The indicators are well known: salinity, toxic blue-green algae blooms, fish deaths, the closing of the Murray Mouth, billabongs that smell of rotten eggs, the lower Darling River running dry, dried out wetlands, dying trees, reduced numbers of waterbirds, and towns along the lower Darling River running out of water.
The Murray-Darling Basin Plan had been an attempt to address this by managing the Basin as a whole to make its use sustainable and so increase the resilence of an almost close dground water basin with only one outlet at the Murray Mouth. This was to be done by restoring a more equitable balance between water use and environment by taking water off irrigators and using it to better manage the health of the rivers. 2750 gigalites was the compromise figure between the states plus an extra 450 gigalitres through efficiency measures. The deadline was 2024.
But things are falling apart due to the Basin Plan’s flawed design, poor implementation, politics, corruption in NSW, floodplain harvesting and water theft in cotton country. The Lower Darling River was without water and NSW started threatening to quit the Murray-Darling Basin Plan in 2019, rather than find the environmental savings by reducing the allocation of water to its cotton irrigators in the Darling-Barwon region north east of Bourke in northern NSW.
The significance of 2023 floods is that this is the first time in 70 years that River Murray flows have reached many areas of the landscape and it is almost certain that there will be changes to the river channel, the floodplain and wetlands. This flood will change the water politics in the Basin.
It is time for me to start planning to return to Lake Bonney and the lower Darling River.
Nourishing Terrains 
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