Song amplifies concerns for Anglesea River

THE Anglesea Social Club have put their feelings about the health of the Anglesea River into song.

Dump The Pump features the social club members with choral support from a group of Anglesea primary school students in support of the waterway, known locally by Wadawurrung Traditional Owners as Kuarka Dorla (place of many mullet).

Released last month, the song calls on Alcoa, which operated an open cut coal mine and power station near Anglesea for 46 years, to abandon plans to resume pumping billions of litres of groundwater from the aquifer below the Anglesea River catchment. Its chorus includes the line “Don’t steal our water to fill your coal hole”.

Alcoa’s application to resume pumping groundwater to speed up the filling of the coal pit is being assessed by Southern Rural Water (SRW), with a decision expected early this year.

The Anglesea River experienced a fish kill event in August last year, one of an estimated six such events over the past 25 years.

Steve Greenwood and Tim Mullen-Walsh wrote Dump the Pump, and the song also features Nathan Adair on bass, Pip Atherstone-Reid on drums and Gus Rigby on saxophone.

“Explaining to my children why there’s dead fish floating in the river is heartbreaking,” Greenwood said.

“The Anglesea River is at the heart of this community – translating our anguish over its health into music is our way of expressing how deeply we care about it.”

Friends of Anglesea River (FoAR) is running a campaign to improve the river’s health, and estimate more than half of Anglesea’s community have signed its petition opposing Alcoa’s plans.

More than 150 opposing submissions have been made to SRW, not only from community members but also from the Surf Coast Shire council and the Corangamite Catchment Management Authority.

Regardless of SRW’s ruling, FoAR says its fight to save the river and catchment ecosystem is far from over.

“Alcoa submitted a huge 2,600-page application to Southern Rural Water,” FoAR spokesperson Keith Shipton said. “It’s deeply invested in getting its way in this, even in the face of community, council and water catchment authority opposition.”

He expected Alcoa would appeal a rejected application to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal, but said FoAR was pre-emptively urging Alcoa to “accept the umpire’s decision and not use its superior legal and financial resources against a community which it was part of for half a century”.

“Essentially what’s being proposed here is killing a precious community waterway, to create another that will be off limits due to toxicity,” he said.

Dump the Pump can be streamed on FoAR’s YouTube channel, IHeartRadio and Boomplay.