The government had a think in the 1960s: the largest remnant native vegetation on the peninsula might be worth preserving, and thus Deep Creek Conservation Park was born in 1972. Its promoters spared no hyperbole: it would conserve, undisturbed, significant places, sites and objects, maintain genetic resources, preserve and even promote “public appreciation and

understanding of the natural values”.

So Deep Creek park – preserving a time past, a time before white settlers, rabbits and radiata – came into existence in the same year as Forestry Department bulldozers were pushing over native trees for exotic plantations in its catchment.

Deep Creek is not to the Fleurieu what the Grand Canyon is to Arizona. Nevertheless tourists, backpackers, hikers, school students, ecologists, picnickers and photographers are lured here by the spectacular wild scenery. It’s a special if secret place. Massive steep coastal cliffs overlook the Southern Ocean pounding below. Just east of Cape Jervis, its 4500 hectares are hills and dales, dense heath and forests, native birds and rare orchids. In an hour’s walk you can see, if you’re quiet enough, a southern emu wren, yellow-tailed black cockatoo, glossy black cockatoo, peregrine falcon, whitebellied sea eagle, and painted button quail. And you can sit, feet dangling, on the ledge of the Deep Creek waterfall where the water actually falls even through the driest summer.

In March last year a collective of MPs could also be seen purposefully wandering through this bush.

They were an eclectic bunch, this Natural Resource Committee of State Parliament. There was Democrat MLC Sandra Kanck, who’d instigated the inquiry which took them here. There were Liberal and Labor MPs Graham Gunn, Steph Key, Caroline Schaefer, an open-neck shirt and jeans was committee chair John Rau, whose intellect, penetrating questions and occasionally acerbic wit would launch siege engines against public service castles a year later.

But that was still to come. On this visit, the committee men and women stood wondering as they looked around in a large natural amphitheatre. This was the source of Upper Deep Creek, one of the main channel’s five tributaries. At one time Upper Deep Creek had been a permanent stream with a permanent aquatic population of waterweeds, reeds, fish and fowl. Strangely, it had dried up of late.

At first it had become shallower, then shallower still. Finally it stopped flowing altogether except after rain, more a depression than watercourse. Like the River Murray writ small, it dried and died. The committee was finding out why. A changing rainfall pattern was not wholly responsible. Upstream dams? No. How about the pinus radiata plantation just over there, with its roots sucking the soil dry? This was a more likely villain.

In 1988, the Forestry Department had taken over an old grazing property called Foggy Farm and planted pines virtually to the creek’s bank. Radiata uses enormous reservoirs of water. Even in the dismally wet south-east of the state, imported blue gums denude the water table to the extent that companies need a water permit before they can establish new plantations. Trees are botanic sponges. There’s a reason paper toweling is made from wood pulp – it’s highly absorbent. A single mature radiata pine can draw more water out of the ground in a day than a family of four will use at home.

The committee concluded that plantations in the Foggy Farm area were the culprit.

“This conclusion has been reached after careful consideration of evidence from a number of sources. These sources include detailed observations by local landholders, film material, rainfall records, historical records of the stream dating back to the 19th century, evidence from the relevant government agencies, expert hydrological evidence and the known history of land use in the area. This material is a mixture of objective facts, opinion and direct observation evidence,” said its report to parliament. Reporters in the press gallery could hardly hold their breath before they rushed out and ignored it.

But the report made eminent sense. It recommended, among other things, a buffer zone between the pine plantation and the creek of between 20m and 100m in the Foggy Farm area. It said trees in this zone should be felled and removed to give the creek a chance.

There matters stood until, as required by statute, then Environment Minister Gail Gago responded to the committee’s recommendations. That response was drafted and handed to her by the Department of Water Land and Biodiversity Conservation, and it lied. According to the department the trees were not responsible for the watercourse drying. Farm dams and low rainfall were to blame. In any case, claimed the department, the Minister for Environment and Conservation does not have the administrative power to direct a plantation forest owner to remove a legally established plantation.

The story could have ended here – but it didn’t. Across the political divide and led by chairman Rau, Liberal, Labor and Democrat MPs re-opened their investigation. They called back witnesses and dug and dug.

