THE warbling of songbirds cracked through the heavy sky hanging over the Darling River yesterday as the Governor-General, Quentin Bryce, stood on the banks of the waterway at the centre of an interstate tug-of-war.

"It's very beautiful, isn't it?" she said, viewing the grey-green river from under a canopy of gums at the Port of Bourke wharf. "You can see why so much poetry has been written about it."

Her first tour as head of state includes Broken Hill, Menindee Lakes, Mildura and Goolwa, as well as Bourke. But the Liberal frontbencher Christopher Pyne yesterday launched an attack on the Governor-General, saying it was a "massive error of judgment on her part" not to visit South Australia's water-starved Riverland area on her week-long visit to the Murray-Darling to get a look at the crisis.

While Bourke has been sapped of more than a fifth of its population through the effects of drought on business, the small town on the outback's edge was wet for Ms Bryce's stay. A lightning storm on her first night flooded fields. In the humid day after, she was briefed by Bourke Shire Council's general manager, Geoff Wise, who has managed the Darling for 12 years from Dubbo.

The 540 gigalitres of water held at Cubby Station , a Queensland irrigation property, was more water than allowed in licences for the entire district from the top of the Darling River to the Menindee Lakes, he said. Bourke had recently had to turn off the taps to a vineyard that employed a 10th of the population, even though it had the most efficient watering systems in Australia. "We've literally had to ban irrigation licensing," he said.

But Bourke's Mayor, Andrew Lewis, in a speech on Sunday cited Henry Lawson's poem The Song Of The Darling River , which spoke of the river's cruelty all those years ago, as evidence the irrigators accused of hoarding water in the north were not the source of the struggles today.

with Phillip Hudson