The Darling near Bourke
|Mouth||joins the Murray River at Wentworth|
|Length||2,739 km (1,701 mi)|
The Darling River is Australia's longest river. It is part of the Murray-Darling river system, one of the largest in the world, drains all of New South Wales west of the Great Dividing Range, much of northern Victoria, southern Queensland and parts of South Australia.
In 1828 the explorer Charles Sturt was sent by the Governor of New South Wales, Sir Ralph Darling, to find the path of the Macquarie River. He discovered the Bogan River and in 1829, the Darling, which he named after the Governor. In 1835 Major Thomas Mitchell traveled the whole length of the Darling.
The Darling does not have an even flow of water. It often dries up, and it sometimes floods. It flows through very dry parts of Australia. In the 1860's the Darling was used by the farmers of western New South Wales to send their wool by boat paddle steamer from Bourke and Wilcannia to South Australia where it could be loaded onto trains at Morgan and Murray Bridge.