Endless heartache of life on the land

WE revisit seven Australians whose fortunes rise and fall with the Murray-Darling.

Duane Statham

FROM the heartbreak country enfolding Condamine in southern Queensland to the vast plains of western NSW, the orchard lands of Victoria and at the river mouth in distant South Australia, eyes are again cast to the heavens.

After two seasons of plenty, times are changing along the 3300km course of the Murray-Darling, the life-giving waterway that snakes through four states and helps feed a nation.

The cycle is turning from boom to leaner times on the land as the La Nina weather pattern ends, signalling an end to the great wet that dumped misery on city and town dwellers while breaking a near-record drought.

Compounding the uncertainty is the impending report of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority on how much water is to be diverted from irrigation to preserve the ecology of the river system.

Today, we tell the stories of seven Australians whose fortunes rise and fall with the Murray-Darling. We first encountered them at the height of the worst drought since Federation. Some have gone on to prosper; others wonder how the good times passed them by after the rains came in 2010 and again last year.

Away from the divisive politics of the Murray-Darling debate, each of them has a different view of what should happen now to manage the river system. They have adapted their lives, and how they run their farms, stations and vineyards, to protect against the vagaries of the weather and the heartbreak of life on the land.

At the top of the basin in Queensland, fourth-generation grazier and wheat farmer Duane Statham is flat out harvesting and mustering on his 2428ha property, Yandarlo.

In 2006, when Inquirer last visited Statham, 15km northwest of Condamine in southeast Queensland, he was two months away from running out of water. His breeder cattle kept dying after giving birth, leaving dozens of orphaned poddy calves.The situation was desperate.

"Then it rained and everything filled up, thank goodness," Statham, 42, says when Inquirer visits this week. The dams have two years' worth of water and he has switched his breeders for fattening cattle, figuring it is easier to sell the latter if times turn tough again.

But the financial reward for last year's bumper wheat crop was cruelled by the high Australian dollar, which drove down the price of the grain.

"It's hard to say if we're in a better financial position (now than during the drought)," he says.

"We owe more money, but our land might be worth more."

Still, the father of three is keeping a watchful eye on nearby Dogwood Creek, a tributary of the Condamine River, which joins the Balonne north of St George and flows into the Darling in northwestern NSW.

Dogwood Creek stopped flowing two weeks ago. "We've got a dam that's just the right size for this place," he says.

"We don't want to keep every drop that's ever landed here ... it wouldn't hurt to have the Dogwood running again."

The vast basin covers nearly 15 per cent of the nation's landmass, or more than a million square kilometres, and is formed by a tangled web of 23 river systems, which together generate 39 per cent of Australia's national agricultural production income.

More than half of the country's grain is grown in the basin and 95 per cent of its oranges, and it supports nearly one-third of Australia's cattle herd.

Downstream from Statham's place, after the Darling forms and flows through outback NSW, the water pools in the Menindee Lakes, in the state's west.

Landowner and retiree John Brennan, 67, calls the Sunset Strip, on the banks of the Menindee, home. When Inquirer first met him, in March 2010, the lake had been dry for eight years.

Now, if he were to stand in the same spot, he laughs that he'd be "under four or five metres of water", after the slow-moving torrent from the 2010 Queensland floods finally reached the lakes later that year.

As former mayor of the Central Darling Shire, Brennan says he sympathises with federal Environment Minister Tony Burke, who is due to present a final plan for the basin to parliament by the end of this year.

Brennan is not optimistic that the basin's decades-old woes can be solved by politicians or scientists, but says he has been heartened by the return of visitors as the lake has filled.

"The first thing you notice when the river fills the lake up, there's shedloads of cars and caravans in Broken Hill heading to Menindee, full of tourists," he says. "When it's dry, it's nothing like that." Brennan has lived for nearly 30 years on the lakes, which sit about 250km north of where the Darling meets the Murray.

Those along the Murray are just as territorial, and concerned, about the health of their own bend in the river.

