DARLING RIVER

The 'Darling River' is the longest river in Australia, flowing 2,739km from northern New South Wales to its confluence with the Murray River at Wentworth, New South Wales. (Some geographers treat the Darling and the lower Murray as a single river, 3,000km long. This is largely a matter of semantics). Officially the Darling begins near Bourke at the confluence of the Culgoa and Barwon rivers, streams which rise in the ranges of southern Queensland. The whole Murray-Darling river system, one of the largest in the world, drains all of New South Wales west of the Great Dividing Range, much of northern Victoria and southern Queensland and parts of South Australia.
The Queensland headwaters of the Darling (the area now known as the Darling Downs) were gradually colonised from 1815 onward. In 1828 the explorer Charles Sturt was sent by the Governor of New South Wales, Sir Ralph Darling, to investigate the course of the Macquarie River. He discovered the Bogan and then, early in 1829, the upper Darling, which he named after the Governor. In 1835 Major Thomas Mitchell travelled the whole length of the Darling, confirming Sturt's earlier discovery that it was a tributary of the Murray.
Although its flow is extraordinarily irregular (the river dried up on no fewer than ''forty-five'' occasions between 1885 and 1960), in the later 19th century the Darling became a major transportation route, the pastoralists of western New South Wales using it to send their wool by shallow-draft paddle steamer from busy river ports such as Bourke and Wilcannia to the South Australian railheads at Morgan and Murray Bridge. But over the past century the river's importance as a transportation route has declined. In this period the Australian poet Henry Lawson wrote a well-known ironic tribute to the Darling River.
Today the Darling is in poor health, suffering from overuse of its waters, pollution from pesticide runoff and prolonged drought. In some years it barely flows at all. The river has a high salt content and declining water quality. To quote another Henry Lawson poem:
The skies are brass and the plains are bare,

Death and ruin are everywhere;

And all that is left of the last year's flood

Is a sickly stream on the grey-black mud;

The salt-springs bubble and the quagmires quiver,

And this is the dirge of the Darling River.

Contents

See also

References

External Links

See also

'Major tributaries'

★ Culgoa River

★ Barwon River

★ Namoi River

★ Bogan River

★ Warrego River

★ Paroo River
'Population Centres'

★ Bourke

★ Louth

★ Tilpa

★ Wilcannia

★ Menindee

★ Pooncarie

★ Wentworth

References

External Links

★ "A river runs through it" Daily Telegraph article - June 06, 2007 http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,21854160-5006009,00.html