   #copyright

Darling River

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Geography of Oceania
(Australasia)

                          Darling River
   The Darling in unusually good condition, near Bourke

            The Darling in unusually good condition, near Bourke

   Origin          Bourke, New South Wales
   Mouth           confluence with the Murray River at Wentworth
   Basin countries Australia
   Length          2,739 km (1,701 mi)
   Avg. discharge  100m^3/s

   The Darling River is the longest river in Australia, flowing 2,739km
   from northern New South Wales to its confluence with the Murray River
   at Wentworth, New South Wales. (Some geographers treat the Darling and
   the lower Murray as a single river, 3,000km long. This is largely a
   matter of semantics). Officially the Darling begins near Bourke at the
   confluence of the Culgoa and Barwon rivers, streams which rise in the
   ranges of southern Queensland. The whole Murray-Darling river system,
   one of the largest in the world, drains all of New South Wales west of
   the Great Dividing Range, much of northern Victoria and southern
   Queensland and parts of South Australia.

   The Queensland headwaters of the Darling (the area now known as the
   Darling Downs) were gradually colonised from 1815 onward. In 1828 the
   explorer Charles Sturt was sent by the Governor of New South Wales, Sir
   Ralph Darling, to investigate the course of the Macquarie River. He
   discovered the Bogan and then, early in 1829, the upper Darling, which
   he named after the Governor. In 1835 Major Thomas Mitchell travelled
   the whole length of the Darling, confirming Sturt's earlier discovery
   that it was a tributary of the Murray.

   Although its flow is extraordinarily irregular (the river dried up on
   no fewer than forty-five occasions between 1885 and 1960), in the later
   19th century the Darling became a major transportation route, the
   pastoralists of western New South Wales using it to send their wool by
   paddle steamer from busy river ports such as Bourke and Wilcannia to
   the South Australian railheads at Morgan and Murray Bridge. But over
   the past century the river's importance has declined. In this period
   the Australian poet Henry Lawson wrote a well-known ironic tribute to
   the Darling River.

   Today the Darling is in poor health, suffering from overuse of its
   waters, pollution from pesticide runoff and prolonged drought, possibly
   the result of manmade global warming. In some years it barely flows at
   all. The river has a high salt content and declining water quality. To
   quote another Henry Lawson poem:

   The skies are brass and the plains are bare,
   Death and ruin are everywhere;
   And all that is left of the last year's flood
   Is a sickly stream on the grey-black mud;
   The salt-springs bubble and the quagmires quiver,
   And this is the dirge of the Darling River.

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darling_River"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