At Deniliquin, in the Riverina district of southern NSW, twins Robert and Fionn Lindsay-Field say their mixed farm missed out on the deluges of the past two summers. When Inquirer last caught up with the brothers in September 2009, the local creeks were bone dry They raise sheep and Angus beef cattle and grow rice and millet on a spread that has been in their family for 94 years.

Financially, their position has never been more precarious, Robert Lindsay-Field says, even though the water is flowing again.

"There's a bit of green about but somehow we missed out on all the bloody rain," he says. "The banks are getting real tough, commodity prices are down and now we have the Murray-Darling plan hanging over our heads."

Their farm relies on irrigated water drawn from the Edward River, a tributary of the Murray to the south, and they're worried about the implications of the impending plan to divert between 2400 gigalitres and 3200 gigalitres to environmental flows.

"The problem is that the banks are asking what's going to happen if our allocation is cut back," he says. "And the answer is, 'I don't know.' They don't like that very much."

An hour's meander downstream, rice grower and sheep grazier Robin Crawford, 44, has already made the decision to permanently sell more than half of her family farm's water allocations.

When we visited her in 2008, her 3000ha property - 55km northeast of Swan Hill - had not produced a rice crop for two years.

This year's summer crop will be her fourth since the drought and she's finally able to use all of her 3000 megalitre water allocation. But it will be her last large rice planting, after agreeing to sell off more than 1800 megalitres of her entitlement.

In the end, it was a business decision. "Farming's not as profitable as we'd like it to be," she says. One-third of her abundant crop last year was wiped out by birds, attracted by the flood. "You'd have to be a mug to be a farmer," she says.

Crawford says she'll hang on to the property, which has been in her family for 43 years, and continue to graze sheep and grow smaller crops. "We all believed that once we had our water back, we'd return to profitability. But with commodity prices the way they are and the high Australian dollar, it's only marginal."

Farther west along the Murray, as it forms the border between NSW and Victoria, citrus grower and irrigator John Piccirillo can understand Crawford's predicament all too well. At Red Cliffs, south of Mildura, Piccirillo and his father had to let their grapes wither and die on the vine in 2008, because they could not afford to water them.

Water was scarce and expensive then ($1100/megalitre) and is now plentiful and cheap ($40/megalitre), but Piccirillo says the situation is still dire.

His once proud vineyards have been abandoned and are grown over with weeds. After the hardship of the drought, he has been forced to focus on his 13ha of navel oranges, but with the dollar still historically high export prices have fallen through the floor.

Where once he could have expected $250 for a 420kg bin of oranges, now it's down to $70.

"Our terms of trade are totally shot," he says. "It's not viable."

Piccirillo has had to take on a full-time office job to pay the bills. He admits that if the property weren't so meaningful to his family, he would have dumped it a long time ago.

About 100km downstream from Piccirillo is the town of Wentworth, where the Darling River joins the Murray for the voyage to South Australia, the lower lakes and finally, out to sea.

Tom Keelan's family's Bremerton Wines vineyards are on the banks of Lake Alexandrina, 100km southeast of Adelaide, and he knows he's at the business end of the Murray-Darling Basin. And when the water disappears, it's a frightening and frustrating place.

"We're at the coal face, we're the canary in the cage," Keelan says. "If there's a drought, we're the first to experience the impacts."

In 2010, when Inquirer first visited Keelan's winery, he was lamenting that only a tiny fraction of that year's record-breaking Queensland floodwater made it more than 3000km into the basin's lower lakes.

The Langhorne Creek premium grape-growing region, of which Bremerton is part, was soon to rely on water delivered by a new pipeline, connected to the Murray River, further upstream. Now, the lake is full. Birds have returned and the future looks brighter.

But Keelan is worried about the final form of the plan and how much it will be influenced by upstream irrigators, who he fears place industry survival ahead of environmental considerations.

"Someone's going to end up losing something out of this, but I just hope it's not the River Murray," he says. "No one can say that a lower environmental allocation is going to be a great legacy to hand to future generations.

"I don't want anyone else in Australia to go through what we did during the drought. It's the only river we've got and we should look after it."

Additional reporting: Sue Neales