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As Australia heads into its eighth year of drought, the country has suffered its first death by water rage.
Strict water restrictions have provoked petty feuds and an element of vigilantism as neighbours dob each other into the authorities, but this is the first time someone has lost their life over the precious resource.
A 36-year-old man appeared in court charged with murder yesterday after allegedly kicking and punching a retired man to death following a row over watering a garden.
Todd Munter apparently took offence when he saw Ken Proctor, 66, using a hose to water his front lawn in a suburban street in Sydney at about 5.30pm on Wednesday.
An argument ensued in which Proctor became angry and turned his hose on Munter.
The younger man then allegedly attacked him, pushing him to the ground and kicking him.
Proctor suffered a massive heart attack and died after being rushed to hospital in an ambulance.
Munter was tackled by two passers-by, including an off-duty policeman.
It has emerged that the dead man was well within his rights to be watering his lawn. Under Sydney Water's tough water use rules, hosing is allowed on Wednesdays and Sundays before 10am and after 4pm.
Neighbours were shocked by the attack.
"It's unbelievable. These things don't happen in our area ... you just don't hear about things like that happening," one woman said.
Friends described Proctor as "a real knockabout sort of bloke" who had become a grandfather.
"He was overjoyed. I'd see him carrying the baby carriage and the kid into the car," said neighbour Bruce Buscombe.
Munter appeared distraught and close to tears as he sat in the dock, watched by several members of his family. He faces a potential maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
The drought, the worst for at least a century, has left much of the country a parched dust bowl.
The two big rivers in the south-east of the country, the Murray and the Darling, are dwindling because of the lack of rain and over-extraction of water. More than three-quarters of New South Wales is in drought, while Victoria has declared 100 per cent of its farmland is affected.
It has concentrated Australians' minds on global warming as the country heads for an election on November 24.
