds of people were moved east and north into alien lands at government reserves and missions at Taroom, Purga, Barambah/Cherbourg, Palm Island and Woorabinda.

Most Gunggari ended up at Taroom settlement established in 1911. They stayed there until 1927 when the site was abandoned for a dam on the Dawson River.  Though the dam never went ahead, they were marched north to a site near Rockhampton called Woorabinda. Here they were among 17 different language groups under the control of the Chief Protector of Aboriginals, an Orwellian title who was supposed to “protect them from acts of cruelty, oppression and injustice.” Instead they turned a blind eye at best, or ran at worst, schemes to rob Aboriginals of what little they had. 

The few Gunggari that remained behind on country didn’t have it easy either. They mostly gravitated to Mitchell town and were housed on the Yumba (“camp”)  on the eastern edge of town near the Maranoa River. At the Yumba, Gunggari elders spoke their language but repressive white attitudes discouraged them from passing on their knowledge to the next generation.  They did pass on the cultural laws and customs and hunting traditions. Yumbas were often shantytowns and many towns such as Mitchell and Surat demolished theirs in the 1960s. The people moved into town and started meeting the whites in school when previously they would only ever meet on the rugby league or netball field.  

The 1967 referendum, the Keating Redfern speech and Mabo and Wik decisions slowly changed attitudes both of the white and black communities. Robert Munn for the Gunggari People first filed a native title application in March 1996 and followed it through despite no legal representation for 11 years. The application was modified in 1998 to reduce the covered areas and the application was split into two parts in 2001.  In 2007 Queensland South Native Title Services became the legal representative  and they registered an ILUA with the Queensland Government in 2008 for the first part which saw parcels of land change hands in the Dunkeld area south of Mitchell.  Friday’s decision was for the second half.  Munn did not live to see it. He died in July 2009 and five others continued the application in their name. 

In December 2010, the State of Queensland began substantive mediation. The applicant and respondents submitted their material to the Federal Court who announced their decision on Friday.  As well as the many Gunggari who celebrated in Mitchell, others celebrated from afar such as Queensland State of Origin star Johnathan Thurston and Opera Australia baritone Don Bemrose. “I am very proud to say I am a member of the Gunggari community,” Thurston said. “It is important that our history with this land, and our customs, have been observed in this way and I congratulate everyone who has fought for this recognition over the past 17 years – almost as long as I’ve been playing rugby league.” 

Bemrose, the first Aboriginal member of Opera Australia, said he was always proud and honoured to represent the Gunggari. “This moment is acknowledgement of our people’s continued bond with the Maranoa and the persistence, dedication and strength of a few to do all possible to again connect our land to all Gunggari past, present and future is amazing,” he said. As Wishart concluded in Court on Friday, the determination has confirmed what the Gunggari already knew: the land was theirs.

Draft Surat Underground Water Impact Report - part 3: Bubbling gas issues

In the last couple of days, the Lock the Gate Alliance which represents a coalition of landholders opposed to coal seam gas in the Surat Basin released a video called Condamine River Gas Leak. It shows footage from an organisation called Gasileaks taken along the River at an “undisclosed location”. There was bubbling activity at the surface of the river and some kind of meter that went berserk when placed near the bubbles.

Frackman in Roma July 2010

The footage was filmed by local landholder Dayne Pratzsky who has been a long-term vocal critic of the industry. I remember Pratzsky as “frackman” for his wonderful attention-grabbing outfit he wore  when he heckled the State Government Community Cabinet in June 2010.  When we published the Lock the Gate footage on our Facebook page today (without comment),  a local man named Andrew Thomas pointed out this phenomenon was not uncommon in the gasfields region. “I grew up at a location near Orallo and all the bores would light up if you wanted them to - the gas comes out of most bore holes,” Andrew said. “It has been happening for well over 150 years around Roma and Surat and lots of other places - get a life and move on.”

It might be difficult for Pratzky and other blockies in the Lock the Gate Alliance to do exactly that. This is their life and they don’t want to move on. Yet I fear they – and others who want a moratorium of the industry – are placing themselves too far outside the conversation about how the industry should evolve. Origin Energy, the petroleum tenure holder in the location where Pretsky filmed (a fishing spot south west of Chinchilla known as the "coal hole") confirmed what Thomas told the Western Star on Facebook “According to local knowledge it goes back at least 30 years and naturally occurring gas has been a phenomenon in the Queensland Western Downs region for more than 100 years,” Origin said.

