Story from the Weekend Australian 13th October 2012:

Sympathy for Bourke as lakes come alive

Broken Hill’s 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 nation’s vast Murray-Darling Basin, long-time local John Brennan feels for federal Water Minister Tony Burke.
According to Mr Brennan, a former mayor of out-back NSW’s 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’s great river system.
‘‘There’s a principle involved in river management, and it applies the world over,’’ Mr Brennan told The Weekend Australian this week. ‘‘(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.’’
Mr 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.
‘‘I want to work with the basin states to provide healthy working rivers; I’m 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,’’ he said. But there is still great dispute among people living along the
basin 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
growers remember all too keenly the decade-long Millennium Drought, and the heartbreak it brought.
Mr 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.
Then the rains came, and the floodwaters that had devastated Queensland communities up-stream flowed through the system, reviving it once again.
This 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. ‘‘Now it’s perfect boating conditions.
We fish for yellowbelly. . . and go yabbying,’’ he said. ‘‘There’s foxes, goannas, snakes and an amazing amount of birdlife around the area . . .everything’s bred in abundance (since the water returned).’’
But he warned the irrigators and landholders along the river system against being too thirsty for the precious resource, even during the good times.
‘‘We’re definitely in an era of plenty now; I cer-tainly hope there’s not going to be another drought for a long time,’’ Mr Clifton said.
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