Thirlmere - where has all the water gone?

'Thirlmere Lakes National Park, with its five freshwater lakes, is ....... perfect for enjoying picnics and barbecues, walking, birdwatching, or canoeing.'

So says the National Parks and Wildlife Service  about this once watery playground 70km south west of Sydney.

All five of the lakes used to be real lakes, where you could in fact do canoeing and other water sports. Now there isn't much water to be seen, and some of the lakes are bone dry. Above are my bushwalking colleagues the other day, probably saying "where are those lakes?!"

Seems like it's hard to find anything definitive, but it certainly looks like it's the nearby Tahmoor Colliery that's to blame for the missing water. It presumably went down the cracks they created.

Here the bushwalkers have found one of the slightly watery ones.

Mostly they're just sand, reeds, and mud though, like the one below. It's actually still a nice place to go for a bushwalk.