The public face of Lock the Gate Alliance is its media-savvy president Drew Hutton. He was the one who publicly announced  the Chinchilla leak.  Hutton, a prominent member of Queensland Greens, said he was unconvinced by Origin’s response and challenged them to prove it. Hutton said Origin should “release its seismic and other data...to establish whether or not the leak is linked to the company's coal seam gas operations.” Hutton said he consulted “several highly competent hydrogeologists” who told him there was a good chance the leaks were “linked to the de-watering of the coal seam aquifers and possibly fracking opening up pathways for the methane.” 

With neither Origin nor Hutton willing to offer their sources, it is difficult to know who is right. And water quality remains one of the great unknowns of this massive new industry. Yet this problem can be solved just as land access and now water depletion. The 2010 Queensland land access laws redressed the power imbalance between gas companies and landholders and the new Draft Surat Basin Underground Water Impact Report  which I reported about on Monday (Part 1) and Tuesday (part 2) deals with the water depletion issue. The report specifically ruled out a role for monitoring water quality. That prompted an anonymous respondent to my Tuesday piece to ask the legitimate question: if "It will not monitor water quality (eg for contamination from fracking)", who WILL monitor water quality?  

The answer to that question is the same as the answer to who will monitor water depletion: a mix of the Queensland Government Department of Natural Resources and Mining and the petroleum tenure holders themselves. Many in the Roma forum on the report I attended asked if this was not leaving the fox in the charge of the henhouse. The Queensland Water Commission’s response to that was to say, if they did something wrong, they’d be found out. There would be anomalies in the results that would stand out.

If this is correct then we need to maintain trust. Trust of the companies to do the right thing and trust of the regulator to pick up the anomalies if the companies don’t do the right thing. The gas majors all have the profit imperative but are bound by a number of strict rules and environment conditions they have to satisfy to get the green light for their enterprises. With the pressure to meet their export commitments once the gas comes online in 2014, those companies will need to ensure they are squeaky clean so the regulator does not have a reason to hold them up.

What does need to be looked at is the quick gobbling up of Australia’s natural resources.  According to mining critic Paul Cleary, Australia has the 12^th largest reserve of gas but is the world’s second largest exporter and heading towards number one. Gladstone Port in Queensland is the home of four of the eight big LNG plants and Incentives by the Bligh Government drove gas consumption for the local market. Now the high price of oil is driving this massive investment in coal seam methane for LNG. The problem is the price of natural gas on the New York-based Henry Hub has been declining for over a year and will mean the companies will have to reforecast earnings or else dig for more gas.  

With governments greedy for the royalties, knowing when that saturation point comes will be critical for the success of the industry and the regions they serve. As the Surat DWIR proves, having good legislation supported by science will be critical in keeping an even keel.

Surat Underground Water Impact Report - part 2

This is the second post on the subject of the Draft Surat Underground Water Impact Report now out for review after the Queensland Water Commission today took its finding to Roma yesterday and Chinchilla today. See yesterday’s post on the background to the report and the geological formations involved.

This post looks at how the model was derived and examines the monitoring regime put in place by the QWC.  There were three key steps in designing the flow model: conceptualisation, construction and calibration.  In the conceptualisation phase, the designers took into account geological data and formation contacts in databases held by the Geological Survey of Queensland and the Department of Natural Resources Groundwater Database.

They also took into account the distribution and depth of the geological layers of the Walloon Coal Measures based on previous studies and developed hydraulic parameter estimates based on pump and drill tests, existing models and reported results.

They devised 19 model layers based the formations from the shallowest (Condamine Alluvium) to the deepest (Permian Sediments) and mapped out the groundwater flow between the layers. The layers are recharged by rain in the outcrop areas on the edges of the Basin. The model is further complicated by the Walloon Coal Measures (the main CSG bearing formation in the Surat Basin) which itself contains various layers of sediment of varying permeability. The model allocates three layers to the Walloon for simplicity.

The model covers an area 550km x 660km each divided into a 1.5sq km cell stacked into 19 layers.  Once constructed with initial hydraulic parameters, the model was calibrated to replicate pre-CSG conditions in 1995.  It was calibrated using groundwater levels from 1,500 bores in the groundwater database.  The model was designed to make predictions from the 1995 data both including and excluding petroleum impacts.  They added uncertainty analysis to provide 200 different predictions of drawdown for each model cell at different time periods. The upper and low five percent of the 200 were discarded as outliers and the maximum value of the remaining predictions was used in the report. 

