“It seems that towns in western New South Wales are being shut down and nobody is listening,” local resident Mark Merritt told Green Left Weekly on the banks of a non-existent river.
Together with Susie Peake and Cath Eaglesham from Earthling Studios,
Merritt attended an event organised on the Baaka River (the local
Aboriginal name for the Darling River) as part of the Yaama Ngunna Baaka
Corroborree Festival tour held between September 29 and October 4.
The tour was organised by Uncle Bruce Shillingsworth to expose the state of the Baaka.
Broken Hill’s water has always come from the Menindee Lakes, a
gigantic lake system in the middle of a semi-arid desert that contains
water bodies more than 15 kilometres wide.
In 1949, infrastructure works modified the lakes to act as huge water
storages to mitigate flooding and hold water supplies for South
Australia. A more than 30-kilometre long levy was built along the
eastern bank of the Baaka to form a human-made lake, named Lake
Wetherell, as an additional water storage to supply the townships of
Menindee, Sunset Strip and Broken Hill.
In the past 60 years Broken Hill has never run out of water.
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