When the River Runs Dry - Documentary

Help Rory McLeod and Peter Yates complete a film documenting the social and environmental impacts of the Darling River Catastrophe.

Rory is a film-maker, and Peter an anthropologist with a PhD in land management.

Faced with news of yet another environmental disaster, we chose action over anger and depression. We decided to use our skills to make a difference. We threw some gear into the car and drove 900km north to capture the events on film and talk to the people affected.

Now we need your help to finish the job.

In January 2019 viral videos showed grown men near Menindee weeping as they held Murray Cod many decades old that had perished in the green oxygen starved soup that is all that remained of the Darling River.  Australians were horrified by the news that the Darling River, known as the Barka to its people, was in a state of ecological collapse. Politicians blamed drought. Ecologists and water management experts placed the blame firmly on the over allocation and over extraction of water –sometimes illegal – by cotton growers upstream.

Fertiliser (and other chemical) runoff from cotton farms have made the water nutrient rich, and zero river flow, coupled with high temperatures has fuelled toxic blooms of cyano-bacteria “blue-green algae” in the river. The fish kill occurred when a sudden cool snap killed off the algae and as it decomposed, it robbed the water of dissolved oxygen. Fish that had survived many droughts over decades died in their thousands. Even at the time of writing in late January 2018, news of another huge fish kill is coming through the media.

These tragic events have shone a spotlight on the appalling plans of the NSW Government and the cotton industry. These plans include the ‘decommissioning’ of the Menindee Lakes – a 30 million year-old lake system, much of it within a National Park – in order to achieve ‘water savings’ (through reduced evaporation), that will reduce the need for expensive buy-backs of over allocated water licences.

Calls for a Royal Commission are urgent as Australian’s begin to suspect that the rules governing the Murray Darling Basin overwhelmingly serve agribusiness interests to the detriment of the environment and downstream communities.

This documentary film was born on that horrible first day, when the images of dead fish came before us. We wanted to document this pivotal moment in Australia’s environmental history, in the hope that we can pull together as a nation to bring this immense, beautiful and remote river system back from the brink of catastrophe. We wanted to document the impact of these events – and the inexorable plans of the NSW Government and Big Cotton over many years – on the people of the Darling River.

In particular, we seek to bring Aboriginal voices to the fore. The Barkindji are the people of the River. They have been dispossessed and marginalised for almost a hundred and seventy years. They survived because of the Barka, the Darling River, and now that is being taken too.

This film will be both a celebration of the resilience of people and nature, and a call to arms.

The Barkindji cannot afford to lose this fight. Australia cannot afford to lose this fight!

About the Film

The Target Audience

The target audience is you! The people who care about our environment. Who put people before profit. And the Policy Makers who need to listen to us.

This film covers issues that are of immense interest to a great many Australians. It will also be made with the highest care for accuracy and production values. The ABC or SBS should be very interested given the media attention that these events have generated over recent weeks, and the likelihood of a major inquiry at the federal level will keep the topic in the spotlight. This film will be valuable in-depth background for any network.

The film will be freely available to the Barkindji to use in their fight for their river, the Barka.

Thus far we have self-funded this project from finances we don’t really have. We need your help to:

• Claw back some of what we have spent,
• Support more trips to the Darling (including one to show Barkinji people what we have done prior to release);
• Trips to Canberra and Sydney to interview eminent ecologists, water management experts and environmental lawyers, and
• To ensure that Rory can continue to eat as he begins the gruelling work of constructing and editing what will be a beautiful, but harrowing film (4-6 Weeks work).
• Pay for some equipment hire.

Budget

If we are lucky enough to overshoot our target, we will use extra funds to go on a 1 or 2 week trip to interview more people on the Darling River and aquire more overlay footage of people and place. Once the documentary is complete and extra funds will be used to promote the Doco: When the River Runs Dry around Australia and support the campaign for a healthy and sustainable Darling River in consultation with river communities.