The dying river

There's a good post and discussion thread here about the jockeying and jostling for states' rights to the waters of the Murray, an issue obscured beyond all clearing by the web of politics at all three levels and the many variations on the theme of short-term self-interest that have always determined the fate of the river.

Here it is at its mouth end: this is the northern reaches of the Coorong on December 27, 2008.





When I look at the photos of gangrenous toes on cigarette packets, my first thought is that I am looking at creeping death. That is what we have here.

Observe the salt and scum, the struggling vegetation, the colour of that ripple just beyond the shore. And imagine, if you will, the smell that hit me as I got out of the car to take this photo, a smell as of large and equal parts of three-day-old dead fish and freshly excreted human shit, left to ripen for an hour or two under the South Australian midsummer sun.

It was recently pointed out to me by someone involved in the Royal Commission of the mid-1990s that the proponent women, as they were called, in the Hindmarsh Island affair always maintained that if the Hindmarsh Island bridge were built, the river would die.