Jay Arthur, from the National Museum of Australia, in Tracking Water Through the National Archives of Australia in Altitude talks about Australian responses to living on a dry continent where water and its management has become one of the issues of the twenty-first century.

Tracking Water is a historical look that highlights entrenched attitudes and habits, explored in terms of responses. The first is the variety of schemes that are the many variations:

of the Snowy Scheme and the Ord River Scheme and other major damming, piping and irrigation schemes – an engineering response to the aridity and variable rainfall of Australia. It is almost as if Australia is seen as a badly-plumbed structure and if only the flow can be re-arranged, it will be able to realise its right potential. The persistence of these dreams is the persistence of the belief that human intervention is able to fix perceived environmental problems.

The other main response is:

the idea of water running to ‘waste’ – as large amounts of water ending up in an estuary are seen to be. There is no sense in these plaints of the role that a seasonal flush of fresh water might have in these ecosystems. The imperative is to use the water that would otherwise be wasted by the ‘profligate’ natural system. This sense of the rightness – amounting sometimes to an obligation – of making use of a ‘wasted’ resource is part of a moral thread running through many of these water project proposals, both the realised and the unrealised. Water management is often seen not just as an economic activity but also as a moral one.