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The Water Dreamers: The remarkable history of our dry continent
For thousands of years, water has shaped where we live, how we struggle with each other and how we imagine our country. The first settlers' dreams of mighty inland rivers evaporated in the silent deserts of Australia. But the water dreamers refused to accept this disappointment. They saw a country that could be transformed by irrigation and hydro-engineering. Today, thanks to their vision, many of our rivers are in crisis and, more than ever, Australians realise that our destiny will be shaped by water.
- GenresNonfictionHistory
336 pages, Paperback
First published August 3, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
May 27, 2021
Easily my favourite book of 2021. It challenged me, upset me and made me feel justified to speak up on causes I care about (i.e. our environment). I've been reading this on and off for some time and it feels so fitting now given the public discourse around climate change and how it will impact access to fuel, food and water.
Michael Cathcart is the historian Australia needs. Not only does Cathcart address colonial injustice, he also eloquently outlines the folly of governments. Some of the lines in this book are so juicy with wry humour I caught myself smiling as I read along.
The book speaks volumes about the violence visited upon Indigenous Australians since colonisation. How the author made 200 years of politics and history so fascinating, I'll never know. The early chapters describing the first interactions between British soldiers and Aborigines were quite heart-breaking - I choked up as the author re-told events that went from friendly to violent in seconds. Please don't let this deter you from reading, it gets better.
I'm so thankful someone took the time to look over first-hand accounts of colonisation. Without this book I would not have known that there was any opposition to the murders of Aboriginal people at the time. Even in the 1860s, there were people who understood how painful life had become for Aborigines who did not need or ask for the "white man" to visit their land.
While the book might read like environmentalist commentary it is actually a story of social justice. How Indigenous people and all Australians have been forcibly disconnected from the land while industry benefits. All the criticism levelled at the government is valid and Cathcart comes bearing receipts that put Australia's governments to shame. The farmers and irrigators who have benefited for decades without appropriate regulation are now being held to account but it's still not enough. This is a wake-up call. This is a call to action. We live on the driest inhabited continent on earth and we cannot live without water.
Many lines from the book moved me but this one in particular:
"We cannot ship water from the environment or pipe it around the country at will. Water, whether it supplies a city, farms or industry is sustainable only when it is part of a healthy, living system. The river, the farm, the factory, the wetlands, the town are all moving parts of the one dynamic environment. Until all users of the river overcome the imagined division between the natural environment and artificial human activity; until they deeply feel the interconnectedness of humanity and the natural world, Australians will continue to damage the lands and waters that sustain them."
Michael Cathcart is the historian Australia needs. Not only does Cathcart address colonial injustice, he also eloquently outlines the folly of governments. Some of the lines in this book are so juicy with wry humour I caught myself smiling as I read along.
The book speaks volumes about the violence visited upon Indigenous Australians since colonisation. How the author made 200 years of politics and history so fascinating, I'll never know. The early chapters describing the first interactions between British soldiers and Aborigines were quite heart-breaking - I choked up as the author re-told events that went from friendly to violent in seconds. Please don't let this deter you from reading, it gets better.
I'm so thankful someone took the time to look over first-hand accounts of colonisation. Without this book I would not have known that there was any opposition to the murders of Aboriginal people at the time. Even in the 1860s, there were people who understood how painful life had become for Aborigines who did not need or ask for the "white man" to visit their land.
While the book might read like environmentalist commentary it is actually a story of social justice. How Indigenous people and all Australians have been forcibly disconnected from the land while industry benefits. All the criticism levelled at the government is valid and Cathcart comes bearing receipts that put Australia's governments to shame. The farmers and irrigators who have benefited for decades without appropriate regulation are now being held to account but it's still not enough. This is a wake-up call. This is a call to action. We live on the driest inhabited continent on earth and we cannot live without water.
Many lines from the book moved me but this one in particular:
"We cannot ship water from the environment or pipe it around the country at will. Water, whether it supplies a city, farms or industry is sustainable only when it is part of a healthy, living system. The river, the farm, the factory, the wetlands, the town are all moving parts of the one dynamic environment. Until all users of the river overcome the imagined division between the natural environment and artificial human activity; until they deeply feel the interconnectedness of humanity and the natural world, Australians will continue to damage the lands and waters that sustain them."
