Floodplain harvesting, the capture or storage of water during flooding or rain events, has become one of the more controversial issues in Australian farming. On one side are those who claim that rain falling on their property is rightfully theirs. On the other are those who argue that intercepting overland flows can have devastating impacts downstream.
Paul Cameron, a fifth-generation farmer from western New South Wales, has become a face of that downstream concern. He spends his days feeding his cattle by the road near the township of Trangie. As he puts it, you need three things to survive on the land, water, food and money, and a bit of luck as well.
Every day, Cameron drives his herd from his property into Trangie so the animals can drink at the public waterhole and graze on roadside fodder. He says he has been walking his stock to town for more than 11 months straight to get a drink, because there is no water in his own system.
Recent rain has put a little muddy water back into his system over the last few weeks, but he says he is still walking the cattle to town to drink. In his words, none of this is right, and he is raising his cattle off-farm simply because he has no water of his own.
This, he stresses, is not a typical drought story. Cameron says his water is sitting in dams on his neighbour's property, held there under a floodplain harvesting licence. The flows that once moved through his land, he argues, have been intercepted before they can reach him.
He believes that water would have left him far better off financially. The flows that used to cross and drought-proof his property would, he says, have put him in a stronger position than he is now. Instead, the money he once earned off his land is now earned by his neighbour, and he feels government departments treat that as acceptable.
Trangie sits in the Macquarie Valley within the Murray-Darling Basin, about an hour north of Dubbo and on the floodplain. Cameron says his grandfather selected Trangie Station almost 100 years ago precisely because of its water and its ability to carry stock through dry times. The floodplains have drawn irrigators since the 1940s, and the opening of Burrendong Dam in 1967 supercharged access to irrigation water, with Cameron saying his property's fortunes changed in the decades that followed.