What New South Wales, Victoria and the bad South Australian and central government are doing to the Murray river in SA.

The Murray river flows through South Australia coming from New South Wales. It's actually a combination of a lot of rivers flowing in to one. The main river flowing in to the Murray is the Darling river.

This picture shows the vast amount of rivers that make up the Murray:



Seeing the above, one would expect the Murray in South Australia to be gigantic.

This was the Murray river in Teal Flat in 2005:



This is the same river at the same spot 4 years later in 2009:



New South Wales and Victoria are sucking the water out so hard (and damming it for their non-native cotton and rice industries) that the water level has dropped about two metres in four years time. The Murray is drying up and this already has catastrophic consequences every where along the river.

It's very, very sad.

The river trip

We drove down to the river today for a quick visit. Along the way the result of a long and extremely warm summer was noticeable.

Everything was dried up and brown.

We drove through little downs with merely more than a pub.

The river was beautiful and peaceful.

But it's dying fast. The water level used to be 30 cm under the floor of the jetti 7 years ago. The water level has actually gone down more than 50cm in the last year alone. It's being sucked dry by industries upstream producing shit that's non-native to Australia in places that obviously don't have enough water by themselves.

Enjoy it while it lasts my friends...

Adelaide also uses water from the Murray as a source of drinking water. It's very clever. Adelaide is right next to the ocean, but instead of desalinating and using that water they created a pipeline kilometres long...

At least our reservoirs are reasonably well filled.