Underwater fencelines

One of the effects of the river going dry is that there is no longer a boundary fence. Like anyone, sheep love to explore new territory!! You either destock the river paddocks - or have a floating population of neighbours sheep mixing with your own. When the river comes down again - you muster and truck them back again - expensive and time consuming. What my brother has done is to build temporary fences down the middle of the riverbed, filling up the gaps between the waterholes. This is obviously also time consuming. A fence in the bottom of a river bed is a visual conundrum. Here are some images of the process;

The fences are made from blue binder-twine with bamboo, gum and box tree 'posts'.

One of the negative aspects of sharing photos of the waterless Darling is that they could serve to 'normalise' our expectations for a river, and hence our practice of using the water for short term economic gains. With environmental and longer term concepts in mind - it is obviously the river that requires water for the continued survival of the river chanel itself and the billabongs and floodplains beside it.

Here are words from Thomas Mitchell describing the (fairly low) Darling River in 1835. The river he saw, called Baaka by the Bakindji people, was managed entirely with Aboriginal world views and attitudes to water use;

July 2nd: "The river and its vicinity presented much the same appearance here that they did 200 miles higher up. Similar lofty banks ... with marks of great floods traced in parallel lines on the clayey sides; ....transparent water, with acquaticplants - a slow current, with an equal volume of water - fine gum trees and an abundance of luxurious grasses."

August 4th: "We, during a sojourn of more than two months in the Australian wilderness, have been abundantly suplied with the finest water, from that extrordinary river which we had been tracing, and without which those regions would be deserts."