I went to a special hearing of the Australian People’s Tribunal for Community and Nature’s Rights, a group created and managed by community leaders, environmental and human rights lawyers and first nations elders.

They held a citizens’ inquiry into the health of the Darling River that travelled upriver from Mildura to Brewarrina, stopping at towns along the way. I caught it in Bourke, a town that survives on the bureaucracy of poorness. A diabetes town. If big cotton enriches communities, as it claims, it is not evident here.

The inquiry was held in the Full Gospel Family Fellowship assembly hall, one of those tizzied-up tin sheds where people can eyeball God one-on-one without a blather of theology. This was a chance for local people to have their stories about the river heard and recorded. To feel the relief of telling at last, and know the succor of having testified against turpitude.

A townswoman I’ll call Rose had steeled herself for weeks to talk at this meeting. But the friendly atmosphere in the room became tense when a cotton lobbyist arrived. Rose’s nerves got the better of her. There’s history between us, she said. She’d had threats from big cotton and was frightened and said other people in town were too. She couldn’t talk with big cotton in the room.

A pants-hitched nonagenarian grazier come to testify from downstream also disappeared when the cotton man arrived.

The cotton lobbyist told a homely tale of immigration and new agriculture and family dynasties and offered cherry-picked facts and blather and look-over-there denial that would’ve made the superannuated CEOs of British American Tobacco glow with nostalgia.

He accepted no blame at all for the state of the river. It was the drought, he said. At moments like these I can’t tell whether a person is drinking the Kool Aid or selling it. Telling their own incredible truth, or a lie. He owns the local paper, and radio station; so whichever it is the locals get plenty of opportunity to hear it.