Death on Lower Lakes (click here)

From Adelaide's Independent Weekly, Editor Hendrik Gout:-

It’s dawn, and the yellow sun is drowning in Lake Albert’s murk. A dozen men, mostly in battered but very serviceable aluminium dinghies, are setting off from Meningie. Their mission, which they have chosen to accept, is to kill as many fish as possible.

This is the government’s best answer to the worst human-caused change the Murray basin has ever seen.

Lake Albert, near the mouth of the once-Mighty Murray, is drying. Soon parts of the lake will be a wind-blown paddock.

It will be an enormous paddock, because Lake Albert is still so large that it’s not always possible to see the far shore..............

........... The government’s answer is to kill the fish before the fish die. The environment department is now paying fishermen to hunt carp and other species, usually with nets, and turn the catch into lobster bait.

......... There are incongruities in environmental politics the world over, but few so intriguing as the last lapping of the last water from what once were Australia’s mightiest lakes.
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