—Michelle Peters—-

Water is our most important resource, says dedicated water conservationist, Anne Kennedy, who at 75 years of age is still continuing her decades-long fight to protect it.

But, she says, it’s vital now that younger generations take up the cause.

A direct descendant of renowned Scots warrior king Robert the Bruce, Anne too, in a sense,  has taken up arms for a cause, fighting for the conservation of artesian bore water and the end of coal seam gas mining.

Her fight has earned Anne an Order of Australia Medal (AM), and now her story has been published in a new book, ‘Nine Lives for Our Planet’ written by John Watts.

As a child growing up in Sydney, Anne didn’t really think much about where her water came from. It was a visit to her friend’s home at Nyngan, where she saw the true value of water.

“In the city, you don’t think about water. You turn the tap on and it’s there.  When I visited the Nyngan property they'd say you can’t shower every day, and I went, oh really,” Anne says with a laugh.

The scarcity and value of our country’s water became only more apparent when Anne married and moved onto her husband, Neil’s property at Coonamble. 

The couple’s only accessible water for the home came from the rainwater tank, while dam water was used in the garden.

“We often ran out of water,” Anne says, “I used to have to drive all the way to ‘Yuma’, my parents-in-law’s property, to do the washing.

“I realised how absolutely vital it was, and then we moved to ‘Yuma’, where we were totally reliant on bore water.”

It was here that Anne became curious to know more about the vast underground store of water in the Great Artesian Basin, the lifeblood of many properties in the Australian outback.

“Bore water is the greatest asset Australia has. And, I remember in school we were taught the Great Artesian Basin was constantly being recharged,” she says.

But it was reading Professor Lance Endersbee’s book, ‘A Voyage of Discovery’ that opened Anne’s eyes to the fact that the water from the Great Artesian Basin was ancient and finite.

This discovery prompted her to action, founding the Great Artesian Basin Protection Group she tirelessly lobbied for the capping and piping of free-flowing artesian bore water.

“Over the years we've conserved the equivalent of Sydney Harbour every year, from a finite resource,” Anne said.

“Then the government decided to start auctioning off the water we’d saved – which we managed to stop for a while. So, from there I just got more and more hysterical about saving water.”

It was at this time Anne became aware of the dangers of “fracking” and coal seam gas on our underground water source.

In an attempt to allay her concerns for properties around Coonamble, a local politician invited Anne to tour a gas field, a tour she says was ‘sanitised’ in order to shine everything in a good light.

“They wined and dined us, and they told us how wonderful it was, just wonderful,” she said.

But it was when visiting Queensland farmer and anti-fracking activist, Dayne Pratzky (the “Frackman” as he has become known) that Anne witnessed first-hand the impact of coal seam gas mining.

“He showed me his bore, and it was burping with gas, out of the ground all the time,” Anne recalled, describing how he’d thrown a match on the bore and the water caught fire.

‘What I’d been working on, with capping and piping work, we were encouraging people to cap and pipe and conserve the water and pressure. They were draining the water, polluting it, removing pressure and undoing years of water conservation,” Anne says.

With the Great Artesian Basin Protection Group, Anne has worked hard to raise money and fund research into the impacts of fracking.

“At first, I was so naive, I thought if I just took all the evidence to the politicians, and they could see that I had scientific evidence from groundwater engineers they’d do something, but they never did a thing,” Anne says.

Anne played a significant part in convincing the Coonamble Shire Council to pronounce a freeze on coal seam gas mining within the Shire in 2010 — a declaration that still stands.

Moving to Orange five years ago, Anne now spends most of her days enjoying the company of her grandchildren and friends, but she still finds time to write letters and submissions to the government continuing her fight for our precious water resource.

It’s a battle that’s ongoing and expensive, she says, and fracking may have already done irreparable damage to our aquifers.

“My incredible passion is still for water, and I must fight on — I have 13 grandchildren, and I look at our precious water, thinking what are we doing to future generations?”

But after two decades of action, Anne also believes it is time now for younger generations to take up the fight for their environment.

“We need more young people, because the older ones are getting a bit burnt out. I’ve been in it for over 20 years, and a lot of my friends have pulled out, or given up.”

Anne urged people to join or support the work of organisations such as Lock the Gate (www.lockthegate.org.au) or the Great Artesian Basin Protection Group (www.gabpg.org.au)