SERVICES COME AT A COST
Mary Kidson's letter ("Value of facilities much more than dollars and cents", June 9) presents a longish peeve about calling the town library a "loss" in council's accounts of what comes in and what goes out.
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This is, it seems, because the library is a "service" and thus should be exempt from calculating how council handles our money.
Ms Kidson might well argue for a third column in ledgers apart from those of debit and credit and call it "Things that we paid for but what shouldn't be counted as losses" but it's the accounting community, not you or me, that she needs to convince of that.
I like the idea of us paying for a public library, that I personally rarely use, that runs at a loss because otherwise it wouldn't run at all because I believe in books and want others to have them. But I'm not King Croesus.
The idea that recording the library's cost should avoid the word "loss" is as bizarre as avoiding the recording of "profit" elsewhere - it's our money and we have a right to know, in plain language, if and when a council facility is run at a loss and at how much.
Robert T Walker, Wagga
ARTICLE PROVIDES THEORIES ON POISON WATERHOLES NAME
In the interest of establishing the background facts to the name "Poison Waterholes", near Narrandera, I suggest people read the following article from the Narrandera Argus on February 5, 1951.
The link from the National Library's Trove collection of digitised newspapers is here: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/101627500.
In this article, the author, a longtime resident of Narrandera, relates his knowledge of the origin of the names of the waterholes.
There are two theories on the origin of the name.
One is that poison was laid at the site to remove the major problem of dingos attacking stock.
This is a well-recorded practice across the Riverina during the early years of settlement by white squatters.
Dingos were in large numbers at the time of the 1840s, and it took many years for them to be pushed further west.
In "Saltbush country: History of the Deniliquin district" by John Bushby, he recounts (page 53) the experience of early settlers making a compound of their vehicles when surrounded by a mob of dingos that would not be driven away.
Dingos were "numerous, bold and crafty".
The other theory is during drought times, stock given access to these waterholes died from an unknown weed that flourished at the time.
Whilst the Murrumbidgee River, nearby, was a permanent enough stream to be safe for watering stock, smaller, stagnant waterholes and tributaries developed a weed cover that proved fatal for animals.
I doubt that the early settlers knew what green-blue algae was in the 1840s.
Nor that it was dangerous to animals and humans until they lost their stock after access to such water and then kept the stock away from the site.
We now know that it is unsafe for humans even to swim in such contaminated water.
The article goes on to mention the development of a tale that the name denotes an attack on Aboriginals in the area, and that such a tale has never been able to be verified by either white or Aboriginal residents of the region.
Gretchen Sleeman, San Isidore
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