Oasis country dying of thirst

SITTING where Australia's two greatest rivers meet, Wentworth lies at the symbolic heart of the Murray-Darling Basin food bowl.

There has been an irrigation industry there for more than a century, and the Wentworth Shire calls itself "oasis country" - a place where the brown waters of the Darling and the green waters of the Murray have enabled people to turn the desert into a garden.

The Perry sandhills outside town are a brilliant red, but the citrus and wine grapes are usually a brilliant green. Generations have grown up knowing nothing but full water allocations, and the most famous monument in Wentworth features a Massey Ferguson tractor.

The tractors are honoured for the epic role they played building levee banks to stop Wentworth disappearing under the mighty flood of 1956.

But no tractor will be able to drag the south-western NSW district out of the drought disaster it finds itself in today. For the first time, Wentworth irrigators are enduring the huge shock of a zero water allocation this year.

Mr Watson wants the Government and farmers to take radical action so this water crisis is never repeated. " I just hope out of this drought we get some changes. Let's stop talking and let's start doing."

The chairman of Western Murray Irrigation, Ian Murdoch, said the water situation was "very grim … the weather patterns seem to be changing".

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