Australia’s biggest river is running dry, despite plans to save it

Where did all the efficiency savings go?

PADDLE steamers once chugged up and down the Darling, the main tributary of the Murray river, ferrying wool from remote farms to the port of Adelaide. The Murray-Darling basin, which is larger than Ethiopia, gives life to Australia’s arid interior (see map). But these days the Darling is reduced to a putrid standstill with alarming regularity. Parts of it disappear altogether at times, a phenomenon which was almost unprecedented before this century. Robert McBride, whose parched sheep station in the state of New South Wales depends on its flow, estimates that 600km of the lower Darling will run dry this year.

This is just the kind of disaster that should have been averted after Australia launched an ambitious plan to preserve the river in 2012. The four states that depend on the Murray and its tributaries had been fighting bitterly over its contents. Since the 1970s enormous farms growing irrigated crops such as cotton and nuts had...Continue reading

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