My dad and his family grew up in a tin humpy on the banks of the Namoi River in Walgett, New South Wales. My grandmother worked on a station, raising the station manager’s children, and never received her pay during her lifetime.

Growing up my father was denied an education and instead given a football; he left school at 15 and later in life was drafted with five other Aboriginal men to play rugby league for the Gundagai Tigers. That year Gundagai saw their first grand final win. Gundagai loved Dad until he retired from football and needed a job. 

My journey towards becoming a business owner started standing on the Gundagai overpass, waving goodbye to my father as he hitchhiked for work, as no one wanted to employ an Aboriginal.

Floodplain graziers and environmental groups are considering legal action against the NSW government if it signs off on controversial water sharing plans, arguing the plans do not adequately take into account the needs of downstream users and the environment.

The Australian Floodplain Association, Macquarie Marshes Environmental Landholders Association and Inland Rivers Network have not ruled out litigation in the Land and Environment Court or the Federal Court if the plans are not amended to more evenly share the pain of a drier climate.

New South Wales water officials have acknowledged that decades of unregulated and unmeasured floodplain harvesting by irrigators was illegal, the minutes of recent meetings show.

At a January meeting, a week before the first drenching rains in northern NSW, members of a senior government water group discussed the legal implications of irrigators harvesting floodwaters, a widespread but unregulated method that accounts for up to a third of the water used by operators in the northern part of the Murray-Darling Basin.

The practice of irrigators collecting floodwaters using banks and levees to divert the water into large storages and dams has been blamed for contributing to declining flows further down the Murray-Darling River system. The 2018 South Australian royal commission described floodplain harvesting as “one of the most significant threats to water security in the Northern Murray-Darling Basin to both licence holders and downstream states”.

A man has been charged following an investigation by Strike Force Trawler detectives into alleged online child procurement.

In February this year, detectives from the Child Abuse and Sex Crime Squad’s Child Exploitation Internet Unit (CEIU) began engaging online with a man from the state’s north west.

Police will allege in court that the man believed he was speaking with a 13-year-old girl and engaged in sexually explicit conversations about acts he wished to perform on the child and sent sexually explicit material.

Following extensive investigations, strike force detectives arrested a 52-year-old man at Walgett about 3.30pm yesterday (Wednesday 27 May 2020).

A short time later, officers executed a search warrant at a home at Lightning Ridge and seized mobile phones and electronic storage devices.