Full-throated and provocative, this is a very personal battle cry to save our most precious natural resource.

We want to reset these bio-diversities and the ecologies in our country. We want to see our fish spawning as they once were, our animals coming back down to drink. Fresh quality water out of the Coorong, not this super saline stuff that we’re living in today’s environment. It’s slowly dying. You can smell the impact of what’s happening . . .’ Grant Rigney, Ngarrindjeri Nation, from his sworn evidence at the Royal Commission into the Murray-Darling Basin.

Richard Beasley is fed up. He’s fed up with vested interests killing off Australia’s most precious water resource. He’s fed up with the cowardice and negligence that have allowed Big Agriculture and irrigators to destroy a river system that can sustain both the environment and the communities that depend on it. He’s fed up that a noble plan to save Murray-Darling Basin based on the ‘best scientific knowledge’ has instead been corroded by lies, the denial of climate change, pseudoscience and political expediency.

He pulls no punches. He’s provocative, he’s outrageous, he points the finger without shame. And he will leave you very, very angry. Dead in the Water would be political satire of the highest order . . . if it weren’t so tragically true.