School of Geography - Theses
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ItemThe water dreamers : how water and silence shaped Australia( 2008)Australia is the most arid continent on earth. This thesis explores how that challenge shaped the ways in which the settlers appropriated the Aboriginal countries, and how those settlers tried to make sense of a land that was so unlike the places from which they came. On the shores of Sydney Cove, the British cut down gum trees. As they crashed to the ground, it seemed as if these trees were shattering the primal silence of Aboriginal Australia - initiating the land into time. The settlers were confident that this process would be repeated in valley after valley until they had brought the whole of this 'silent continent' to life. But in inland Australia, the settlers found that the silence would not disperse. This was the arid zone. The explorers John Oxley and Charles Sturt articulated a core idea when they referred to this region as a place of 'death-like silence'. By the mid-nineteenth century, this silence had become an accepted fact about Australia. But the colonists disagreed about how they should respond. Some argued that the inland was a place of despair, a place to be avoided. Others found consolation in a mythos I have called necronationalism, which imagined that the people who had died in the desert were somehow elevated into the mystery of the land itself. However, at the end of the nineteenth century, the water dreamers began to challenge the very idea of silence. Their optimism was based on the promise that hydroengineering could triumph over the climate itself, creating a new, luxuriant Australia in the silent voids of the desert. By the 1920s, this ethos of 'Australia Unlimited' had become a major site of debate in Australia, when it was challenged by the geographer Griffith Taylor. Taylor insisted that the environment was the determining factor in human settlement. It could not simply be overridden by engineering. The debate took on a patriotic urgency, because many Australians believed that their failure to occupy the inland and the 'open north', left the continent vulnerable to an Asian invader. This debate produced a series of plans for great hydro-engineering schemes, some of which were built and some not. Today, this phase has largely ended, as we face the environmental damage caused by a code of engineering which, for all its idealism, took insufficient account of the environment itself.