During September and October, properties across the Riverina, along the Murray and throughout the central west were inundated by a massive storm system that also hammered the east coast.

At the time, Collingullie farmer Troy Stone criticised authorities as he stood ankle-deep in a flooded paddock and more than six months later his anger had only grown.

“We’re just finishing the clean up now,” Mr Stone said.

“My family has spent hours and hours picking up sticks, sitting on tractors, while we’ve had eight months of nothing coming in.”

In April, the Murray-Darling Basin Authority hinted it would extend “environmental watering”, which led to fears it would simply flood farms again.

South Australian water campaigner Ken Jury said there needed to be a complete analysis of the damage caused by last year’s floods before any environmental watering occurred.

“People lost fencing, it ripped crops out, but they still won’t talk about leaving airspace in the dams in case there’s a drought,” Mr Jury said.

“When is the government going to build more dams, introduce more storage into the system and look over the shoulder of the MDBA?”

Speak Up, a lobby group made up of landholders across the broader Riverina, released a statement warning environmental water would damage productive farmland “at a time when governments claim they want our nation to transition from a ‘mining boom’ to a ‘dining boom’.”

MDBA head of environmental management, Carl Binning, said the best results for the environment would be achieved by building on “the benefits of the 2016 flows”.

“We will have our first opportunity to do watering on this scale using the water recovered for the environment over the past 10 years under the basin plan," Mr Binning said.

“The basin plan is about long-term system health, to support communities, farming and the environment into the future.”

Meanwhile, Mr Stone said he would keep moving on and hoped the authorities realised the damage they could cause.

“I’ll wear a natural flood,” he said, “but not a man-made one.”