Immediately smitten, Norman calls Jessie afterwards and sets up a double date. Norman attends a Fourth of July dance and meets Jessie Burns, a flapper whose father runs the general store in Wolf Creek. Norman leaves to attend college at Dartmouth when he returns six years later during the Prohibition era and the Jazz Age, he finds that Paul has become a highly skilled fisherman and a hard drinking but fearless investigative journalist working for a newspaper in Helena. As young men, the brothers steal a rowboat and navigate a dangerous waterfall.
#WHEN THE RIVER RUNS DRY ARMOURY SHOW CODE#
Norman and Paul are home schooled under the strict moral and academic code of their father. John Norman Maclean, a Presbyterian minister, from whom they learn a love of fly fishing for trout in the Blackfoot River. That this catastrophe was is large part man-made is conveyed through footage of the dry riverbed, off-take pipes, massive earth-wall dams and laser-levelled irrigation farms: mute testament to a river system drained of its resilience.The Maclean brothers, Norman and Paul, grow up in Missoula, Montana, with their father, Rev. The on-going drought in western NSW provided ample opportunity (shifting sands, starving kangaroos) to build a sense of the catastrophe that was engulfing ordinary people and the land. To show some of the things still there we focused on bird life, particularly around the river floodplains and the dwindling Menindee lakes. This was a story of loss, but it was important to show that there was still plenty to save along the Darling/Baarka. Interviews were to be shot using predominantly natural light in locations relevant to the subject matter which was generally along the river. To the voices of indigenous people, we added balance and explanation in the form of interviews with eminent scientists, other community members who were affected, and environmental lawyers.
With his background in anthropology, it was the most natural thing for Peter to interview the people of the river – the Barkindji, and to hear their stories of disenfranchisement: anguished wounds that stretched back over generations, but which now bled afresh with the realisation that the Baarka, their Mother, was close to ecological death.
It simply could not be right that where the Darling was not dry it was a lurid green, and that millions of fish were dying. We did not approach the research and filming of When the River Runs Dry from a partisan position, unless that partisan position was the side of the River. Problems on the Darling had been on the periphery of many people’s awareness for years, but now here was ‘the bill’, the cost of over-extraction of water and institutional indifference manifest in a dying river. Then began a harrowing period, interviewing people, camping by and filming the remains of the Darling, simply capturing the moment. We arrived too late in Menindee – all the fish had sunk to the bottom, leaving only foul green water and a horrible stench. Sensing that this was a pivotal moment in Australia’s environmental history, we, (Peter Yates and Rory McLeod) moved quickly, and were on the road to Menindee within a few hours, to document the event and its impact on the people of the river. The devastating sight of enormous Murray Cod, dead in a man’s arms, led first to distress, and then anger. In January 2019, images and videos began to filter through social media of a massive fish-kill on the Darling/Baarka River near Menindee in NSW. When the River Runs Dry was born on an impulse.
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