NSW rivers crisis: A ‘perfect storm’ of drought, theft and corruption

“The problem is mismanagement of the Barwon-Darling rivers” activist Fleur Thompson told the Yaama Ngunna Baaka Corroboree Festival bus tour, as it passed through the western New South Wales town of Bourke on September 30.

“The federal and state governments could step in anytime and fix it, but they don’t and won’t. To do that the governments would have to admit fault.”

Between September 28 and October 4, some 300 Indigenous and non-Indigenous people travelled through western NSW towns that have been badly affected by a lack of water in the rivers, as part of the corroboree organised by First Nations activist and artist Uncle Bruce Shillingsworth.

Discussing the causes of the lack of water, Thompson explained: “There is a water crisis. It is a perfect storm, which includes drought, water theft, mismanagement, political interference and corruption.

“It came about because the rules about irrigation and allocation of water in the river were changed by governments in 2012.”

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Is NSW deliberating shutting down towns to mine underground?

“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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