The plains west of Sydney, almost as large as Great Britain, have fed Australia for decades. In good years more than 40 per cent of the country’s rural income came from the Murray-Darling basin. It was home to half the nation’s sheep, 60 per cent of its fruit and three-quarters of irrigated land.

Now it is going to dust. The Bureau of Meteorology said yesterday that 2007 was the hottest year measured in the lands around the river system, Australia’s Mississippi. To the two million people who live there this came as little surprise.

This is a drought even more fearful than that which so disturbed the much loved poet and drifter, Henry Lawson, more than a century ago that he compared its dry, dessicating emptiness to entering Dante’s Inferno.

Trees that dripped with fruit for decades are being ripped out. There is no longer enough water to keep the basin’s 150,000 hectares (370,000 acres) of citrus, melons, apples, pears, plums and grapes alive. Since the drought began in 2002 milk production has fallen by nearly two billion litres and the dairy industry has shed about 15,000 jobs.

Forecasts expect wine grape production for this year to be down 33 per cent. Successive grain crop failures have pushed prices to record levels and Australians are being warned to prepare for increases of up to 20 per cent on staples such as beef, dairy, pork, eggs and chicken.

In the two hours it takes to cross the gun-barrel straight Outback highway that leads from the last town westward before Bourke, there is hardly a sheep or a cow left on the plains – save for those being driven along the roadside by weary farmers on horseback, now too poor to afford the costs of moving their herds by lorry. No cotton has been sown for two years. Often great black clouds come in the afternoon – and pass over.

The old town of Bourke sits hot and silent on the plains. The Darling River, which flows through the town, is brackish, low and deathly.

Father Brian Roach criss-crosses the plains in a four-wheel-drive vehicle provided by the Anglican Church’s Company of the Good Shepherd, which ministers to Outback families.“There is a lot of depression. There have been a few suicides,” he said. “A quarter of the population of Bourke has gone. The farm hands have been laid off. There is an enormous amount of debt.” Northwest of Bourke, Ian Cole, his brother-in-law, Steve Buster, and other family members once prospered on nearly 15,000 hectares of land. In 2000 they were named Australia’s cotton growers of the year.

Five years later they harvested their largest cotton crop and made a profit of $7 million (£3 million). Lucrative contracts to supply fruit juice companies with citrus followed and so did contracts for almonds. The family were confident of weathering the drought because they had built huge water storage areas and installed more efficient irrigation systems.

Then the flows in the Darling River – from where they draw their irrigation water – fell away and the family’s big water pumps are silent. Only 14 of more than 50 staff remain. The equity is all gone. Their stored water is exhausted. Their farm, in the family more than 40 years, is for sale. “We’ve gone to dust, really,” says Mr Cole, a laconic 52-year-old.

All of his six children have had to leave the region within the past two years. When he looks at the photographs of his old Bourke Warriors Rugby Team, he and the coach are the only two left in the district. “It’s reasonably hard flogging a dead horse,” Mr Cole says of his need to stay on the farm while the banks seek a buyer.

Further out, 155 miles (250km) west of Bourke, are the big sheep and cattle properties. Colin and Beryl Leigo own Moorland Downs, which has been in the family for more than 80 years. So ravaging is the drought that the property’s 25,000 hectares can now only support 150 cattle and about 1,000 sheep – a sixth of what they carry in normal years.

For months Mr Leigo has wandered his property with a chainsaw, cutting down wild shrubs to feed to his animals. It has allowed him to avoid borrowing money for stock feed.

He has never known dingoes, wild Australian dogs, to prowl around his house at night as they do now. It suggests that the drought has already killed off the kangaroos and the rabbits that the dingoes usually hunt. The Leigos are not leaving. Not yet.

“We have hung on this long. There’s nothing you can do about it,” Mr Leigo said. “You just get up and hope it rains.”

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