These tragic events have shone a spotlight on the appalling plans of the NSW Government and the cotton industry. Fish that had survived many droughts over decades died in their hundreds of thousands. The fish kill occurred when a sudden cool snap killed off the algae and as it decomposed, it robbed the water of dissolved oxygen. Ecologists and water management experts placed the blame firmly on the over-allocation and over-extraction of water – sometimes illegal – by cotton growers upstream.įertiliser and other chemical runoff from cotton farms have made the water nutrient rich, and a zero river flow, coupled with high temperatures, has fuelled toxic blooms of cyano-bacteria, blue-green algae, in the river. In January 2019 viral videos showed grown men near Menindee weeping as they held decades-old Murray Cod that had perished in the green oxygen-starved soup that is all that remained of the Darling River.Īustralians were horrified by the news that the river, known as the Barka to its people, was in a state of ecological collapse. When the River Runs Dry (Rory McLeod, 2019) is a 54-minute documentary film about the mass fish kills at Menindee, in western New South Wales, on the Darling River, that shocked Australia in 2019. (Approvals are usually processed regularly during trading hours, but please allow up to two business days.)

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When the river runs dry