The dry last ditch

摘要

After 17 years, Tony and Michelle McManus are preparing for their last sheep-shearing season on Toorale, a sprawling outback property near Bourke in western New South Wales (NSW). By Christmas, Toorale's 30,000 sheep, 1,200 cattle and irrigation machinery will all be sold, ending a way of life on the ranch begun by the region's European pioneers-in the 1870s. Last month Australia's federal and nsw state governments bought Toorale for almost A$24m ($17m), not to run it as a farm but to take control of a commodity that now seems more precious than the food and fibre it produces: water.rnThe sale of Toorale is the biggest of its kind in a plan by the federal Labor government, under Kevin Rudd, to buy water entitlements from farmers in Queensland and northern nsw. The water-buyback scheme, as it is known, is a last-ditch bid to save Australia 's biggest river system, the Murray River and its main tributary, the Darling (see map). Both are suffering from the worst drought in a century, and decades of prolific farm irrigation.