On the banks of Disaster

IT WAS November 2000 and Richard Kingsford was up to his neck in the Macquarie Marshes, leading a party of sceptical followers covered from shoulder to ankle in leeches. Far from being worried, the shaggy professor of environmental science at the University of NSW, then a senior researcher with the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, looked like a swamp troll in his element.

With gleeful eyes, dripping beard and determined semi-swimming stride, it was hard to believe he was one of Australia's most respected and senior inland river scientists.

Kingsford was leading a team towards a vast breeding ground of straw-necked ibis. To get there a helicopter had landed on a tiny speck of land surrounded by what seemed like an inland sea. Kangaroos were swimming through the marshes and life had exploded on a breathtaking scale.

We plunged in and soon only chests and heads were out of the snake-infested swamp. We pressed on for about a kilometre towards thousands of the noisy, breeding ibis.

Water is what Kingsford lives for - volumes with numbers so big that the only way to conceptualise them is by referring to "syd 'arbs". One "syd 'arb" is the equivalent in volume to all of Sydney Harbour - about 500,000 million litres (megalitres) of water.

from the Sydney Morning Herald