New South Wales: Everything's dried up and communities begin to crack

By Josephine Tovey, November 28, 2009 FISH lie belly-up on the cracked bed of Lake Cargelligo. Like the lake it is built around, the town is drying out. Lake Cargelligo, a settlement of 1300 in the geographical heart of NSW, was once a holiday haven for swimmers and waterskiers. Now empty shops line the street and even the post office is for sale. On Tuesday hundreds of those who are still here gathered to listen to a travelling roadshow of water bureaucrats about what was going to be done with the little bit of water that remains in the dam upstream. The Lachlan River, muse of Banjo Paterson and lifeblood to tens of thousands in the region, is being cut off at Condoblin, with only small flows being released below. Towns further south-west will go without. If they did not do this, State Water staff told the meeting, the dam would be sapped by February. … ”If this is the Government’s climate change policy,” said Patti Bartholomew, a cattle farmer, ”then God help NSW.” … Ten years ago Wyangala Dam was at 99 per cent, a wall of water 25 storeys high licked the top of its wall. Since then the inflows have been the lowest on record, less than half of what they were during the Federation drought. The dam is now less than 5 per cent full. As water disappears, cracked creek beds and muddy embankments are left exposed. Animals searching for water are getting bogged up to their necks. The Herald saw a farmer crawl out on logs and sink his hands deep into the thick mud to wrench out his neighbour’s sheep. Most of the people the Herald spoke to are sceptical about climate change, but according to CSIRO and other climate models, they are some of the hardest hit. ”Certainly the southern part of the Murray-Darling Basin, which includes the Lachlan, [is] looking at hotter and drier projections in the future,” a senior research fellow at the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of NSW, Dr Jason Evans, said. …

Everything’s dried up and communities begin to crack