Inside Australia's climate emergency: the taps run dry

When Fleur Magick Dennis moved her family to Euchareena in July 2017, the dam that supplies the tiny village with water was full, the three local creeks were flowing and her four boys didn’t have to share bathwater.

“Everything was green,” the Wiradjuri woman remembers.

Fleur, 40, and her husband, Laurance, 47 — known as Locky — picked their home in central New South Wales to keep their children away from the ghettoised estates of nearby towns.

But within 12 months, drought had bitten so hard that the dam the kids used to cool off was almost empty. The town water supply — never drinkable, but usable for laundry, toilets and watering plants — was turned off.

For months there was no water coming from the taps. The rainwater tank, once used just for drinking water but now the only supply, was running low.

The family lives in a run-down rented property. Even if it does rain, “we end up with more water in the living room than we do in the tank”, Locky says.

The only option was to pay $450 for a water truck to drop 15,000 litres into the rainwater tank each month.

Parts of New South Wales received big downpours in early February — but it was not enough to break the drought. About 70 towns in the state are still facing the prospect of serious water security problems within 12 months, including running out entirely, unless there is significant rainfall. Water carting, bores, pipelines and desalination plants are planned for multiple towns.

As many as 15 towns have already had to cart in water.

Euchareena sits in the Macquarie Valley. Just 30 minutes’ drive away is the rest of the region’s main water supply at Burrendong Dam, a vast inland store that can hold as much as three Sydney Harbours’ worth of water, serving about 70,000 people.

In early February, the dam was at 1.5% capacity. The average annual inflow into Lake Burrendong is 1,450bn litres. In the 24 months up to October 2019, only 87bn litres reached the dam.

Water NSW says that without major rain, what’s left in the dam is enough to meet “critical human needs” until just the middle of 2020 for towns that include Dubbo, Warren, Nyngan, Cobar and Wellington.

Everyone is worried.

Fleur and Locky have a small business running cultural workshops and ceremonies.

At the suggestion of a local pharmacist they travelled to Wellington with a mob of kids to perform a raindance. They asked the rain spirit Wahwee to bring rain for the people and the land.

The Macquarie Valley sits in the north of the Murray-Darling basin, where the drought has been fierce. Rainfall totals have been the lowest on record here.

“This is a very extreme drought,” says Dr Ben Henley, a climate scientist researching water resources at Monash University. “But actually, so far it’s quite short.”

He says climate models are so far inconclusive about whether the Macquarie Valley region will get wetter or drier. For the southern parts of Australia, the models are more conclusive. There will be less rain.

But the models and the weather observations are clear, Henley says, that climate change is pushing temperatures ever higher.

When you live in a tin house with not enough cash for air conditioners, you have to find different ways to cool down. Like running down to the dam, which is no longer safe to swim in.

Fleur contacted local media about her town’s water problem and, along with Euchareena's progress association, started writing to the local council about their plight. In October 2019, Dubbo council applied for state government funding to pay for water to be carted by truck to residents.

Now a truck rolls up every 21 days and drops 13,000 litres into the family’s water tank — an allowance of 100 litres a person each day, which cannot be used outside the home.

Fleur and Locky run a household with no alcohol, no drugs and no gambling, and they play a critical role in mentoring young Aboriginal people.

“We are cultural knowledge holders and we have a responsibility to pass that on,” Fleur says.

This means there will often be a lot more than just six people in the house, and it’s the reason why, every 18 days or so, there’s no water left in their tank. The family’s only option then are bottles.

In January 2020, the strain of life without water became too great — the family moved away to Sydney. "It's sad for us to have to move off country," says Fleur. They want to return. They just need water.