A river ran through it

The Murray is the lifeblood of Australia’s farming country, a legendary river that thundered 1,500 miles from the Snowy Mountains to the Indian Ocean. Now, it’s choking to death in the worst drought for a thousand years, sparking water rationing and suicides on devastated farms. But is the ‘big dry’ a national emergency, or a warning that the earth is running out of water?

Australian farmers always know someone else who is doing it tougher. They pride themselves on their resilience. They take pleasure in living in ‘a sunburnt country of droughts and flooding rains’. Conservative and deeply sceptical, many dismiss global warming as hogwash. But with unprecedented water scarcity and the Murray, the country’s greatest river system, on the verge of collapse, warning bells are ringing around the globe.


Financially, the drought is pinching as far away as the UK, hiking up the cost of bread in British supermarkets as wheat prices reach a 10-year high. Symbolically, it cuts much deeper. Commentators are looking on, nervously, wondering if what is becoming the norm in Sydney could be the future for Sydenham.

Professor Tim Flannery, an Australian environmental scientist and an international leader on climate change, has no doubts. ‘Australia is a harbinger of what is going to happen in other places in the world,’ he says. ‘This can happen anywhere. China may be next, or parts of western USA. There will be emerging water crises all over the world.’ In Kenya, the herdsmen of the Mandera region have been dubbed the ‘climate canaries’ – the people most likely to be wiped out first by global warming. In Australia, the earth’s driest inhabited continent, it is the farmers who are on the frontline.

This extended dry spell began in 1998. Four years later came the one-in-100-years drought. Last year was declared a once-in-a-millennium event. Every city, bar Darwin in the ‘top end’, is facing water restrictions. Rivers are reduced to a trickle a child can jump across. Old Adaminaby, a town drowned by a reservoir 50 years ago, has resurfaced from its watery grave. Distressed koalas have been drinking from swimming pools. The list goes on.

The Observer