The Last Drop of Water in Broken Hill
It’s April in the outback of New South Wales, a southeastern state of Australia, and the afternoon sun is warming the red, sandy, and scrubby plains. We’re near the desolate area where The Road Warrior was filmed. But the movie got it wrong. The real fight around here is not for oil. It’s for water.
“You’re under five meters of water right now,” Barry Philp says. “Hard to imagine, isn’t it?” I look through the windshield of his pickup. The sky is blue and empty and the land is dead flat.
We’re rattling along the gray clay bottom of Lake Menindee, several miles from its shore. Three years ago the lake was full. Together with surrounding lakes, it held five times the water in Sydney Harbor. Rainfall in the past three years is tracking lower than the worst on record. The lakebed is now bone dry.
Philp, a solid man in his late 40s, manages the Menindee Lakes system. The system was built in the 1950s to secure a water supply for the mining town of Broken Hill, 70 miles northwest. It diverts water from the nearby Darling River, storing it in plains and lakes that previously filled only in floods. For the second time this century, it’s on the point of failure.
This past December, government officials estimated Broken Hill, population 18,000, would run out of water in August. Amid news about coming droughts around the world, and record temperatures forecast to get even hotter, I’ve come to an iconic Australian town to see how it’s reached the brink of running dry.
The struggle for water draws out the character of the continent and the dreams woven deep into the psyche of the people who settled here. “We have a major problem,” says John Williams, former chief of the land and water division of Australia’s national science agency. “It’s a clash between what the land can do and how it works, and our aspirations for a stationary, Western civilization.”
Residents are prohibited from watering their gardens during the day. They must wash their cars and paving with buckets, not hoses.
Philp pulls up to a blue rig rising above the plain, surrounded by trucks and men. He grew up nearby, in the hamlet of Menindee, where his mum, Beryl, was born on the Menindee Aboriginal Station. As a local resident who also works for State Water, Philp is stuck between a desert and a dry place. He’s welcoming but reserved, as if he’s decided fewer words will upset fewer people. He must implement unpopular water-policy decisions made elsewhere by the New South Wales government. We’re visiting the latest controversy: a bore-drilling program searching for
