Australia’s relationship with the nation’s dry heart: The Water Dreamers of Australia lecture

Media Release, Tuesday 29 April 2008

The ways Australians live and think have been shaped by water - or rather by the lack of it - according to the University of Melbourne’s Michael Cathcart, who is to give a public lecture this Wednesday 30 April at 6.30pm on ‘The Water Dreamers of Australia’.

Mr Cathcart is an historian and broadcaster, and the author of a forthcoming history of water in Australia. He has just finished filming a new two-part documentary set in colonial Sydney for the ABC.

He says that as soon as Australia was colonised, the dry interior entered the national consciousness as a “troubling desolate silence” with aridity at its heart.

Because of that, during the 19th century, colonists gradually came to feel that there was a spirit of lethargy and death at the heart of their “silent land”.

“We see the great legends around figures like Burke and Wills arise during that time,” Cathcart says. “It has been suggested that though their expedition ended in tragedy, they have been mythologised because we love failure.”

“But I don’t think that is really the case. They have been mythologised because they died – because the arid heart took their lives. They were received into the mystery that lies at the heart of Australia, and we became fascinated by that”.

“It is interesting to look at the parallel case of the pioneering of America,” Cathcart says. “When American explorers ventured west, they discovered mighty rivers and plains which convinced them that they were a people with 'a manifest destiny’”.

“When our explorers headed west, they found silence, despair and death. So it's no wonder that we think differently from the Americans.

He says that entering into the 20th century, a new group of nationalists led by Alfred Deakin among others, decided that this kind of nationalism based on death was unacceptable and they set out on a great mission to redefine the Australian spirit by altering the physical, and through it the spiritual, landscape.

And they did this predominantly by changing the way we use water. Deakin championed the development of irrigation on the Murray River. The justifications were only partly economic. In the main, Australians were affronted by the enormity and silence of the arid zone. Irrigation was not just a way of growing food. It was also a way of claiming a country.

“The early 20th century nationalists surely thought they were doing something healthy, vigorous and good,” he says, “but they inadvertently damaged the environment through irrigation, with dams, and by destroying the river systems.”

He says we now see a new nationalism emerging, a kind of environmental consciousness – a nationalism that embraces global responsibilities.

What: School of Historical Studies Public Lecture ‘The Water Dreamers of Australia’

Who: Michael Cathcart, School of Historical Studies, University of Melbourne

When: Wednesday 30 April at 6.30pm

Where: Theatre A of the Elisabeth Murdoch Building

More information:
Katherine Smith, Media Officer, University of Melbourne
Mobile: 0402 460 147