A discussion of Adelaide’s location and dependence on water is in Michael Williams’ “The Making of Adelaide,” in John W. McCarty and Boris Schedvin’s (eds.) Australian Capital Cities. (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1978, 112–43). Derek Whitlock’s Adelaide From Colony to Jubilee: A Sense of Difference (Adelaide: Savvas Publishing, 1985) provides an easily accessible overview of Adelaide up until the 1980s. The more recently published A History of South Australia by Paul Sendziuk and Robert Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) brings the history up to date, albeit with a slightly wider focus. The definitive work on water in the city of Adelaide is Chris Daniels’ edited collection Adelaide: Water of a City (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2010). Marianne Hammerton’s Water South Australia: A History of the Engineering and Water Supply Department (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1986) provides insight into the formation and achievement of this key institution. A more technical paper modeling the impact of drought and the loss of River Murray water supplies is Holger R. Maier et al., “Impact of Drought on Adelaide’s Water Supply System: Past, Present, and Future,” in Kurt Schwabe et al. (eds.) Drought in Arid and Semi-Arid Regions: A Multi-Disciplinary and Cross-Country Perspective (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013, 41–62). How to balance a city’s water supplies against the competing demands within the rural sector, with a specific case study of Adelaide, is discussed by Brian Richter et al. in “Tapped Out: How Can Cities Secure their Water Future?” Water Policy 15 (2013), 335–63. Current information on water supplies in Adelaide is available on the SA Water website https://www.sawater.com.au.

Brisbane

For an overview of Brisbane’s urban water supply, see Gordon Greenwood and John Laverty, Brisbane 1859–1959 (Brisbane: Oswald L. Ziegler, 1959) and John Cole, Shaping a City: Greater Brisbane 1925–1985 (Brisbane: William Brooks Queensland, 1984). For more recent urban history see Peter Spearritt, “The Water Crisis in Southeast Queensland” in Troubled Waters: Confronting the Water Crisis in Australia’s Cities, edited by Patrick Troy (Canberra: Australian National University, 2008, 19–36). For accounts of Brisbane floods, see Margaret Cook, “Damming the ‘Flood Evil’ on the Brisbane River,” History Australia 13, no. 4 (2016), 540–56, and “The Australia Day Floods, January 1974,” Environment & Society Portal, Arcadia (Spring 2017), no. 15, https://doi.org/10.5282/rcc/7871.

Melbourne

For an overview of Melbourne’s history in the past century, see Seamus O’Hanlon, City Life: The New Urban Australia (Sydney: NewSouth, 2018). The evolution of urban housing styles is discussed in Robin Boyd, Australia’s Home: Why Australians Built the Way They Did (Melbourne: Penguin, 1978). Tony Dingle and Carolyn Rasmussen’s book Vital Connections: Melbourne and its Board of Works 1891–1991 (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1991) is an excellent institutional history. On the postwar economic boom and development of new suburbs, see Rodney Maddock, “The Long Boom 1940–1970,” in Rodney Maddock and Ian McLean (eds.), The Australian Economy in the Long Run (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, 79–105); Tony Dingle, “People and Places in Post-War Melbourne,” in Graeme Davison et al. (eds.), The Cream Brick Frontier: Histories of Australian Suburbia (Monash Publications in History No. 19, Monash University, 1995, 27–40); Tony Dingle, “Necessity the Mother of Invention, or Do-It-Yourself,” in Patrick Troy (ed.), A History of European Housing in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 57–76); Lionel Frost, “Town and Country in the Menzies Years,” in J. R. Nethercote (ed.), Menzies: The Shaping of Modern Australia (Brisbane: Menzies Research Centre/Connor Court, 2016, 231–55). For a contemporary account of conditions in postwar suburbs, see Barry McCrea, “Heartbreak Streets,” Sun (Melbourne), 15 August 1955, 9–13.

Perth

For an overview of Perth’s history in the past century, see Tom Stannage, The People of Perth: A Social History of Western Australia’s Capital City (Perth: Perth City Council, 1979), and Jenny Gregory, City of Light: A History of Perth since the 1950s (Perth: City of Perth, 2003). For an Aboriginal perspective on Perth’s wetlands, see Reverend Sealin Garlett and Corina Abraham, “The Significance of the Beeliar Wetlands for Aboriginal People,” in Andrea Gaynor, Peter Newman, and Philip Jennings (eds.), Never Again: Reflections on Environmental Responsibility After Roe 8 (Crawley: UWA Publishing, 2017, 43–9). The history of Perth’s gardening preferences is discussed extensively in Andrea Gaynor, Harvest of the Suburbs: An Environmental History of Growing Food in Australian Cities (Crawley: UWA Press, 2006). On Perth’s water history, including the development of groundwater resources and the impacts of climate change, see Ruth A. Morgan, Running Out? Water in Western Australia (Crawley: UWA Publishing, 2015). For a historical study of Perth’s groundwater resources, see Bill Bunbury, Till the Stream Runs Dry: A History of Hydrography in Western Australia (Perth: Department of Water, 2010). The best areas for installing a household bore can be found online in the Perth Groundwater Map.

Sydney

For an overview of Sydney’s development in the twentieth century, see Peter Spearritt’s Sydney’s Century: A History (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2000). The definitive account of the Sydney system is W. V. Aird, The Water Supply, Sewerage and Drainage of Sydney (Metropolitan Water Sewerage and Drainage Board, 1961). See also Dan Coward, Out of Sight: Sydney’s Environmental History, 1851–1981 (Canberra: ANU, 1988). On water crises in the 1980s and 1990s, see Christopher Sheil, Water’s Fall: Running the Risks with Economic Rationalism (London, Pluto Press, 2000). For insights into the Indigenous history of the valley inundated by Warragamba Dam, see Jim Smith, The Aboriginal People of the Burrogorang Valley (Lawson: Blue Mountains Research Trust, 2016).

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.

Further Reading

Adelaide

Brisbane

Melbourne

Perth

Sydney

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

About the author

Further articles by this author:

Browse the exhibition

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Further Reading

Adelaide

Brisbane

Melbourne

Perth

Sydney

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

About the author

Further articles by this author:

Browse the exhibition