Traditional owners in Menindee are grieving for a river that smells like death.
“The Baaka is our culture; to see the fish like this and to smell the fish is just unbelievable,” says Malyangapa Barkandji woman Denise O’Donnell. “The whole of Australia should be fighting for this river – all the rivers. It makes me sick to see it like this, it makes me cry. It’s very heartbreaking. A lot of the community feel the same and they are grieving – this is so wrong.”
It should be a time of abundance. After years of drought, the Darling-Baaka experienced record floods in 2022, inundating properties downstream of the Menindee Lakes and causing a fish breeding boom. But the fish – particularly invasive carp and the native bony bream – bred too fast, choking the waterways as flood waters receded, just as a heatwave hit the state. The dissolved oxygen levels in the river dropped, causing a hypoxic blackwater event that saw fish dying in their millions.
The carcasses stretch tens of kilometres along the Baaka, on a scale that locals say surpasses the fish kills in 2019. Unlike 2019, where a significant number of Murray Cod were lost, most of those that have died are quick-growing bony bream.
Barkindji traditional owners say they are tired of spending their time fighting for the health of a river system that should be a national priority.
“People fought so hard when this first happened and to see it again like this is hurting everyone all over again,” O’Donnell says on Monday.
She says there is a feeling of despondence among the Menindee community, who are exhausted and depleted from the ongoing fight.
“This place should be swarming with experts,” O’Donnell says. “This is an Australian disaster and it should be treated as such: like a bushfire, like a flood. Fish kills and unhealthy river systems have got to be taken seriously, it’s just so wrong it breaks my heart.”
Norman O’Donnell says he is also tired of talking about the unhealthy river. “You get sick of speaking the same thing over and over again and nothing ever gets done,” the Barkindji man says.
“It’s stuffed now, all this here will kill this river. You can smell it, it’s in the air, it’s everywhere – you just have to learn to live with it. It will never ever be healthy again.”
‘It polluted my skin’
The Tolarno station owner, Rob McBride, has been collecting dead fish and mud samples, refrigerating them and driving them to Adelaide for toxicology tests. He also feels the community will have to take an active role to get governments to pay attention.
“There has been a major flood, these fish should be up and down the river exploding in numbers, but we are looking at a situation where 20 million fish died in the last few days and the world doesn’t really care,” McBride says.
“They are saying that hot weather caused this [but] it wasn’t particularly hot on the day they died. This is outback Australia, it’s supposed to be hot. It’s deoxygenation of the water and also what’s in the water – you can see the colour of the water.”
The community still needs community support to deal with the aftermath of last year’s floods: 81-year-old Patsy Quayle’s home was flooded, forcing her to live in a caravan. The Barkandji woman’s home is still uninhabitable.
“I’ve been living like a derelict ever since the water came up,” she says.
“I’m so angry I can’t express how I feel, it’s only me to clean up that mess, they are still full of mud … The river is devastated, the fish are dying, and all my walls are still full of shit. It’s a whole mess.”
The town of Menindee draws its drinking water from the Darling-Baaka, which is treated downstream of the lakes. Many other draw theirs directly from the river. Masses of dead fish have locals questioning their water quality.
Some residents have already reported adverse effects from using the water. Matt Flower, who has been staying out at Tolarno station the past few months, says his skin broke out since showering in the river water for the past two weeks.
“It’s completely polluted my skin,” he says. “It’s gone all over my body top to toe, all down my legs. My feet look like they are about to fall off.”
A multi-agency emergency operations centre was set up in the region on Monday to conduct testing and ensure people in Menindee have access to a fresh, clean water supply.
The NSW deputy emergency management commissioner, Peter Thurtell, says they will begin removing dead fish. He says there is “no need for community concern” about water quality as there were “multiple viable solutions to maintain water supply”, which would be switched on the minute testing showed the water was unsafe.
A community meeting was planned for Tuesday.
Evelyn Bates, 85, has lived on the river her whole life and says she has never seen it in such a state. She was concerned the fish would be left to stagnate and rot in and around Menindee.
“How are we going to clean this up, that’s what I would like to know,” she says. “It’s bad, it’s really bad, and it breaks my heart.”
Otis Filley is a freelance journalist and film-maker based in Broken Hill
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