The report estimates the CSG industry will draw an average of 95,000 megalitres of water a year over the life of the industry.  It will be higher in the next three years as the industry expands with the QWC with an average of 125,000 ML a year over the period.  This is why getting the water monitoring strategy right is so important. 

The water monitoring strategy involves monitoring of water levels in coal seams and surrounding aquifers. It will not monitor water quality (eg for contamination from fracking) or the volume of water extracted from wells. QWC will not conduct the monitoring – that will be left to the gas companies. Someone said to me today that was like leaving Ned Kelly in charge of the bank vault but the QWC assures us the companies have legal responsibilities and any anomalies will quickly be exposed.

The monitoring has six broad objectives. 1. Establish background trends not attributable to CSG. 2.Identify changes in aquifer conditions in petroleum development areas. 3. Identify changes in aquifer conditions near critical groundwater use (eg towns that rely on groundwater), 4 Identify changes in aquifer conditions near springs. 5. Improve future groundwater flow monitoring 6. Improve understanding of connectivity between aquifers.

There will be a regional monitoring network which will have 142 monitoring sites across the region (27 already exist) which will have 498 monitoring points (104 already exist). These sites will target different strata of the Surat and Bowen Basin including the Condamine Alluvium, Main Range Volcanics, Mooga Sandstone, Orallo Formation, Gubberamunda Sandstone, Westbourne Formation, Springbok Sandstone, Walloon Coal Measures, Hutton Sandstone, Evergreen Formation, Precipice Sandstone, Clematis Sandstone and Bandanna Formation.

At each site, water data is collected at least once a fortnight.  Queensland’s regulatory requirements provide for the UWIR to be updated every three years but there will also be an annual report.

Draft Surat Underground Water Impact Report - part 1

Surat Cumulative Management Area

I had much underground water on my mind today.  That was because I attended both sessions today in Roma where the Qld Water Commission were explaining their Draft Underground Water Impact Report (pdf, 8 meg) for the Surat Cumulative Management Area to the public.  The quick and dirty bottom line is that I don’t think the data supports a moratorium of the industry and as a worst-case scenario says the impact is moderate and manageable. However this is the first of several posts that will drill down into the report in some detail.  

The Surat Cumulative Management Area is a rough triangle drawn between Emerald in the north, Roma in the west and Toowoomba in the south-east. The geology of the region is complicated as the nature of the water. I had several concepts challenged including what are the Bowen and Surat Basins, what is the Great Artesian Basin and where is the gas stored. The Great Artesian Basin is not a continuous geological formation but a hydrogeological basin across many alternating geological layers. Similarly I used to think the Bowen Basin as the land roughly inland of Mackay including all the big coalmining areas of Emerald and Moranbah. The Surat Basin roughly went from Dalby to Roma.  But it turns out my understanding is that is faulty too. The Bowen Basin lives below the Surat Basin, it is only in the strip-mining areas at Moranbah where its coal formations come to the surface. 

Petrol and gas is a different mining process to coal and covered by different legislation.  The Draft Underground Water Report was required because the law allows petroleum tenure owners to explore for petrol and gas on private property and by necessity, there is some interference with the water on those tenures including the removal of the water. This is particularly so in coal seam gas production which works by reducing water pressure in the seams to release the gas. In the Surat Cumulative Management Area most of the mining is done in the Walloon Coal Measures (Surat Basin) or Bandanna Formation (Bowen Basin) which are geological layers of the Great Artesian Basin which have low permeability rocks alternating with high economic value aquifers and feed important springs.

The problem is that when water is removed, it affects a wide area around the gas well. This is compounded if there are a number of nearby wells also drawing out water. Today most of the groundwater in the Surat Region that comes to the surface is used by agriculture, industry, stock and domestic – some  215,000 megalitres a year. CSG is only responsible for 17,000 ML at the moment but that will rise sharply in the coming years as the four big projects (Santos GLNG, Origin APLNG, British Gas QCLNG and Arrow Surat Gas Project) take off.

When water is removed from the coal formations, water from surrounding aquifers will flow in.  So when the water pressure is reduced, it doesn’t necessarily mean less water. However it does mean there will be a decline in the water level of the bore that taps that aquifer.  The question is by why how much and to answer that question the Queensland Water Commission developed a groundwater model to predict the impacts of the CSG industry. They used vast reams of already known data on water levels and bores which they added to the known plans of tenure holders plus some science about the way underground water moves through the region.

