Safe water or fish traps?

 What is more important - safe water for many of the "preservation" of some rocks which were allegedly used as "fish traps" by an indigenous community?

I spent the last two years of primary school in a remote two-teacher school on the "west coast" of this state. My parents were the teachers. The school was situated in a tiny community along the railway line which carried the wheat. There were seventeen houses in the town when we arrived and twenty-three when we left. The six new houses had been built to house the wheat silo workers and their families. Yes, things were changing perhaps.

In reality they have not changed that much. The place is a little bigger.  The school has been amalgamated with other small schools in an effort to give the children better education facilities.  It is now situated some kilometres down the highway.  As I write this some children will be spending an hour or more on a bus to get to school, a bus driven by a teacher.

And everyone will be watching the water supply. The water supply is vital. The average rainfall is so low that it cannot be relied on to provide what people need. When we lived there the water supply came through on a pipe which was above ground. It was a mere 2.5cms in diameter. It barely trickled through. For the first six months my parents used to cart water in buckets into the house because the pipe had not been connected to the house. The water was not really fit for drinking. It was almost salt.  There was a very precious rainwater tank attached to the school. We actually lined up at recess and lunch time to get our enamel mugs filled with water.

The Senior Cat immediately demanded a rainwater tank for the school house as well. (The school house was new and barely fit for purpose as nobody had supervised the builders of it.) The demand was met quickly enough - but then it had to rain enough to get water into the tank.

The water in the pipe came from a dam over 300km away. On a hot day (and summer temperatures often exceeded 40'C) it was too hot to put your hands under. My mother would put a tiny amount of water from the outside pipe into the bath and then wait for it to cool down enough to put my two younger sisters in it to play with their bath toys. This was the supposed cold water tap.

Now the water supply for the same area is back in the news. The dam no longer fills the needs of the area. It has not done for some time. Water is scarce. There are more rainwater tanks of course and yes it rains sometimes. All this does not supply the water needs of an increasing population along the coast line. The government is proposing another desalination plant. They have chosen a location which they believe is suitable. They have taken into account the environmental issues involved and they are ready to go ahead, plan and build.

But there is a problem. They have been hit with a claim by the "indigenous" people of the area. They don't want the desalination plant there because it is the place where their ancestors fished, where they used some of the rocks to make fish traps. They say the desalination plant can go much further away - at a much greater expense. Everything has stopped. This is going to court. It will all go on for months.

This same small group has already prevented the building of a much needed nuclear waste dump which a majority of people in the community wanted. That was disturbing and the result was not in the best interests of all. (The waste in question continues to be stored in an inner city location.) This time however their demand is surely unreasonable. Water is essential for life. I don't much care for the idea of desalination plants but the water this one will produce is essential for the well being of the community.

Are fish traps really more important than a safe supply of drinking water?