From the Department of Water Land and Biodiversity Conservation it called back senior officers Michael Derring, Darryl Harvey and Stephanie Williams. Islay Robertson reappeared as a witness for Forestry SA. Others were from Primary Industries and landholders.

There was a hydrologist, a conservator and managers by the pallet-load. And for the first time, it demanded the appearance of DWLBC’s chief executive, Rob Freeman.

The hearings were open to the public, as all committee inquiries are, in a comfortable room at Parliament House. Everyone’s invited but most stay away.

A theatre reviewer would have given the committee’s performance five stars. There was tension, a strong supporting cast and a plot that twisted and turned.

Firstly the committee got to the bottom of whether trees were the problem. In response to the committee’s first report, the department reckoned they weren’t. Rau’s committee turned up evidence that DWLBC had initially withheld from parliament.

The department had known, but had not revealed, that “forest plantations are located immediately adjacent to a number of swamps and the additional extraction of soil water by these trees may lead to a more rapid depletion of the water stored within these swamps over the summer period”.

The department also knew and also did not reveal its information that “runoff in Upper Deep Creek has been reduced by an estimated 21 per cent, most of which is due to plantation forestry”.

The seven-member committee, resourced by officers Knut Cudarans and Patrick Dupont, then investigated the department’s claim that the minister couldn’t get rid of the trees even if she wanted to. DWLBC repeated its falsehood at least five times.

Asked how the department came up with its advice that no legislative powers existed, DWLBC principal policy advisor Darryl Harvey reluctantly confessed he’d just taken verbal advice from non-lawyers with whom he shares his workplace. There was more. The plantation had exceeded DWLBC sustainability guidelines and the department knew it. The department perfectly understood committee recommendations but fudged its response.

When it all got too tough DWLBC chief executive Robert Freeman blamed it on the minister.

“At the end of the day, the response that you have is Minister Gago’s,” he said brazenly. But he admitted: “It may have been that the majority of this information came from the department or even all of this attachment.”

“All of it!” Rau snapped.“ But what I cannot do is take away from the fact that this is Minister Gago’s response,” Freeman pleaded.

In technical fact this is true; she signed off on the material. But as the committee said, “procuring the former minister’s signature on one of their documents does not render it any less objectionable or the former minister in any way complicit in their deception.”

It said the departmental officers had used the minister as a “human shield or fig leaf to prevent examination of their conduct”.

Last week, on September 11, the Natural Resources Committee of the 51st Parliament of South Australia presented to the Speaker its 23rd report. This time its heading wasn’t so simple. This time it was headed “A search for straight answers”.

To those who’d read through the committee’s transcripts or sat in on the hearings it was no surprise. It said the department deliberately attempted to misinform and misinterpret the committee’s recommendations. Material coming from DWLBC had been factually inaccurate. The department withheld and censored documents to prevent their scrutiny. State parliament had been “deceived”.

The committee gave an ominous warning. In a black-bordered box on page three of its second report, the committee reproduced a section of the 2004 Natural Resources Management Act.

That section, number 214, reads thus: “A person who furnishes information to the minister or another authority under this Act that is false misleading in a material particular is guilty of an offence. Maximum penalty $20,000.”

So why would the department have been duplicitous? Why wouldn’t it want a few trees cleared in a proposed buffer zone? After all it wasn’t a lot of trees, a fraction of a fraction of the vast plantings on the Fleurieu.

Because it had apparently been acting in cahoots with the Department of Forestry’s case.

“This is inexplicable,” said the committee, given that DWLBC was established to improve sustainability and protect the state’s natural resources, biodiversity, water, land and marine resources.

The gamekeeper had married the poacher and now all the ducks were dead. The creek is dead. The other waterbirds and fish are dead and gone. The pines are still there, gulping their water, a commercial crop sucking the life out of a conservation park.

Well, that’s according to the inquiry and the report. DWLBC is still sticking to its story. On that wild Californian coast, Junípero Serra may have been a complete nutter, scourging himself with burning pine torches every other Sunday. But mad as he was, Father Serra was using the Monterey pine to try to repent his sins.

Down at Deep Creek the pines are still growing,

and in Adelaide is a bureaucracy apparently unrepentant.