In Australia’s Channel Country, water brings life
From the window of a Cessna, the curving shoreline of a lake dissolves into a maze of channels, each one shuttling liquid gold—water—into the baking heart of the Australian Outback.
I’m on a brief aerial tour with two colleagues from The Pew Charitable Trusts outside the remote cattle-ranching town of Birdsville in southwestern Queensland. We’re here to witness a remarkable phenomenon: the natural, slow-motion flooding of a desert. Birdsville is nearly dead center in the Channel Country, named for the rivers, streams, and countless rivulets that snake through the nearly flat landscape.
“They say you can walk ahead of the flood,” says Traditional Owner Josh Gorringe, of the Mithaka people, referencing the monsoon rains that travel across the Gulf of Carpentaria from November to March. “The gradient here is about 1 centimeter per kilometer, so I believe it.”