The resulting flow model was complex. There are 19 interacting layers and three million individual cells in the model. It was calibrated to get close matches with known 1995 results from bores giving the team a high degree of certainty they were in the ballpark. They also added ‘uncertainty analysis’ taking the 95 percentile of 200 different predictions for each well. In other words,  they were taking the worst case scenario in 20.

For each well the QWC set a trigger threshold of drawdown.  For consolidated aquifers such as sandstone, the trigger was five meters, it was two metres for unconsolidated (shallow alluvial) aquifers such as the Condamine Alluvium and just a 0.2 metre drop for springs, including watercourses connected to springs.

If the modelling showed the “Immediate Affected Area” (an IAA) of that well exceeded that threshold in the next three years, then the responsible CSG company must undertake restoration measures to restore the bore’s capacity to supply water, or provide the bore owner with an alternative water supply.  This is known in the legislation as “make good" requirements. It could mean adjusting the bore, improving the pressure, drilling a new bore or finding an alternative source. QWC have identified 85 bores in the Surat Region which will exceed the trigger, all of them in the Walloon Coal Measures.

There was also a secondary measure of long-term impact if an IAA exceeded the threshold at any time in the future. This modelling identified 528 bores affected, mostly in the Walloon but some in the Springbok Sandstone (104), Hutton Sandstone (23) and Gubberamunda Sandstone (1).  It is less clear what the Commission expects to happen with these bores though the Roma session talked about gas tenure holders being “proactive” with bore owners in this category.

Part 2 of this will discuss the monitoring regime QWC is putting into place to determine the trigger points.

Reaching back to Ryan to secure Labor's future

Queensland Labor leader Annastacia Palaszczuk has reached far back into the party’s past to conjure up a vision for its future. Palaszczuk used a Labor Day dinner in Brisbane to announce a new not-for-profit organisation to debate and discuss new policies funded by the party and the unions. The new entity is called the T.J. Ryan Foundation after the former state Labor premier. Palaszczuk called Ryan one of the Labor movement’s shining lights. "It was Thomas Joseph Ryan's government from 1915 to 1919 that is regarded as having laid the groundwork for the Labor governments that dominated Queensland politics in following decades,” she said. 
(Photo: National Library of Australia)

But the foundation link to the union would not have entirely pleased the wily lawyer who was the state’s greatest Labor premier and possibly the greatest of either party. As D.J. Murphy notes in a 1978 study of Ryan, Labor never aspired to be purely a trade union party in Queensland. From its foundation until the maritime strikes of 1890, it saw itself as a reforming party based on urban and rural unions and it supported farmers who wanted a more equitable sharing of wealth. It wasn't long before they grabbed power. Though it was only initially for just one week in 1899, Queensland was the first jurisdiction in the world to elect a labour government. In 1904 the first Commonwealth Labor Government of John Watson took power by entering into a coalition with dissident Liberals.

Among the Liberals attracted to the reforming zeal of early Labor was Thomas Joseph Ryan. Ryan was the son of an itinerant Irish farm labourer who arrived in Victoria in 1860 and became a stone fence builder in Geelong. Thomas Joseph was the fifth of his six children to Jane Cullen who died when he was just seven. Eldest daughter Mary, 11, brought up the family in her mother’s absence. Young Tom was a gifted student and got a scholarship to St Francis Xavier College in Kew. He graduated in law in 1899 and he moved to Queensland as a teacher at Rockhampton Grammar School. He was admitted to the Queensland Bar in 1901.

Ryan’s politics were shaped in Victoria by the liberalism of the 1890s which saw a big role for the state, He was also an avid federationist and both views shaped his thinking in power. At Maryborough and Rockhampton, Ryan was marked out as a great public speaker. His specialty was constitutional law and he argued for the vote for women, “one person one vote” and fair elections.

In 1903 he nominated as a Deakinite but it was soon obvious to him he had more in common with Labor. A year later he switched sides and quickly established himself as a leading Labor spokesman in Rockhampton.  He was inspired by the Prime Minister Watson who ruled responsibly in office. He remained Labor in 1907 after William Kitson left the party he led but was defeated in that year’s election. In 1909 he moved west to stand for the seat of Barcoo and was elected. He was respected as a lawyer who had mastery of labour laws and could reduce complex legal questions into arguments anyone could understand.

