Sympathy for Bourke as lakes come alive<\/p>\n
Broken Hill\u2019s Darryn Clifton takes his boat for a spin this week on lake Copi Hollow at Menindee in NSW.
\nResidents of the basin fear a growing thirst. Story by: Sarah Elks, Sue Neales<\/p>\n
ON the shore of the now brimming Menindee Lakes, at the heart of the nation\u2019s vast Murray-Darling Basin, long-time local John Brennan feels for federal Water Minister Tony Burke.
\nAccording to Mr Brennan, a former mayor of out-back NSW\u2019s Central Darling Shire, it would be im-possible for Mr Burke to please everyone when finalising a political solution for the future of the nation\u2019s great river system.
\n\u2018\u2018There\u2019s a principle involved in river management, and it applies the world over,\u2019\u2019 Mr Brennan told The Weekend Australian this week. \u2018\u2018(Each person along the river says) the water in that river there is my water, those bastards upstream keep pinching it all and those bastards downstream can go and get stuffed.\u2019\u2019
\nMr Burke this week reaffirmed his determination to have the Water Amendment Bill pass parliament this year, reviving the debate about management of the basin, which covers 14 per cent of Australia and more than one million square kilometres.
\n\u2018\u2018I want to work with the basin states to provide healthy working rivers; I\u2019m willing to work coopera-tively to find a pathway which delivers the healthy rivers we need in a way which is sensitive to the challenges faced by rural communities,\u2019\u2019 he said. But there is still great dispute among people living along the
\nbasin about how it should be managed. From the top of the river system, at Romain southern Queensland, to Goolwa in South Australia, where it finally flows into the sea, landowners, graziers and
\ngrowers remember all too keenly the decade-long Millennium Drought, and the heartbreak it brought.
\nMr Brennan does. When The Weekend Australian first visited his lakeside home, in March 2010, he was still looking at a parched, dry expanse, devoid of wildlife.
\nThen the rains came, and the floodwaters that had devastated Queensland communities up-stream flowed through the system, reviving it once again.
\nThis week, boatie Darryn Clifton, from nearby Broken Hill, was on the water of the full lake. The 50-year-old said he was chuffed at the transformation he had witnessed since he bought his lakefront caravan site in 2009, when the little water that remained was stagnant and full of dying fish. \u2018\u2018Now it\u2019s perfect boating conditions.
\nWe fish for yellowbelly. . . and go yabbying,\u2019\u2019 he said. \u2018\u2018There\u2019s foxes, goannas, snakes and an amazing amount of birdlife around the area . . .everything\u2019s bred in abundance (since the water returned).\u2019\u2019
\nBut he warned the irrigators and landholders along the river system against being too thirsty for the precious resource, even during the good times.
\n\u2018\u2018We\u2019re definitely in an era of plenty now; I cer-tainly hope there\u2019s not going to be another drought for a long time,\u2019\u2019 Mr Clifton said.
\nINQUIRER P17<\/p>\n
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Sympathy for Bourke as lakes come alive Broken Hill\u2019s Darryn Clifton takes his boat for a spin this week on lake Copi Hollow at Menindee in NSW. Residents of the basin fear a growing thirst. Story by: Sarah Elks, Sue Neales ON the shore of the now brimming Menindee Lakes, at the heart of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":667,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bhsbc.com.au\/club\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bhsbc.com.au\/club\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bhsbc.com.au\/club\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bhsbc.com.au\/club\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bhsbc.com.au\/club\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=666"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.bhsbc.com.au\/club\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":669,"href":"http:\/\/www.bhsbc.com.au\/club\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666\/revisions\/669"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bhsbc.com.au\/club\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/667"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bhsbc.com.au\/club\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bhsbc.com.au\/club\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bhsbc.com.au\/club\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}