Travelling to the Macquarie Marshes

Over Easter I am travelling out to the Macquarie Marshes in central NSW. As there is very little water in the marshlands - we will be walking rather than Kiaking! The Marshes is a vast 200,000 hectare bird breeding and wilderness declared area, and I was speechless to discover that there are cotton plantations on the Macquarie river - upstream from the marshes. There are even cotton plantations extracting water in the centre of the marsh area. This is more surprising as the Marshes are a heritage listed site

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Near the town of Warren the Macquarie River divides into a series of channels, spreading out and creating the marshlands. In the top image you see the dark shapes of the marshes in the distance with the bulldozed areas of cotton in the foreground. The bottom image is south of the town of Warren (shown by the yellow flag)

The Wilderness Society are campaigning to stop the ongoing bulldozing of trees for even more lazer graded cotton 'farms'. I plan to make more images from the air using a kite to launch my reasonably new digi compact. Photos soon!! Charles C Benton the Californian maestro of 'kite aerial photography', (KAP) has a wonderful website which tells all about the follies of launching cameras into the atmosphere.

The image below is one of the Cotton plantations within the RAMSAR listed marsh area.

Darling River without water.

The Darling River in western NSW, Australia was not given this endearing name because of a love and connection to the river - which may seem a perfectly logical idea - but because when it was named by a white man, Charles Sturt in 1830, he decided to honour the Governor of the day Ralph Darling. http://gutenberg.net.au/dictbiog/0-dict-biogD.html He was a right bastard, but he footed the bill for Sturts 'exploration' .

Here are two photographs I took in December 1991, when for the first time I saw the Darling with a large stretch of dry river bed and a tiny puddle of water. A river without water is a very sorry site.

They are from the same site, about 20 road miles south of Wilcannia, looking up and down river.