Rob McBride’s Darling River plight continues

Outspoken blue-blood grazier Rob McBride is not scared to take on anyone in his fight to return water to the dying Darling River.

Bank on it: Rob McBride on the bank of the Darling River at Tolarno Station. Picture: David Geraghty

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ASK ROB McBRIDE what makes him tick and the reply is swift.

“Fairness, equity; the right of everyone to an equal fair go,” says the outback sheep grazier credited with almost single-handedly bringing the critical plight of the dying Darling River in far western NSW to national and global attention.

“But it’s more than that, too. It’s also about the right to water; how water belongs to everyone, to the river and the floodplains, not just to a few big corrupt cotton growers and their political mercenaries.”

Most Australians will know Rob McBride from his passionate Facebook and YouTube pleas for help for the great inland river that runs through his historic 200,000-hectare sheep property, Tolarno Station, halfway between the remote Darling River towns of Menindee and Pooncarie in the arid Western Division of NSW.

Who can forget the videos of a desperate McBride, standing knee-deep in a shrinking stagnant pool left in the deep dry trough of the once-mighty Darling, with a giant dead Murray Cod in his arms and thousands more dying fish flailing around him in the cracking mud?

Or McBride and his articulate 22-year-old daughter, Kate, on national television calling out the moribund Darling River and the mass death of more than one million native fish last year as the disastrous consequence of not a lack of rain or drought, but deeply failed water policy and government mismanagement.

And the family’s key role in helping expose corruption, rampant greed and water theft by some in the $1.5 billion cotton industry upstream on the Darling River and its seven tributaries above Bourke.

“I have no problem with cotton as long as it is grown sustainably, but unfortunately there are too many Australian cotton growers in the northern (Murray-Darling) Basin who are cowboys and have no regard for anyone but themselves,” says a typically blunt McBride, whose three adjacent outback properties run together as Tolarno, one of NSW’s biggest farms. “The cotton industry is a minnow in terms of its size and economic importance yet it has got control of the system and is taking so much water upstream that it is destroying the Darling River and now the Murray system, too.”

Rob McBride on his family property Tolarno Station in NSW. Pictured with son James and daughter Kate. Wife is Katharine.

ON THE banks of a sluggish but still-flowing Darling at Tolarno Station last month, McBride indicates the river height marker at which big rain, such as the deluge that fell in southern Queensland in February, should have led to a flood in the Lower Darling that spilt out across the expansive floodplain country – the “lungs of the river” – turning more than 8000 hectares of Tolarno’s grey soils green for months and providing valuable feed for its 14,000 remaining Merino sheep. “All we got was a little flow that hardly came up the banks, and we’re supposed to be grateful for that,” says McBride of the mud-coloured flush that finally saw the Darling rejoin the Murray River at its Wentworth junction in mid- April after 18 months of no flow.

“More than 80 per cent of this flood event was cut off and stolen by the cotton industry upstream into private farm dams – most of them built and paid for by taxpayers using $6 billion of public funding under the Murray Darling Basin Plan that was supposed to be used to return more, not less, water to the river; how did we ever let this happen?”

It’s a stance that has won Rob McBride, 56, few friends in Australia’s powerful cotton industry.

Legal action has been threatened against McBride by cotton growers upstream on the Darling River and its major tributaries. In turn, McBride last year lodged a police complaint of “intimidation” against an employee of the Cotton Australia industry group, who he claims warned him quietly at a water conference in Sydney that (in McBride’s words) “unless you stop your Facebook page, the cotton industry will unite and destroy your family, your business and Tolarno station”. Cotton Australia denied the claims and the case was later dropped.

Rob McBride on his family property Tolarno Station in NSW. Pictured with son James and daughter Kate. Wife is Katharine.

Nor has McBride been timid in alleging leading National Party and Coalition government figures have deliberately protected and favoured “their mates” in the cotton industry above all other water users in the Murray Darling Basin in return for personal, political and financial support.

But just how did an outback wool grower come to be such a thorn in the side of federal politicians, the Coalition Government, water authorities and the cotton industry? And have such a sway on national opinion?

The answer lies in looking beyond the red outback sand hills, gnarled river red gums and vast sheep flocks of Tolarno station to Rob McBride’s blue-blood family background.

Despite his stained and battered stockman’s hat, baggy blue jeans and genuine knockabout nature, McBride is just as comfortable in the conservative corporate boardrooms of Adelaide as he is yanking a wild goat from the grips of deep mud in Tolarno’s wild back country.

Rob McBride with NSW MP Jeremy Buckingham, holding a dying Murray cod, and neighbour Dick Arnold last year. Picture: Office of Jeremy Buckingham/AFP

THE McBride family has long ranked high among the dynasties of South Australia’s pastoral “royalty” – alongside the McLachlans, Hawkers, McTaggarts, Michells and Kidmans – with the family’s 100-year-old company AJ & PA McBride Ltd remaining a major force in Australian agriculture.

Still owned solely by 102 members of the extended McBride family, AJ & PA McBride Ltd has ridden the rollercoaster of the “sheep’s back” since the first sheep station, Faraway Hill, was bought at Burra, SA, in 1902, rising to become one of the three biggest wool producers in Australia.

It now owns 10 wool, lamb and beef properties in South Australia and Victoria worth $300-400 million, shearing more than 375,000 Merino sheep and produces an extraordinary 7000 bales of wool each year. Its most recent mega-purchase was the prized Telopea Downs from Qatar’s Hassad Food for $89 million in 2018.

Rob McBride – who owns Tolarno Station in his own right outside the family company – has sat on the board of AJ & PA McBride Ltd for the past 16 years (the original AJ was his great-grandfather), and together with his older brother holds about 10 per cent of its 6.3 million shares.

