WATER & IRRIGATION
206
Drought-Proofing a Sunburnt Country
The mighty Ord River Dam, in The Kimberley north-east, where huge volumes of water are poured into the sea every day.
Australian Poet and Fiction Writer Dorothea McKellar’s vision for Australia is still waiting to be realised. But where will all the water come from?
By Warwick Lorenz
Despite personally advocating for it for a long time, the plan to drought-proof the inland of Australia is not new, in fact. John Bradfield CGM (1887-1943), the eminent Australian civil engin- eer who built the Sydney Harbour Bridge nearly a century ago, came up with a plan in the 1930s to turn rivers in Queensland and New South Wales backwards to feed the thirsty inland. A few years later, towards the end of the World War II, and prior to becoming a journalist for the Truth and Daily Mirror publications in the 1950s, Leslie Henry Luscombe started promoting the same idea. His 177-page book, “Australia Re- planned”, was published in 1945, though it was written in 1944 before the war had ended. His map, drawn by hydrologists at the time, showed how rainfall could be captured and stored for the “six lean years” to come.
As we make our way through this third decade of the third millennium, Australians are confronted with the challenge of sustaining our world-class lifestyle in the face of unprecedented threats to our national security. Various geopolitical, public health, and socio-economic forces are now con- verging while most of the international scientific community describes climate change as out of our control. Our resilient farmers survived a horrific record 6-year drought to be rewarded, serendipitously, with a glut of rain in 2020 and 2021. Consequently, our stewards of the land are currently enjoying unprecedented economic prosperity. To depend on the right climate at the right time, however, is a fragile strategy fraught with risk, as any Aus- tralian farmer will tell you. The only sustainability that counts in this country is water security.
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