The Coonamble Declaration, passed unanimously in the town bowlo last December, isn’t about Coonamble. It’s a manifesto for our times. “Not on our watch,” it declares. “The GAB [Great Artesian Basin] is too important to be put at risk and the APA pipeline will be blocked at any cost.” Fighting words.

But still I reckon Aussie farmers are way too nice. I’d be pouring my milk by the gigalitre into the Warragamba by now. I’d be piling my meat higher than the Martin Place banks and letting it rot, blockading Macquarie Street with cattle-trucks. I’d be doing farm-protest the French way. Anything to make them listen.

Coonamble has been hit hard by a lack of rain. Credit:Dean Sewell

This is not about drought. Yes, it’s frighteningly dry. Coonamble has had 1mm of rain this month - 3 per cent of their average rainfall. But drought just intensifies the ongoing, human-driven nightmare of coal seam gas. Somehow, the farmers’ own “conservative” side of politics has signed them up to a GSG invasion that can commandeer their land and destroy their water with negligible benefit to them but massive risk – health, legal, moral, property, financial and environmental. It’s unclean, unhealthy and catastrophically unfair.

Grasping the depth of this political treachery, farmers gaze across their bare brown paddocks. They read the lying letters, hear their representatives’ weasel words and watch the huge, international gas-drillers flex their ugly muscles. Watch them snuggle up with government, rev their bully-machines and grin, triumphant. Then they quietly despair. “Where do we go,” they murmur, “when we can’t live here?”