WHEN THE RIVER RUNS DRY - Trailer Premieres Feb 22nd 2020 - Cinema Nova - Melbourne
Synopsis:
In January 2019, viral videos showed grown men near Menindee weeping as they held Murray Cod, many decades old, that had perished in the green, oxygen-starved soup which is all that remains of the Darling River. Australians were horrified by the news that the Darling River, known as the Barka to its people, was in a state of ecological collapse. Politicians blamed
drought. Ecologists and water management experts placed the blame firmly on the over allocation and over extraction of water – sometimes illegal – by cotton growers upstream Fertiliser (and other chemical) runoff from cotton farms have made the water nutrient rich, which, along with zero river flow and high temperatures, has fuelled toxic blooms of cyano-bacteria “blue-green algae”, in the river. The fish kill occurred when a sudden cool snap killed off the algae and, as it decomposed, robbed the water of dissolved oxygen. Fish that had survived many droughts over decades suddenly died in their thousands. Even at the time of writing, in late January 2018, news of another huge fish kill is coming through the media. These tragic events have shone a spotlight on the appalling plans of the NSW Government and the cotton industry. These plans include the ‘decommissioning’ of the Menindee Lakes – a 30 million year-old lake system, much of it within a National Park – in order to achieve ‘water savings’ (through reduced evaporation), to reduce the need for expensive buy-backs of over allocated water licences.
There were urgent calls for a Royal Commission as Australian’s began to suspect that the rules governing the Murray Darling Basin overwhelmingly served agribusiness interests, to the detriment of the environment and downstream communities. This documentary film was born on that horrible first day, when the images of dead fish came before us. We wanted to document this pivotal moment in Australia’s environmental history, with the hope that together, as a nation, we can bring this immense, beautiful and remote river system back from the brink of catastrophe. We wanted to document the impact of these events – and the inexorable plans of the NSW Government and Big Cotton over many years – on the people of the Darling River. In particular, we seek to bring Aboriginal voices to the fore. The Barkindji are the people of the River. They have been dispossessed and marginalised for almost a hundred and seventy years. They survived because of the Barka, the Darling River, and now that is being taken too. This film will be both a celebration of the resilience of people and nature, and a call to arms. The Barkindji cannot afford to lose this fight. Australia cannot afford to lose this fight.
Bruce Shillingsworth - 2019 Corroboree Project - Yaama Ngunna Barka (Welcome to our River)
Bruce Shillingsworth: "This River's in big trouble. We need your help desperately. We need our rivers to survive, to sustain us and to look after us."
Bruce Shillingsworth is calling all the different nations to come to Brewarrina for a "Corroboree Project" to "get the water back in the river". Yaama Ngunna Barka (Welcome to our River).
Bruce Shillingsworth: "I'm here calling for our people out there, First Nations People, to come together in supporting us here in Brewarrina. To get the water back in the river, to let our rivers run freely. We need ceremonies, we need dancers, we need rainmakers to make it rain, we need special lawman, to sing the land, to talk to the spirit. We need our stories and our knowledge to be told again. We need to heal our country through the spirit. Call on Biami our great spirit."