In parliament he was quickly seen as a rising star and he established himself as a formidable adversary of the government. Aware of the power of the press he bought the Rockhampton Daily Record in 1910 which while supportive never became a mere propaganda tool for Ryan. These were exciting times for Labor as Andrew Fisher gained a majority in both houses at Federal level. 

Ryan was a nationalist who supported referendums to give the Federal Government more power over monopolies and labour issues. Labor had hoped to win the Queensland election of 1912 until a Brisbane general strike allowed Liberal premier Digby Denham to play the law and order card in a snap election. Ryan was elected leader of the new opposition with EG Theodore installed as his deputy. It would prove one of the great combinations of Australian politics.

In 1913 he outlined where he wanted Labor to go. “There was no other party which had a policy formed at the instance of the people themselves,” he said. He appealed to professionals, farmers, clerks and labourers. With Ryan at the helm, Labor won easily in on 1 June 1915 with a broad appeal to workers and farmers who supported his push to end the monopoly power of the Colonial Sugar Refinery. Tom Ryan was just 39 years old. As Ryan became premier and Attorney-General, Australia was being sucked deep into the European War. He fully supported the war. What Ryan hated was the way the big companies grew fat on war profits with the likes of CSR and the pastoralists overcharging the Imperial Army for its supplies. He established a cane price board and negotiated a sugar labour agreement. 

Yet Ryan’s biggest problem wasn’t industrialists but his own parliament: specifically the upper house. As early as 1908 Ryan called the Legislative Council an ‘excrescence on the Constitution”. In 1915, the chamber was stacked with the previous government’s appointees with only five of 45 members supporting Labor frustrating his reform program. Ryan wanted the Council abolished as the Governor seemed unwilling to appoint new Labor members. By 1917, Ryan had charmed the new Governor into appointing 13 Labor members and set the course for the Upper House’s abolition. He supported abolition in a 1917 referendum but it was comprehensively defeated. 

His other major referendum issue was conscription. Australia was the only volunteer army in the war and Ryan could see it emerging as a divisive issue. He delayed a party decision to avoid a split. But once the referendum was called, he was the only premier to take a stand against it. Because of his role in helping to defeat the first conscription referendum, Ryan became the defacto leader of the second campaign, a battle he relished. Prime Minister Billy Hughes had brought in wide-ranging censorship to gag anti-conscriptionists. On 19 November 1917 Ryan made a speech in parliament which the censors refused to allow printed though the same arguments he made a day earlier had been faithfully recorded by the pro-conscriptionist Brisbane Courier. In the offending speech Ryan had quoted war office figures that showed there were already 100,000 men available for reinforcements making conscription unnecessary.

The censor’s report made it sounds as if Ryan supported conscription and refused to budge on requests to correct the record. Ryan insisted Hansard print the censored portion of the speech and Theodore took advantage of this to include two other censored pamphlets with the removed text highlighted in bold print. Theodore also arranged to have the Hansard circulated throughout Queensland.

At this was happening, Hughes arrived in Brisbane and authorised the raid on the Queensland Government Printer’s Office to stop the publication. He challenged Theodore to repeat the pamphlets outside the privilege of parliament and he would “have him in 48 hours.” But the press interpreted this as a direct challenge to Ryan as Theodore’s boss. It was Ryan who accepted the challenge and repeated the speech in front of thousands at two public meetings. He and Theodore were prosecuted but the magistrate dismissed the case.

Because of his strong anti-big business stance, Ryan was hated by the press. In October 1917, the Brisbane Courier editor threw his own remarks into the report of a Ryan speech against the “intolerable” Legislative Council saying it was Ryan who made it intolerable. “He wishes to retain power in the hands of the union s to create these intolerable situations whenever they choose,” the editor said. The Melbourne Argus called his anti-conscription campaign a “paltry and contemptible conspiracy with Germans and other disloyalists.” 

But more people believed Ryan than the Argus and the second referendum was lost by a bigger margin than the first. By 1918, Ryan was a national figure feted by large audiences in Sydney. He was easily re-elected as Premier of Queensland the same year in a personal triumph. He had shown it was possible to achieve in parliament what many socialists believed was only possible through revolution. But his growing stature meant he was increasingly consumed by national issues.

He still found time to pursue his attack on the Legislative Council. When the upper house softened his taxation laws, he threatened them with a large influx of Labor members and worked on a second referendum to curb its powers. In 1918, he left for England for a Privy Council case and arranged for loans with the Bank of England. Ryan’s urbane demeanour allayed the fears of the British moneymen Queensland was in the hands of the Bolsheviks or the Wobblies. 

