1 ...and pray there aren't any waves...

2 Waves?  On a dam in New South Wales?

You'd be lucky to have water.

3 I admit I missed the damn part about the damn dam.  Damn.   NSW is somewhat arid, I take it?  Guess the Civ III map I play a lot is somewhat incorrect, then.  Pity.

4 The eastern half of NSW is reasonably fertile country; the western half - places like Broken Hill, Cobar, Lightning Ridge - is pretty damn arid.

Normally.  The last four or five years, the whole state has been suffering a drought, so it's the same as usual only more so.

(I like this description of Cobar Shire: With an area of 44,065 km² the Shire is almost the same size as the whole of Tasmania. It is home to 7,000 people...)

South Australia, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory are where the real outback is, but living in Sydney you tend to forget how big and empty even New South Wales is.  It's bigger than Texas but with one-third the population.  To put it another way, Cobar Shire alone is the size of New Jersey, Connecticut and Delaware added together.  Or if you ignore water it's as big as New Hampshire and Vermont combined.