Gudday OZ,
Yes, I agree that there are bodies of water
close enough, however in my post I used the word
compatible.
On a map those lakes and dams show up as nice large patches of blue, however in reality they are almost never full and also they are studded with standing dead timber. Even more so as the water level drops, I have been to Eildon, Nillacootie, Mokoan and Hume inside the last month, some of them are closed even to boating, due to snags, you'd have extreme difficulty conducting CL415 ops on any of them.
This is an old photo of lake Hume, it is much, much drier now:
Now, I am not saying it is
never possible to effectively use something like a CL415 on our inland dams, but it is not as easy as one might imagine.
I think the above reasons, among others, are why we use small fixed wing and large rotary wing a/c, certainly choppers can access all the water storages you mentioned, even this year.
Cheers,
ABX