Category: drought
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the Darling gone dry
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…
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wetlands (sort of)
Well Covid-19 pandemic has been and (more or less) gone, the River Murray has gone from drought to being in flood in the autumn of 2023, and I’ve made no further road trips to work on this project since 2019. There are no more planned for the next 6 weeks or so as Suzanne has…
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Photography in the Anthropocene
It was a welcome relief to come across pockets of habitat in the Lower Lakes and the Coorong National Park that were in a healthy condition, despite the lack of river flow during the Millennium Drought (1997–2009) in south-eastern Australia. These low flows happened within the proposed Anthroprocene period, which is a time when much of…
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Landscape loss + nostalgia
One of the frequent responses to the common experience of landscape loss in Australia’s industrial modernity –eg., salt ladened landscapes, dried out wetlands, low flows in our rivers, on-going land clearing and the loss of biodiversity in Australia—is that of nostalgia, or a yearning for what has been lost in the Anthropocene. The rivers used to flow with…
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at the Stockyard Plain Basin
When I was working in the Senate as a policy/political advisor prior to 2006 I realised that one of the crucial aspects of the management of the River Murray in South Australia was the salt interception schemes (SIS) with their associated disposal basins. The current salt management in the Murray-Darling Basin aims to intercept the…
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at Tolderol Game Reserve
Towards the end of the Millenium Drought (1997-2009) we visited the Tolderol Game Reserve, which on the northern shore of Lake Alexandrina and is east of Pt Sturt. We wanted to see what had happened to this migratory bird sanctuary as a result of this decade long drought. This was more than a standard dry time which…
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Lake Alexandrina
During the Millennium Drought I did some photography around the edge of the shallow freshwater Lake Alexandrina, including the the seaside towns of Clayton and Milang. At the time, given the absence of sufficient flows dredging was undertaken to keep the Murray Mouth open and to ensure salt and other pollutants could be flushed out…
Nourishing Terrains 