In January 2019 viral videos showed grown men near Menindee weeping as they held Murray Cod many decades old that had perished in the green oxygen starved soup that is all that remained of the Darling River. Australians were horrified by the news that the Darling River, known as the Barka to its people, was in a state of ecological collapse. Politicians blamed drought. Ecologists and water management experts placed the blame firmly on the over allocation and over extraction of water – sometimes illegal – by cotton growers upstream. But who is to blame? And what can be done?