The Hay Plain in NSW is a space that people drive through on their way from Adelaide to Canberra or Sydney. It is treeless with scrubby saltbush, and it is commonly seen by those viewing it through their car windows as a flat, barren, featureless and bleak space--especially during the day in mid-summer. I find this space fascinating as it is very atmospheric with the changing light, clouds and rain.
Hay is an overnight stop for me on the Adelaide and Canberra trip and I usually stop and take photos. This picture was made on a 2015 trip to Canberra as I was driving into Hay on the Sturt Highway:
The light was starting to fade and I only had the time to quickly make a couple of photographs. I stopped the car and wandered around whilst the road trains roared past. I noticed the bits of cotton moving over the road and along the ground from the wind and the road trains. I laid down on my stomach on the side of the road and made some snaps before the light went.
If you dig around in the region between the Murray, Murrumbidgee and Lachlan rivers you can see the investment in new private irrigation channels is opening up previously dry sheep country north, east and west of Hay to cotton, which is trucked by road to the Port of Melbourne. The Merino wool industry once reigned supreme on the Hay Plains--Hay was a wool town built on wool --- now it is giving way to irrigated agriculture that is hungry for water.
Hay has a reliable water supply and cotton is seen as the answer to Hay’s farming future. The justification is strong regional development and employment growth in Hay on the back of irrigation development.
The cotton industry is an agri-business industry (eg., Auscott Limited and Tandoors) which is very hostile about the environmental concerns about environmental flows to the Murrumbidgee and Snowy Rivers, and antagonistic to the Murray-Darling Basin plan that was designed to protect the health of the rivers after the decade long drought.