Western Sahara Down Under, Down Under Matthew Brace goes to Australia, where marine and freshwater farming offers up bounties faster than they can be harvested. It is a country at the forefront of aquaculture technology and it's becoming big, big business. Australia's red centre looks primeval. Great quartzite ridges stretch to the horizon like the carcasses of fallen dinosaurs, their ribs stripped of flesh and their bones fossilised by time. Outback temperatures from October to March regularly top 40 C, and clouds that promise much at dawn dissolve by noon.
Creeks run dry for most of the year.
Hardy eucalyptus growing along their banks suffer arboreal arthritis, causing their branches to wither and snap as the water table retreats out of reach of their deepest roots. It is not just the vast central deserts of the 'dry continent' that lack water. Its arid and semi-arid regions extend into the wheat belt of Western Australia and creep up to the foothills of the Great Dividing Range that runs from Queensland south to Victoria. The country's biggest river system, the Murray-Darling, has been bled almost dry by a century of agricultural greed that has seen unsustainable amounts of water being tapped to irrigate crops. Areas of wetland in western New South Wales have evaporated and rising salt levels are choking woodlands of acacia and gum tree.