[2] As of the early 2020s, the Darling is in poor health,[3] suffering from over-allocation of its waters to irrigation,[4][5] pollution from pesticide runoff,[6][7] and prolonged drought.

In 1828 the explorers Charles Sturt and Hamilton Hume were sent by the Governor of New South Wales, Sir Ralph Darling, to investigate the course of the Macquarie River.

In 1856, the Blandowski Expedition set off for the junction of the Darling and Murray Rivers to discover and collect fish species for the National Museum.

Although its flow is extraordinarily irregular (the river dried up forty-five times between 1885 and 1960), in the later 19th century the Darling became a major transportation route, the pastoralists of western New South Wales using it to send their wool by shallow-draft paddle steamer from busy river ports such as Bourke and Wilcannia to the South Australian railheads at Morgan and Murray Bridge.

A report by the Australia Institute said this was largely due to the decisions by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority on instructions from the New South Wales government.

It said the reasons for those decisions appeared to be about building the case for the new Broken Hill pipeline and the Menindee Lakes project.

Major settlements along the river include Brewarrina, Bourke, Louth, Tilpa, Wilcannia, Menindee, Pooncarie and Wentworth.

[17] Brewarrina was also the location of intertribal meetings for Indigenous Australians who speak Darling and live in the river basin.

These heritage listed rock formations have been estimated at more than 40,000 years old making them the oldest man-made structure on the planet.

[2] Australian poet Henry Lawson wrote a well-known ironic tribute to the Darling River.

[19] To quote another Henry Lawson poem: The skies are brass and the plains are bare, Death and ruin are everywhere;And all that is left of the last year's floodIs a sickly stream on the grey-black mud;The salt-springs bubble and the quagmires quiver,And this is the dirge of the Darling River.He also wrote about the river in The Union Buries Its Dead and "Andy's Gone With Cattle".