From little things, big things grow. And so, for the 60 odd years until the nineteen-nineties, we saw the land in the Murray Darling basin being developed from what was mainly arid low-yield farmland into a province producing over 40 per cent of the nation’s agricultural output.

Dams transformed the highly irregular flows of the system (the annual variation being between 7,000 and 118,000 gigalitres) into a placid river.