In 1896, Western Australia’s water dreamer, the engineer C.Y. O’Connor, designed a system to transport water from the Darling Range via a pipeline to the thirsty mines of the arid goldfields, nearly six hundred kilometres away.
Even the engineering schemes of ancient Rome had not been so bold as to pump water such a distance, let alone uphill.
At its opening in 1903, Sir John Forrest, the state’s first premier, referred to Isaiah (43:19) when he suggested that future generations would remember this achievement: ‘They made a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.’
This so-called ‘Golden Pipeline’ followed a trail of waterholes that local Aboriginal guides had revealed to colonial explorers in the 1860s, who sought to develop a pastoral economy in a region where permanent water sources were scarce.
With pastoralism and gold came more people and livestock, which combined to exert unprecedented pressures on these shallow groundwater reserves.
Around the goldfields, for instance, Kalamaia Indigenous peoples found themselves competing with prospectors, cameleers, horses and camels for access to these precious reserves.
Such an analysis of the social worlds of water (and its absence) sheds light on the prevailing ideologies of aridity and the broader dynamics of colonial rule in this dryland outpost of the British empire.
Even the engineering schemes of ancient Rome had not been so bold as to pump water such a distance, let alone uphill.
At its opening in 1903, Sir John Forrest, the state’s first premier, referred to Isaiah (43:19) when he suggested that future generations would remember this achievement: ‘They made a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.’
This so-called ‘Golden Pipeline’ followed a trail of waterholes that local Aboriginal guides had revealed to colonial explorers in the 1860s, who sought to develop a pastoral economy in a region where permanent water sources were scarce.
With pastoralism and gold came more people and livestock, which combined to exert unprecedented pressures on these shallow groundwater reserves.
Around the goldfields, for instance, Kalamaia Indigenous peoples found themselves competing with prospectors, cameleers, horses and camels for access to these precious reserves.
Such an analysis of the social worlds of water (and its absence) sheds light on the prevailing ideologies of aridity and the broader dynamics of colonial rule in this dryland outpost of the British empire.
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