3 weeks ago
14
February 4, 2026 — 12:06pm
Hundreds of thousands of native fish have died at Lake Menindee in western NSW after last week’s heatwave, the first big fish kill on the lake since 2023.
Luke Driscoll, chief executive of Barkandji Native Title Group Aboriginal Corporation, said about 100,000 bony bream had washed up dead on the banks of Lake Menindee, near homes on Sunset Strip.
“It’s a really bad smell for those that live in Sunset Strip,” Driscoll said. “Even from Menindee caravan park, a good three kilometres from Sunset as the crow flies, it smells pretty bad.”
In 2023, an estimated 30 million fish died in a mass fish kill at Lake Menindee. More recently in March 2025 in Ballina, hundreds of thousands of fish including bream, flathead, and whiting, died after the flooding from ex-Tropical Cyclone Alfred.
The Barkandji rangers were on high alert throughout the heatwave last week after finding dead fish in the Darling-Baaka River, downstream from the lake. Over four days last week they found 400 to 500 dead fish, mostly introduced carp, Driscoll said, but the crisis seemed to have passed.
“I thought we dodged the bullet,” he said. On Saturday morning there were no dead fish at the boat ramp at Sunset Strip, but over the weekend the situation changed dramatically.
Driscoll said the native, freshwater bony bream could not cope with the sudden change in temperature. After an extreme heatwave all week, there was a storm and sudden cool change on Saturday night.
In Broken Hill, where Driscoll was, it was 40 degrees at 8.30pm on Saturday, then it dropped to 22 degrees in less than an hour.
Water NSW also issued a blue-green algae alert for Lake Menindee in January.
“The river and lakes have been sick for a long time, and we’ve been seeing the effects of it over the last eight years,” Driscoll said. “It’s sad because the rivers and the lakes are big part of Barkandji cultural history – Barkandji means ‘people of the river’, and it’s their mother, it’s their lifeblood, so seeing their fish die – and bony bream is a totemic species – really hurts those that live in the community and the whole Barkandji nation.”
Driscoll said his Menindee rangers were working with the local council, the NSW Environment Authority and other government agencies on clean-up around the lake shore, and he also had rangers from Wilcannia and Wentworth on standby.
When possible, the rangers would go out in a boat to test the water quality, Driscoll said. By then, he expected the dead fish to have sunk to the bottom rather than be floating on the surface.
