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HOMEThe Murray-Darling Basin encompasses 1,058,800 square kilometres, or roughly 14% of the total area of Australia. Almost two million people live within the Murray-Darling basin, and a further one million residing outside the basin are heavily dependent on its water. Since early colonial times this vast inland river system has been crucial to the economic development of the nation.
The continuing economic importance of this river system is evidenced by the fact that around half of Australia's crop-land, half of our sheep, a quarter of our cattle (beef and dairy), more than half of our orchards and three quarters of the nation's irrigated crops and pastures are within the Murray-Darling basin, and the value of agricultural production in the basin exceeds $10 billion, $3 billion of which is the result of irrigation. The river system is also of great historical, cultural and environmental significance to Australia.
Because of the great range of agricultural and horticultural activity within the basin, it would be impossible to adequately cover all of these within the parameters set for this project. I have therefore chosen to focus on viticulture, although mention will be made of other crops that are produced in grape-growing regions. The fact that the Sunraysia district alone has over a quarter of the total area under grape vines in Australia and produces over 80% of Australia's dried vine fruit crop as well as 32% of the table grape crop and 13% of our wine grapes illustrates that viticulture is a major industry in the Murray-darling basin.
In light of the above , I believe that a web site that deals with this aspect of the Murray-Darling basin (or indeed any aspect of it) would be of some benefit to secondary school students, and they are therefore my main target audience, although I hope that my project may be of interest to other web users.
I propose to divide the basin into viticultural regions eg Riverland S.A., Sunraysia which can be accessed by means of clickable maps and hotlinked text. Within each region I will deal with the following topics:
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Irrigation will be included here.
Wherever possible, links will be provided to other relevant web sites, although at this time it apears that most of these will be overseas.