The photos below shown the condition of the Darling River north of Wentworth in NSW. They were made at a bridge near Pooncarie around April of 2018, just before the drought broke and the Medindee fish kill. This was just after Barnaby Joyce, as the Federal Water Minister in the Turnbull Government, had been using his power to actively undermine the Basin Plan.
This was just after the time when people became aware that lots of water had gone missing because of water theft or illegal diversions; aware of the blind eye about lax monitoring of water use; and that the Murray-Darling Basin Authority had been captured by irrigators and was acting to reduce water recover for environmental flows in the northern basin. Politics pushed science aside.
The picture is a good reminder of the necessity for environmental flows to ensure the ecological health of the river, given the decades long over-extraction of water from the Darling River. This is the primary cause of the river running dry not climate change.
This part of the Darling River is seen as the Lower Darling, and from what I could judge, the ecological health of the river was been sacrificed to ensure that the cotton irrigators in the northern NSW and southern Queensland had all the water for they needed for their plantations.
Nourishing Terrains 
Leave a comment