Ryan and his wife caught the dreaded influenza in England and they lay stricken in their hotel, with doctors expecting both to die at any moment. They both recovered and Ryan won his case but years of political struggle were starting to take a  toll. He returned back to Melbourne to a large crowd and was asked would he enter federal politics. “Possibly” was the answer. When he came home to Queensland, he was escorted by hundreds of soldiers carrying lighted torches crammed by cheering spectators. 

A conference in October 1919 formally asked him to become campaign director of the federal campaign. When his friend Jim Page died in 1921, the seat of Maranoa opened up and Ryan went there to campaign for the seat. He had a heavy cold and was physically exhausted. In Barcaldine, he collapsed and was placed in hospital. He died on Monday, 1 August 1921 aged just 46.

His legacy was immense and his successor Theodore completed many of his projects including the abolition of the upper house. Thanks to Ryan, Labor would rule from 1915 to 1929 and again from 1932 to 1957. As long time Queensland parliament clerk CA Berneys wrote, Ryan was the best he’d seen: “He stood pre-eminent as a leader; as an earnest exponent of the faith that was in him and as a generous big hearted fighter.”

Today's Queensland Labor leader Palaszczuk looks to Ryan as the party emerges from the wreckage of their worst ever election loss. She said the Ryan Foundation would show Labor was something beyond a mere brand. Channelling Ryan she said Labor always been “a living, breathing party” focused on equality, fairness and opportunity. “Labor’s policies and principles should always be about people,” she said.

Labor trounced in another Queensland election

The City of Brisbane has not yet finished punishing Labor delivering a handsome victory to the LNP in the Council elections. Suffering a swing of 5% since 2008, Labor is likely to lose three seats barely a month after being trounced in the State election. The city is Australia’s largest municipality and incumbent Mayor Graham Quirk is heading towards an easy victory with 60% of the vote with almost 65% counted.  Labor’s Ray Smith is polling a disappointing 24.69% while the Greens candidate the high profile and former Democrat senator candidate Andrew Bartlett is also not doing as well as some expected with 10.36% of the vote.

The Greens are doing much better in the councillor vote, in some inner western seats overturning Labor as the main opposition.  The LNP will comfortably retain their big majority in council and are likely to take three seats from Labor with another two Labor seats in the balance. In Central, Heather Beattie (wife of former premier Peter Beattie) is heading for defeat as she trails Vicki Howard by 51-31 percent with over half the vote counted. This was the seat vacated by Labor powerbroker and former deputy mayor David Hinchliffe ending a 24 year run by Labor in the seat.

There are 26 one-member constituency wards in Brisbane and at the time of writing, the result looks like being LNP 19, Labor 7 (20-7 including the Mayor). Two of those seven Labor seats are still in the balance: Wynnum-Manly (43-41) and Northgate (51-49).  Two more are definitely lost. In Karawatha (Woodridge) sitting ALP councillor Gail MacPherson stood down but her replacement Adrienne Cremin is losing easily to a candidate with a very un-LNP like name: Kim Marx. 

Labor's John Campbell is the only sitting councillor likely to be unseated as he trails Ryan Murphy in Doboy (Tingalpa) by 54-46. In the Indooroopilly-based Walter Taylor ward, the Green’s candidate Tim Dangerfield (19.77 per cent) outpolled Labor’s Adam Atkins (14.33 per cent) to finish second to LNP’s Julian Simmonds (65.91 per cent), with nearly two-thirds of the vote counted. 

Meanwhile Labor looks set to retain The Gabba which is in Anna Bligh’s old seat of South Brisbane. Bligh’s former election agent Jackie Trad has narrowly won the South Brisbane by-election which also took place yesterday though the LNP is not yet conceding just 800 votes behind with over half the votes counted. 

Delighted with his own win and the win in Central, returned Brisbane Mayor Graham Quirk said it was the first time the LNP had held inner-city Brisbane at all three levels of government.  "Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, is an opportunity - a very unique opportunity - for a high level of co-operation between the Premier of this state and the lord mayor of this city, to work in a cohesive and co-operative way," Cr Quirk said. "I think it is a very good thing for Brisbane and for Queensland."

correction: Tennyson was won by an independent not by the LNP making the result LNP 18, Lab 7 Ind 1 - thanks to Bird of Paradox for the pick-up.