Garth Dutton

Où la mer rencontre
le lac Patawalonga
il y a une belle barre de sable.

Where the feminine sea meets
the masculine Patawalonga Lake
there is a beautiful sandbar.

But the sandbar had to go.
The rescue boat
couldn’t get out at low tide,
and yachts and fishing boats
couldn’t get back in
if the weather
suddenly changed for the worse
when the tide was low.

The Patawalonga sandbar
became South Australia’s
most intractable environmental problem.
No matter how many times it was dredged,
owing to ’longshore drift’,
it simply reformed.
The struggle went on for years.
Hundreds of engineering hours were spent
trying to design sand pumps
and sand by-pass systems…
The sandbar remained defiant.

I showed my poem
to a friend called Maureen Clifton.
She thought about it for a while, then said,
“Perhaps we should consider it
in terms of ‘environmental contraception’.
Possibly the ‘barrier method’ might work.”

So I sent my poem and her comments
to Brian Nadilo,
the then Mayor of Holdfast Bay.

He tabled them at the next Council Meeting.
Soon afterwards,
work began on building a ‘barrier island’
out in the sea
to the south of the Patawalonga.
And lo and behold,
a lovely new sandbar soon formed
between the beach
and the ‘barrier island’.
The Patawalonga sandbar was dredged
and didn’t re-form.
The sand had been given the chance
to be part of something better.

So the problem was fixed
easily,
permanently,
and at virtually no cost.
But if it hadn’t been for consideration
of the genders of the components,
they would still be trying to fix the problem
in terms of ‘longshore drift’,
sand pumps, and sand by-pass systems.