Climate change crisis - Murray’s green basin almost dusty outback

In Eric Bogle’s great anti-war song ‘The Band Played Waltzing Matilda’ his narrator “lived the free life of the rover From the Murray’s green basin to the dusty outback I waltzed my Matilda all over” before he was called, like hundreds of Irishmen, to fight at Gallipoli.

Neither he or Bogle could have imagined how like the dusty outback Murray’s green basin might be a century after WWI because of man’s misuse of nature’s gifts and climate change. Today, Murray’s green basin is choked, and dying because of poorly controlled abstraction to irrigate farmland eked out of a hostile environment and unprecedented temperatures. The catastrophe unfolds despite a river-system management plan put in place a decade ago to protect the resource. Maybe it’s time to recognise that in the face of escalating climate change humanity’s options to avert and restore are becoming more and more limited.