Paper short abstract:

Since ca. 1900, Australia pursued a radical hydro-modernist project to transform its environment and populate the continent with white settlers. Irrigation was a key means for building a new society unconstrained by natural limits. The crisis of salinization put an end to these utopian ambitions.

Paper long abstract:

The notion that Australia was an “empty” and “useless” continent was crucial for its colonization by a predominantly white settler society. In the land that was considered “terra nullius”, the high modernist project of technologically transforming nature for human needs developed into a radical blend of modernism and settler nationalism. In the twentieth century, irrigation and hydrologic infrastructures were understood as key means to appropriate the continent and transform it beyond its natural constraints. Water was the centerpiece of Australian High Modernism. With little to no regard for traditional land use patterns, powerful state agencies set about creating entirely new landscapes and white settler communities based on irrigated agriculture. In this vision of an “Australia Unlimited”, a new society was to be forged which would free itself from the tyranny of the wide, arid, unproductive continent. Building hydrologic infrastructures meant building a nation.

Drawing on my case study about the southern Murray-Darling Basin between 1945 and 2020, I argue that this endeavor was in crisis by the 1970s: The excessive mobilization of water caused widespread soil and water degradation – chiefly salinization – in Australia’s most important agricultural areas which threatened to undermine them. During the 1970s and 80s, salinization became a top-priority environmental issue in Australia. As a result, the combined forces of neoliberalism and sustainability induced a transformation of Australia’s public irrigation sector. Water was turned from a seemingly unlimited resource into a high-value commodity. Hydro modernism ceased to be a utopian force; farming became a business.