Aboriginal peoples have lived along the Darling River for tens of thousands of years. The
Barkindji people called it
Baaka or
Barka, "Barkindji" meaning "people of the Barka". The
Queensland headwaters of the Darling (the area now known as the
Darling Downs) were gradually colonized from 1815 onward. In 1828 the explorers
Charles Sturt and
Hamilton Hume were sent by the Governor of New South Wales,
Sir Ralph Darling, to investigate the course of the
Macquarie River. He visited the Bogan River and then, early in 1829, the upper Darling, which he named after the Governor. In 1835, Major
Thomas Mitchell travelled a portion of the Darling River. Although he did not reach its confluence with the Murray River, he believed (correctly) that it did flow into the Murray River. In 1856, the
Blandowski Expedition set off for the junction of the Darling and Murray Rivers to discover and collect fish species for the National Museum. The expedition was a success with 17,400 specimens arriving in Adelaide the next year. Although its flow is extraordinarily irregular (the river dried up forty-five times between 1885 and 1960), in the later 19th century the Darling became a major transportation route, the
pastoralists of western New South Wales using it to send their wool by shallow-draft
paddle steamer from busy river ports such as
Bourke and
Wilcannia to the South Australian railheads at
Morgan and
Murray Bridge. But over the past century the river's importance as a transportation route has declined. Large floods occurred in 1974 and 1976. In 1992, the Darling River suffered from a severe
cyanobacterial bloom that stretched the length of the river. The presence of phosphorus was essential for the toxic algae to flourish. Flow rates, turbulence, turbidity and temperature were other contributing factors. In 2008, the Federal government purchased
Toorale Station in northern New South Wales for $23 million. The purchase allowed the government to return of
environmental flows back into the Darling. In 2019, a crisis on the Lower Darling saw up to 1 million fish die. A report by the
Australia Institute said this was largely due to the decisions by the
Murray-Darling Basin Authority on instructions from the New South Wales government. It said the reasons for those decisions appeared to be about building the case for the new
Broken Hill pipeline and the
Menindee Lakes project. Maryanne Slattery, senior water researcher with the Australia Institute; "To blame the fish kill on the drought is a cop-out, it is because water releases were made from the lakes when this simply shouldn't have happened. A large flood occurred around Bourke in 2022. A worse fish kill occurred in 2023. Millions of dead bony bream, golden perch and silver perch, and Murray cod flowed down the river at
Menindee. The cause was low oxygen levels and high temperatures. ==Course==