Darling River’s basin blockage: NSW Parks seeks flood-plain harvesting licence

NSW Parks and Wildlife Service has sought a licence to capture water before it reaches the Darling River, angering downstream communities.

Backed up: A Sentinel satellite image from last month shows water once again backing up on Toorale Station.

The NSW Parks and Wildlife Service has sought a floodplain harvesting licence over the 90,000ha Toorale Station so it can continue using the former cotton property’s dams and levees to capture the Warrego River’s flows before they reach the Darling River.

The station’s irrigation infrastructure was meant to be decommissioned after the Federal Government purchased the property and its water rights in 2008 for $23.7 million, under the leadership of then Water Minister Penny Wong.

View from the air of dams and levees that divert the Warrego river on Toorale station, west of Bourke, NSW.

At the time Senator Wong said: “returning this water to the Darling will begin to turn around the long-term decline of this once great river,” while her NSW counterpart Carmel Tebbut told parliament “water from Warrego River will flow into the Darling River, and the flow of water across the flood plains will be unimpeded”.

Yet NSW NPWS continues to use levees built on the property near Bourke as far back as 1882 to capture water and divert it onto man-made wetlands, in breach of the original agreement and despite repeated criticism from the Darling River’s downstream communities.

The Weekly Times can reveal NPWS has tried to legitimise holding water back on Toorale, with internal government emails showing it lodged an application for a floodplain harvesting licence last year.

In a July 14, 2021 email titled Proposed Toorale flood-plain licence, a NSW Government governance manager stated “we are leaning towards ‘yes’, but we should really undertake a benefit/cost analysis for government, which is a struggle given current workloads”.

The move has angered Darling River communities, with Australian Floodplain Association vice-chairman Graeme McCrabb saying it was “bizarre” that a parks and wildlife service was trying to obtain a floodplain harvesting licence.

Diminishing water levels on the Darling River in 2019. Picture: AAP Image/Dean Lewins

“Parks is the biggest floodplain harvester in the state,” Mr McCrabb said. “Yet they’re not even metering that water.

“There’s real questions over the legality of what they’re doing, because the whole intention of buying the property was to let the water run freely.”

NSW Environment Minister James Griffin handballed The Weekly Times queries to his department, whose spokeswoman said: “should a floodplain harvesting licence be issued for any part of Toorale National Park and State Conservation Area, it would be utilised to protect the water from extraction by other licenced users for the benefit of the floodplain and downstream environment”.

However it’s clear that some NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment staff are concerned at NPWS’s licence bid.

In July last year one department’s environmental water governance manager wrote an email stating “the NPWS letter received regarding interest in applying for a Toorale FPH licence is scant on details and process”.

Large dams and levies from the turn of the century, capturing and diverting water from the Warrego river, onto surrounding flood plains (foreground) at Toorale Station on the Warrego river, about 70km west out of Bourke, Western NSW.

The Commonwealth Environmental Water Office has also raised concerns, with assistant secretary Michael Wrathall telling Mr McCrabb last December “there’s no commitment to remove all structures remaining within the Warrego River itself”.

During the 2019 drought, when the Darling had dried into a series of stagnant pools, The Weekly Times used satellite images to show ex-tropical cyclone Trevor had delivered a flush of water down the Warrego that was captured by Toorale’s Boera dam, which sits behind a 17km embankment across the river.

An investigation commissioned by the CEWO into the incident stated “if (Toorale’s) Boera Dam did not exist as a regulatory structure, some additional flow — around 5000ML — would have made it to the Darling River”.

Australian Floodplain Association chairman Justin McClure said “if they want to maintain that wetland, it means they are destroying a wetland downstream, which could be the Anabranch”. “There’s only one bucket of water,” he said.

NPWS has proposed an operating strategy for the management of environmental water at Toorale, which states under normal conditions water should be held back behind Boera Dam and shared on a 50:50 basis between the property’s western floodplain and the Darling.

The only time releases from Toorale’s Boera dam would be maximised is when the Darling River had:

CEASED to flow for more than 110 days, or.

THERE has been more than 135 days of flow less than 450 megalitres a day, or

IT has been more than one year since a small fresh of at least 1500 megalitres/day occurred for at least 10 days as measure at the Louth gauge.