Economics of Water is a series that I made in response to the droughts that were affecting the Murray-Darling Basin. I grew up in a small town called Menindee in far west New South Wales. The town was famous for the Menindee Lakes, which provided irrigation for crops and also for commercial fishing.
My stepfather was a fisherman on the lakes, so I grew up going out in the boats on the lakes. It was an important part of the town's life, but over the years, cotton farming and other industries had been drawing too much water. And in combination with droughts, the river started to dry up, and the lakes were no longer used for fishing.
In 2018, the droughts had got to a record level, and everything had dried up. I went out and documented the lakes, overlaid them with gold geometric shapes to represent how the lakes had been overused for financial gain. A few months later, an unprecedented event which caught the headlines of the nation was when there was a massive fish kill in December 2018. There was a second one that followed in January 2019. And then a third in March 2023.
It killed a lot of native fish including silver perch and Murray cod. These events are often considered just a phenomena because of drought and algal bloom. However, many of the locals have been advocating for better water management in the Darling region because of overuse of water by different industries such as cotton. So, for me, this was a work that I wanted to make to highlight how industry had been overusing the water in the Murray-Darling Basin.
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