The McBride dynasty is also deeply embedded in Australia’s conservative side of politics. Rob’s great-uncle, Phillip McBride, was a conservative federal politician for nearly 27 years, a member of Prime Minister Robert Menzies’ War Cabinet in 1940, a founding father of the Liberal Party and a long serving Minister of Defence in later Menzies’ governments. A cousin of Rob’s, Nick McBride, is the current Liberal MP for the SA rural seat of MacKillop in the conservative stronghold of SA’s southeast.

But Rob McBride shrugs off the wealthy, blue-blood, squattocracy tag. While he maintains a home in Adelaide with his wife Katharine, the daughter of former SA Liberal premier Dean Brown, and his three children, Kate, James, 19, and his new young son Michael, 2, are following in his footsteps down the path of Adelaide private schools and university, he decries the comfortable landed gentry credentials of his forebears.

“My job on the board is to make AJ & PA McBride a bigger and stronger company and to pass it on in better shape to the next generation,” McBride says.

“But it’s not my achievement, it’s not me; I’m a worker and much more interested in dealing with the practical and mental challenges of outback pastoralism at Tolarno than I ever will be in breeding racehorses, or going into politics, or playing polo or farming where there’s always green grass and a 28-inch rainfall, like other members of my family have been.”

But McBride also accepts his privileged background and family pedigree have well-armed him to fight harder for his beloved Darling River – and make accusations against all sides of agriculture and politics – when other activists or agitators might have fallen by the wayside.

So, too, has he been helped by his imposing two-metre, or six-foot-seven, height, growing social media following and grudging admiration by many in the farm sector for how McBride led the fight and marshalled powerful wool grower forces behind the scenes to dislodge controversial Australian Wool Innovation chairman Wal Merriman from the top job after a decade of discontent.

“Those who try and tear me down as taking this position for political reasons (criticising the Coalition government, the National Party and the cotton industry), haven’t been able to, because my family fundamentals are as conservatives, Liberals and long-term Australian farmers,” McBride says.

“I’ve been called a Green, a communist, everything under the sun, but I’ve never minded being a stirrer. I’m speaking out against injustice and complacency, not because of any political party or persuasion, because I’m not prepared to sit back and see the Darling system die in my lifetime.”

It’s a passion, almost an obsession, for the Darling River – he prefers its Aboriginal name, the Barka, – and his own Tolarno Station bred into McBride as a young boy in the 1960s.

He spent his childhood alternating between stately homes in Adelaide and the rough red-dirt sheep station in far southwest NSW, 200km north of Mildura, which his parents had bought in 1949.

Those early years instilled an everlasting fascination in McBride for the history of the Darling and its slow flowing waters; of the days when paddle-steamers laden with wool plied Australia’s greatest inland waterway, and much of the nation’s rollicking history and colourful birth was written through its striking shearers, outback poets, vast pastoral stations and wool wealth.

Rob McBride on his family property Tolarno Station in NSW. Pictured with son James and daughter Kate. Wife is Katharine.

AS THE Darling curves in a deep bend around the tall palm tree and white weatherboard wings of Tolarno homestead, McBride sits under the gnarled river red gums and brings alive the heyday era of the great Tolarno Station in the 1860s to 1890s.

Those were the giddy years when Burke and Wills partied in the station’s old log hut on their way north to the Gulf of Carpentaria, Tolarno Station teemed with 380,000 Merinos on its dusty plains, its massive 110-stand shearing shed was alive with the noise of thousands of sheep and blade-flashing shearers, the river banks bustled with three pubs, a scouring plant, jail and two wharves, and Tolarno’s then-owners, the Reids followed by the Chaffeys, grew rich on the sheep’s back and Tolarno’s fleet of 12 wool-carrying riverboats.

“It’s my whole world,” says McBride simply, who bought Tolarno Station from his siblings in 1997 after his parents had died. He then added adjoining Peppora Station in 1998 and its adjacent property, Wyoming, in 2011, to create the vast half-million-acre property now stretching more than 100 kilometres east of the Darling to its farthest boundary, one of the biggest landholdings in NSW.

Away from the river and its once-productive floodplains – “they need a flood every four or five years, which they’re not getting now” – are rolling low red sandhills covered with mallee scrub, interspersed with open soil grey country dotted with desert oaks, belah and black box.

To many, the beauty of this arid country – Tolarno’s rainfall is less than 250mm (10 inches), technically classifying it as desert country – is hard to see.

Bleached bones of dead sheep, goats and kangaroos lie across its sands – until last month its soils were dry and dams were empty – goats roam in aimless mobs across its vast 10,000-hectare paddocks, and at night around the kitchen table the talk is of wild killer pigs mauling sheep.

But McBride sees the country and its moods through different eyes. Especially after this year’s blessed autumn rains have left shining sheets of water pooling in shallow valleys, wildflowers popping through the red sandhills and lush young grass, bluebush and mallee lucerne shooting on its greening plains.

Even coronavirus isolation has its upsides. His daughter, Kate, is home from university, writing essays on her laptop out on the sunny homestead lawns when not responding to radio calls to rescue bogged station hands far from home, while eldest son James is fixing anything mechanical, and helping build an outlying new shearing shed.

While Merino sheep numbers are low after 10 years of dry times, record prices for wild goats driven by demand from the US for goat meat – up to $120 a goat this year compared to a decade years ago when they were worthless and shot as pests – have kept Tolarno, and most of McBride’s neighbours, afloat. Good wool prices have helped too, although many stations were forced to fully destock their sheep when the river and dams dried up and bores faltered.

“It’s an honour to work a place like Tolarno. This is Australia’s heartland and my whole world,” says McBride, as he rejoices in the recent rain. “This country can be amazingly productive when it has water and river floods; when this country explodes with colour after rain there is nowhere better in the world.”