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There are few more celebrated Outback towns than Bourke, in the parched west of New South Wales.
A century ago it was enshrined in frontier mythology by bush poets such as Will Ogilvie, who wrote: "It's the bitterest land of sweet and sorrow, but if I were free I'd be off tomorrow, out at the back o' Bourke." The expression "back o' Bourke" is understood by all Australians to mean in the middle of nowhere.
However, the town's legendary resilience has been pushed to breaking point by six years of drought, the worst "big dry" since the white settlement of Australia in 1788.
Unless the drought breaks soon, Bourke will become "an economic and social disaster" researchers warn. "Bourke is on the brink," they say.
A 70-page report, compiled by researchers at Charles Sturt University, in NSW, found the drought's impact is "reflected sharply in higher crime figures, increased family separation, out-migration, increased mental health issues and drug and alcohol abuse."
The drought is taking a heavy toll on towns across the Outback, but its effect on Bourke, 780km northwest of Sydney, is particularly acute.
Unlike other towns in the bush, Bourke has no mining to fall back on. Its reliance on irrigation for vast cotton fields and citrus fruit plantations also makes it vulnerable to the lack of rain.
The town's lifeblood, the Darling River, is dwindling by the day beneath a blazing blue sky, its sluggish waters an unhealthy pea-green.
"This used to be a good fishing spot, but look at it now," says publican Lachlan Ford, surveying a section of the river a few kilometres out of town.
A weir has dammed most of the water and beneath it there are exposed sand banks, gravel shoals and foetid black pools.
The mighty Darling, one of Australia's longest rivers, has been reduced to a trickle. "There are places where you can step from one side to the other," says Ford, the owner of one of the town's three pubs.
There has been no cotton crop for three years and orange and tangerine orchards are withering.
The town's Aborigines have been particularly hard hit because they rely heavily on the seasonal jobs provided by agriculture.
"It's had a major impact," says Alister Ferguson, Bourke's most senior Aboriginal representative. "Families have a lot less money to spend on food and their kids."
The landscape has been drained of colour, the bushland surrounding the town a dreary monochrome of grey-green trees and brittle grass.
Even the wildlife seems exhausted. A pair of startled emus struggle to break into a run, kicking up little explosions of dust as they bound across a bone-dry paddock. Kangaroos lie panting on a lawn in front of an office building on the outskirts of town.
Farmers are selling up, and those that remain are struggling to survive financially. Without sufficient grazing, they have had to either sell all their sheep and cattle or, at great expense, buy in fodder.
Sixty pastoral stations in the Shire of Bourke - an area about the size of Denmark - have no animals left.
Desperate graziers have taken to rounding up the flocks of feral goats which inhabit the scrub. Until recently dismissed as pests, they are now the only thing left to sell.
The mental toll is enormous - a national mental health organisation has claimed an Australian farmer commits suicide once every four days.
Graham Brown, 58, owns a 175,000ha farm 300km west of Bourke.
He has had to cut his merino flock by 80 per cent, and those that are left are surviving on scrub and leaves blown off trees by the wind.
"We've had two exceptionally hot, dry summers. Our dams are depleted and we're running out of water. We're holding on by the skin of our teeth, but if we don't get any rain this summer, we'll be hitting the panic button," he says.
"Some farmers are just throwing in the towel. Our neighbours have just sold up and moved to South Australia, near the ocean."
Healthy ewes fetch a paltry A$10-15 ($11.55-$17.30) each. Scrawnier sheep, left too long on the land, are being sold for A50c or less.
Darren Wykes has left his 800ha wheat and cattle farm near Wellington, New South Wales, to work as a technical skills instructor.
"Half of my farmer mates have left the land in the last 10 weeks," he says.
"You just can't make any money. We've had a gutful of it. My dad's still on the farm, flogging himself to death."
When farming families have no money, local towns suffer. Businesses close down, jobs are lost and families move away. Bourke's population has dropped in the last three years from 3500 to fewer than 3000. Shops on the main street are boarded up and houses are for sale.
Falling rolls have closed two schools in the region. In the tiny hamlet of Byrock, south of Bourke, the school was down to five children from two families. When the families fled the drought, the school had to be shut down.
"This is the worst drought white men have seen - it's as challenging as any of the tough times we've been through before," says Bourke's Mayor, Wayne O'Mally, who is having to handfeed the 2000 sheep left on his farm.
"Six years of drought is really testing people's resources. There's been a 25 per cent drop in average business turnover. Some people are down 30 to 40 per cent." Without significant rainfall, the town will run out of water next year, and contingency plans are being drawn up to bring in underground bore water by truck from 45km away.
The drought has prompted an intense debate in Australia about the effects of global warming and whether some areas are becoming too dry for farming.
The Government, which has refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, insists there is no proven connection between climate change and the present drought. "The extent to which it's linked is debatable," Prime Minister John Howard said this week.
Locals tend to agree. "What we're going through now is similar to the very bad drought of the 1890s," says O'Mally. "This is a boom-and-bust-type environment."
At an emergency summit in Canberra this week, ministers were warned by the head of the Murray Darling Commission, an irrigation authority, that Australia could be facing a "one in a 1000-year drought".
The Government queried that, arguing that rainfall records have existed for less than 200 years, making such a judgment impossible.
It did, however, announce a new round of emergency drought relief aid to help businesses which rely on farmers for their income, in addition to the millions of dollars already offered.
That has failed to impress the people of Bourke. "The Government could give us all the money in the world but that isn't going to solve the problem if we don't have rain," says Sue Smith, a town councillor.
"If we don't get rain by December or January, God help us. I shudder to think what it will be like."
Prayers for dream land gone to dust
More than a century ago the bush poet Henry Lawson, who tramped this part of the country, declared, "If you know Bourke, you know Australia."
The same is true today - Bourke is just one of many Outback towns which are being devastated by the continent's relentless drought. With cloudless blue skies and no significant rain forecast, some communities are turning to prayer.
About 200 Burke locals gathered on an old timber wharf overlooking the Darling River on Wednesday in a mass prayer for rain.
The small crowd listened to sermons and sang hymns such as Great South Land - "This is our nation, this is our land, this lucky country of dreams gone dry."
A prayer called for life-giving rain to "come and soften our parched land".
The sense of quiet desperation would have been familiar to Lawson, who lived in and around Bourke in the 1890s.
He recorded the devastation caused by drought after walking 200km to the desert outpost of Hungerford, on the Queensland border.
"The country looks as though a great ash heap had been spread out there ... a blasted, barren wilderness that doesn't even howl," he wrote.
Lawson was no less scathing of the stations, or Outback farms, he worked on. "A western station is the hottest, driest, dustiest and most God-forsaken hole you could think of," he wrote.
Looking out today over a landscape of grey-green woodland, the leaves and grass underfoot so dry they crunch like potato crisps, it is not hard to see what he was driving at.
