No plans of slowing down

Phill Thompson works as a Global Information System (GIS) Administrator at Murray Irrigation.

Heuses the GIS technology to map the company’s vast network of infrastructure and assets, and to collect other integral data. It’s complex, at times all-consuming, work. He’s actually been known to wake up at 4am with the solution to a problem that may have been vexing him for days!

The information that Phill spends his days gathering, analysing and sharing is helping to ensure that Murray Irrigation has a full picture of what is happening on the ground. This is critical to the ongoing and efficient running of the company’s water delivery system.

Phill also used this GIS technology and his expertise to assist Edward River Council to identify low spots around Deniliquin during last October’s floods, helping them to determine where the river was running.

“The work can be challenging at times, but when things are going well - and the program is working well - it’s a great job,” Phill said.

“It’s probably the best job I’ve had since I started working in this business.”

These words from a man who recently notched up 50 years’ service at Murray Irrigation.

In the past five decades, Phill’s work responsibilities have ranged from nine to five hours in the office, to long days in the great outdoors. And he has embraced every opportunity to learn, build new skills and grow professionally along the way.

Phill’s current role is a far cry from the work he was tasked with when he first arrived at the company’s Finley yard in February 1973, just “a skinny young kid”. He only has to look out the window from his desk to see the exact spot where it all started.

“I can’t remember much about my first day – but I know it was hectic, because I started in the store,” Phill said.

“You could say I’ve come full circle, because that store is only 150 metres from where I’m sitting now.”

In 1973, Murray Irrigation was still a government-owned entity, being run by the Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission (WCIC).

Over the next 22 years, this body would undergo a further two identity changes (becoming NSW Water Resources Commission in 1976 and NSW Department of Water Resources in 1986) before control and operation of the system was handed over to the irrigators in 1995, marking the birth of Murray Irrigation as we know it today.

As a young stores officer, Phill spent busy days delivering a constant supply of stock and equipment to the bustling Finley workforce, which was responsible for operating the channel system between Mulwala to the old Deni CSIRO station south of Conargo. Orders were sent to Sydney and transported by rail.

With not even a hint of computers on the horizon, each piece of inventory had to be painstakingly documented into a giant ledger book.

At that time, the Finley site employed around 140 people. There were welders, mechanics, carpenters, tyre fitters and apprentices. Not to mention the “outdoor guys”, such as the dragline excavator operators who would clear debris and other build up away from the channels, and the teams of channel maintenance workers, who could often end up soaking wet over the course of their day.

Phill spent more than 10 years of his career at Murray Irrigation right at the coalface, delivering water to farmers as a channel attendant.

This was at a time when water orders were still largely being taken via a water card system. Farmers would write down their orders on small white cards and leave them in an order box for the water channel attendants to collect.

After the orders had been called through to the office, the water delivery could begin. Gates had to be opened and heavy redgum drop bars had to be lifted to complete the order. It was physically demanding stuff - and not for the faint hearted.

“Now they push a button for the gates, they push a button for the outlets, and away they go,” Phill said.

He is, of course, referring to the evolution Murray Irrigation’s water delivery network has undergone in the past 20 years or so.

The once manually operated system that required boots on the ground has been automated and is now controlled remotely.

With 50 years’ service under his belt, it would be safe to say that Phill’s fingerprints are everywhere across the business.

By way of example, he was actively involved in the establishment of the first touch-button water ordering system that was a precursor to the sophisticated system

Murry Irrigation has today. He also participated in the mammoth task of mapping the company’s entire assets following privatisation in 1995.

“There were three of us - Barry Basham, Michael Telford and myself - we went out there with GPS units and we GPS’d every structure that we had in the system,” Phill said.

“And that’s how our current GIS system started.

“We’d be out there with backpacks, trudging around the farms, collecting all the data - where all the wheels were, where all the stock points were, where all the bridges were - taking a point.

“We’d collect the data and go back into Deni every Friday because we had a real time GPS unit at the office. We’d post-process the data back into the system, and that would then bring it all into alignment with surface.

“We did that for about 12 months. We had everything we needed in the system GPS’d, and then we went through and developed what we’ve basically got today.”

Phill admits there’s probably not a channel across the Murray Irrigation system that he hasn’t traversed at some point during his career. And with his travels have come an array of colourful tales; especially of the old days.

His experiences working as a relief payroll officer back in the ‘70s are the perfect case in point.