| BACK HOME MENINDEE LAKES STORAGE is a paradox of nature, a huge expanse of water sixteen kilometres long by fourteen wide, lying in one of the most arid regions of the world. It is the largest of a number of natural freshwater lakes clustered around the old Darling River Port of Menindee,110 kilometres east of Broken Hill. Major Mitchell discovered the lakes, which he called "Laidly's Pond" in 1831. since then the area has been a landmark in the history of outback development. Explorer Charles Sturt used Menindee as a depot during his expedition into Central Australia in 1844-46,it was similarly used in 1860 by the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition to the Gulf of Carpentaria. Pastoralists brought great mobs of cattle and sheep to graze through this desert rangeland on properties that sometimes covered a million hectares. Along the winding Darling River, paddle steamers towed barges laden with fencing wire and flour,horseshoes and nails and roofing iron and all the paraphernalia of civilisation for the hardy pioneers of this sunburnt country. Menindee was an important river port and telegraph station then, and produce messages from there would often be delivered to the great markets of the world. But the water highway, like the water supply, was unreliable. Sometimes steamers lay for months in the baking mud of drought and when the river flooded they might wander far out beyond the banks, to be marooned again when floodwaters vanished. Water was the life-blood of this region, and lack of it meant death and disaster. Sometime men perished along the dusty tracks and thousands of sheep died in the bone dry wilderness. The Pastoralists brought in water-diviners and well-sinkers and these were the men who found the mineral wealth that lay beneath the surface at Silverton and Thackaringa. Finds that led to the legendary lodes of Broken Hill and brought roads and railways to open up the country. Water, however continued to be the keystone of survival for landholders and miners alike. But the lakes at Menindee could never be relied upon as a permanent source of water. As separate depressions in the land, they filled in times of floods and drained back into the Darling when the river level dropped. Interest in the lakes as a storage scheme first surfaced in 1894,when an act of Parliament authorised a private company to store water in Lake Menindee and irrigate the bed of downstream Lake Cawndilla. That proposal was never carried out, and it was not until 1949 that the Menindee Water Conservation Act gave power to a state authority to harness nature's supply of water in this region. Work began immediately on building dams, weirs, levees and regulators, designed as a correlated system to catch and retain the precious floodwaters that would otherwise be wasted. In 1952 the storage scheme suffered a tempory setback when work was suspended for a period of five years. However, the importance of this inland storage could not be denied, and in 1957 the silence of Menindee was again shattered by the bulldozers and draglines of progress in the name of water conservation. The entire storage, comprising four major lakes with a combine capacity of 1,794,000 megalitres, completed in 1960. Simply stated, the scheme consists of a dam in the Darling River designed to raise the water about 12 metres above bed level. At this level, water will flow into Lake Malta, Balaka, Bijije and tandure. It will also flow through a regulator into Lake Pamamroo where it can be stored to a maximum depth of 4.8 metres. From Lake Pamamaroo, water flows through a large artificial canal to Lake Menindee and on to Lake Cawndilla.It can be stored to a depth of 5.4 metres in Menindee and 7.1 metres in Cawndilla. In May 1st 1962 Lake Cawndilla was breached as a result of heavy wave action eroding the earthen embankment at the regulator. It was not until 1965 that repairs were completed. NEXT |