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“Drought, Mud, Filth, and Flood: Water Crises in Australian Cities, 1880s–2010s” was created by Andrea Gaynor, Margaret Cook, Lionel Frost, Jenny Gregory, Ruth Morgan, Martin Shanahan, Peter Spearritt, Susan Avey, Nathan Etherington, Elizabeth Gralton, and Daniel Martin (2019) under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. This refers only to the text and does not include image rights. Please click on an image to view its individual rights status. Thumbnails of the following images appear on the exhibition landing page:

Map of Australia showing the location of the exhibition’s five cities. Illustration by Nathan Etherington, 2019.

Snippets from front pages of The West Australian from the early 1950s, a time of frequent water restrictions. The West Australian, 17 December 1953 and 18 January 1950.

Mannum-Adelaide pipeline under construction. Completed in 1955, the pipeline connected Adelaide to Murray River. Unknown photographer, 1953.

Brisbane is flooded by the second and third highest recorded floods within a fortnight. Unknown photographer, 1893.

Artist’s impression of the Warragamba Dam published with Sydney Water Board promotional material in 1957. Unknown illustrator, 1957.

Mrs. J. Asbury gives her daughter Barbara a lift across the flooded drain outside her home in Cuthbert Street, Reservoir in Melbourne, Victoria. Photograph by Len Drummond, 1953.

Perth’s Southern Seawater Desalination Plant converts seawater from the Indian Ocean to drinking water, to meet more than half of Perth’s scheme water demand. Photograph by Nearmap Australia Pty Ltd, 2019.

This graph, published in the Argus during the drought of 1938, shows Victoria’s annual rainfall since 1874. Unknown illustrator, ca. 1938.

Drought, Mud, Filth, and Flood: Water Crises in Australian Cities, 1880s–2010s

In this exhibition, we invite visitors to consider the historical relationship of “water crises” of various kinds to the development of urban water systems, through the experience of the driest inhabited continent on earth, Australia. We have chosen a range of different departures from water-related business as usual—from shortage to flood, pollution to drainage—in the five mainland Australian state capitals from the late nineteenth century to the present. The part of this exhibition devoted to each city focuses thematically on just one or two kinds of crisis, while the timeline covers a wider range of events in each place.

About the Exhibition

About the author

Gaynor, Andrea

University of Western Australia

Andrea Gaynor is Associate Professor of History at the University of Western Australia. An environmental historian, she seeks to use the contextualizing and narrative power of history to address contemporary problems. She is co-editor, with Nick Rose, of Reclaiming the Urban Commons: The Past, Present and Future of Food Growing in Australian Towns and Cities (UWAP 2018). At UWA, she is Chair of the History Discipline Group and Director of the Centre for Western Australian History; she also convenes the Australian and New Zealand Environmental History Network and endeavors to inform policy as a member of The Beeliar Group: Professors for Environmental Responsibility.

Cook, Margaret

University of Queensland & La Trobe University, Australia

Dr Margaret Cook is an environmental historian, cultural heritage consultant, a Post-Thesis Fellow at the University of Queensland, and an Honorary Research Fellow at La Trobe University. Her PhD, completed in 2018, explored the history of floods in the Brisbane River and her findings have been published in national and international journals and in a forthcoming book, A River with a City Problem, with University of Queensland Press. Her current research deals with the colonial settlement of central Queensland for the production of cotton in the 1920s, particularly gender, climate and water.

orcid.org/0000-0002-3354-0658

Further articles by this author:

The Australia Day Floods, January 1974

A Legacy of Brisbane’s Benchmark Floods of 1893: Creating Dam Dependence

Frost, Lionel

Monash University, Australia

Born and raised in Melbourne, Lionel Frost is an associate professor in the Department of Economics, Monash Business School at Monash University. He is current President of the Economic History Society of Australia and New Zealand, and has published extensively on urban and economic history in Australia and North America. Recent publications include “The Economic History of the Pacific,” in J. R. McNeill and K. Pomeranz (eds), The Cambridge World History Volume VII: Production, Destruction, and Competition, 1750–Present (2015).

Gregory, Jenny

University of Western Australia

Jenny Gregory AM, is Emeritus Professor of History at The University of Western Australia, after a career at UWA that included time as Head of the School of Humanities, Chair of History and Director of UWA Press. Author of numerous publications in the fields of urban history, planning and heritage, her current research projects include responses to water famines and past governance of water and sanitation in Australian cities. Currently President of the History Council of WA, she has received a number of awards for her contribution to her profession and the community.

Morgan, Ruth

Monash University, Australia

Ruth Morgan is a Senior Research Fellow in the History Program at Monash University. She has published widely on the climate and water histories of Australia and the British Empire, including her award-winning book, Running Out? Water in Western Australia (2015). Her current project, on environmental exchanges between British India and the Australian colonies, has been generously supported by the Australian Research Council and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She is also a Lead Author in Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Assessment Report 6.

Shanahan, Martin

University of South Australia

Martin Shanahan is Professor of Economic and Business History at the University of South Australia and visiting Professor at the University of Goteborg (Sweden). He has written extensively on wealth inequality, business cartels, water markets, and climate change from the perspective of economic and business history. He is currently involved in a number of projects, including work (with Lionel Frost) that examines the impact on health and living standards of variations in access to water in two Australian cities.

Spearritt, Peter

University of Queensland, Australia

Peter Spearritt began his scholarly life as an urban historian and continues to be fascinated by how cities function and the impact they have on their environment. His Sydney’s Century: A History (2000) traces the growth of Australia’s largest city over the twentieth century, while Where History Happened (2018) examines urban and rural sites, from Cooktown in North Queensland to New Norcia, the Benedictine Abbey north of Perth. He is a critic of quick-fix solutions to urban water shortages, especially the building of desalination plants, when household water tanks and lowering household use of water would suffice in most instances.

Avey, Susan

University of South Australia

Dr Susan Avey is an architect and urban historian. Her research interests include individual agency in the historical development of urban environments, discovering everyday lived experiences of cities through historical data as well as the potential of drawing as a historical research tool. Recently Susan has worked in the School of Art, Architecture and Design at the University of South Australia and the International School of Hotel Management as a lecturer, studio educator, and academic researcher. She is currently engaged as a researcher in the School of Commerce at UniSA.

Etherington, Nathan

University of Sydney, Australia

Nathan Etherington is a doctoral candidate at the University of Sydney and a registered architect. He has degrees in architecture and arts from Harvard and the University of Sydney and his research is located at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and urban environments. Nathan is the founder and principal of NEA, an architecture practice based in Sydney. His current research interests explore the construction of urban landscapes through engineering and infrastructure.

Gralton, Elizabeth

University of Western Australia

Elizabeth Gralton has a PhD in nineteenth-century French history from the University of Western Australia. Her research focused on contemporary reactions to and portrayals of the Paris Universal Exhibitions. She has taught in the areas of nineteenth-century Europe, early-modern France, urban history and art history. She is now based in Melbourne, working as a research consultant and studying cultural materials conservation.

Martin, Daniel

University of Western Australia

Daniel Jan Martin is a designer, urbanist, and researcher based in the School of Design at The University of Western Australia. He studies urban ecology and hydrology in relationship to architecture and urbanism. His work has focussed on mapping, environmental communication, and education. Since 2016, Daniel has worked within the Cooperative Research Centre for Water Sensitive Cities where his current research is exploring strategies for coordinating infill housing with ecological repair.

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Drought, Mud, Filth, and Flood: Water Crises in Australian Cities, 1880s–2010s

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