Whatever happened to the Coorong?

For those of you with East-coast-centric school geography behind them, the Coorong is the massive lagoon at the end of the Murray River, just south of the where the river exits the sea, and the setting of "Storm Boy" - the novel and film written by Colin Thiele in the 70's.

But I digress. The Coorong is a national park, and is rich with bird and aquatic life. You know, an important breeding ground for birds and all that. I've been there several times, once on a Summer Holiday bird survey trip, and some other times for short camping trips.

Sure it has always dried up from time to time in summer, but it's been dry for quite a while. The picture above is the Coorong taken two weeks ago. The recent flooding and rains in the Darling/Murray River catchments has all flown into relatively empty dams (ie some of Adelaide's drinking water is sourced from a large dam downstream) and has been taken up by irrigation allocations that Qld, NSW and Victoria aren't really reducing as much as they should.

In fact, the river has stopped flowing for a while now (again, drought plus irrigation overuse), which has lead to sand banking up at the Murray mouth, and Lake Alexandrina (below left, with dust storm), a deeper lake to the North of The Coorong, is drier than anyone remembers.

Someone I know is doing sampling and surveying down this way and has made many trips to the region recently. On one trip, there were lots of dead, stinky fish lying on the dried up ground.

Very depressing, and I'm hoping that our climate change and water Minister - who is South Australian - will do the right thing by our poor, backward-flowing river system. Let's wait and see, shall we?