§ Geography

A river with two ends

The Basin has a wet, regulated, populous south and a dry, episodic north — and the consultation wrote about them very unevenly. Of the 1,244 documents carrying a geographic-focus tag, attention flows 1.8:1 toward the southern connected system.

1.8 : 1
721 documents focus on the southern basin — the Murray, the lower lakes, the Coorong — against 391 for the Darling–Baaka, Menindee and the northern basin. Documents can carry several geographic tags; basin-wide tags sit outside both rollups.
Southern basin · 721Northern basin · 391

Every geographic focus

Documents per Geographic-focus tag. Teal = southern rollup, amber = northern rollup, grey = basin-wide or unclassified.

Documents by geographic-focus tag
Basin-wide
832
Specific catchment or river
523
Murray system
522
Southern Basin
442
South Australia lower Murray or Coorong
312
Northern Basin
294
Darling or Baaka system
240
Menindee Lakes
147
No clear geographic focus
122
x
1
southern rollupnorthern rollupbasin-wide / other

The north's water crises — mass fish deaths, a river that stops flowing — made national news; the consultation's paper trail still runs south. Whose river gets written about is itself a finding.