June 9, 2020
If I were Michael Cathcart, I’d feel rather short-changed by the title of this book, which, even with its subtitle ‘The Remarkable History of our Dry Continent’ still doesn’t capture the nature of Cathcart’s question or approach....Cathcart examines the way that Australia was imagined and written about in our national consciousness and there is just as much about the ‘silence’ of the landscape as there is about ‘water’. I don’t know how you find a title that combines both these elements, but ‘water dreamers’ doesn’t do it. This is as much a book about cultural interpretation and literature as it is about engineering....
Through literature and language, we can see the adoption of North American tropes of a ‘howling wilderness’, a ‘virgin’ land, and an empire- wide ‘lost civilization’ adventure genre all imposed onto the Australian landscape. We see the practice of drawing lines on maps to delineate arid zones disputed by the boosters of industrial and technological ‘solutions’. Cathcart’s book is not just about explorers and schemes; it is also about literature and national consciousness, and concepts of geographical defeat and technological victory. Does he succeed in melding the two? I’m not sure that he does, and he has the two threads running alongside each other, rather than interweaving them as a concise, integrated argument.
Nonetheless, this is a beautifully written cultural history that ranges across poetry, diaries and novels as well as nationalist stories of explorers and engineers. It tells a much more complex story about more than just water.
For my complete review, please visit
https://residentjudge.com/2020/06/09/...
Through literature and language, we can see the adoption of North American tropes of a ‘howling wilderness’, a ‘virgin’ land, and an empire- wide ‘lost civilization’ adventure genre all imposed onto the Australian landscape. We see the practice of drawing lines on maps to delineate arid zones disputed by the boosters of industrial and technological ‘solutions’. Cathcart’s book is not just about explorers and schemes; it is also about literature and national consciousness, and concepts of geographical defeat and technological victory. Does he succeed in melding the two? I’m not sure that he does, and he has the two threads running alongside each other, rather than interweaving them as a concise, integrated argument.
Nonetheless, this is a beautifully written cultural history that ranges across poetry, diaries and novels as well as nationalist stories of explorers and engineers. It tells a much more complex story about more than just water.
For my complete review, please visit
https://residentjudge.com/2020/06/09/...
September 13, 2021
This is a book with a very interesting premise, which in some ways doesn't quite live up to the claim of the title, but is still well worth reading.
Much more and much less than a history of White Australia's interaction with water in Australia, Cathcart has also written about how the British (and others) took possession of the country through their imaginings of what it might be, and how those imaginings have been rebuffed by the country itself.
Starting with the arrival of the First Fleet, Cathcart shows how a people used to copious rain and riverflows struggled with the erratic nature of Australia's rainfall and water catchments. He delves further into the literature of early Australia than others have to show that some of the received knowledge that we thought we knew about what early White Australia thought of water and the interior may not be actually what we think we know.
Apart from Sturt, most early explorers soon realised that there was no great river, lake or sea in the centre of the continent. This did not stop them from over-estimating the carrying capacity of the water that was available, encouraging pastoralists to venture too far inland, and destroying many watercourses in their search for reliable water.
Cathcart chronicles two differing schools of thought that developed regarding the "Dead Heart", or "Red Heart", depending on the view taken. The centre of Australia was either a place of despair and death with no possibility of permanent settlement, or a potential food bowl and living place for millions, after man's hand was run over the countryside to provide it with water.
Cathcart chronicles much of the work and literature of the "water boosters" as he calls them, including the strange "Lemurian" literature, a kind of pulp fiction that spoke of lost tribes and ancient seas around which the "Dead Heart" was once civilized. Ever one for facts rather than fantasy, he pops the bubbles of those who would generate a history of the continent through their words, rather than from the actuality of water, or lack of it. As he writes in his introduction his book "is an investigation that returns again and again to one overwhelming fact. In Australia, the success or failure of settlement has been largely determined by rainfall."
As still happens all too often in this country, those that talk sense, such as Griffith Taylor, were hounded until he left. Taylor's commentary, that much of Australia is too dry to settle in the way that politicians hoped to, still holds up today. Cathcart pricks the "populate or perish" bubble as well - why would the "teeming Asian hordes" want to take a desert country - they are hardly going to parachute into the Western Desert and invade from the inside out...
The book finishes with a short section on the current policy of trading water rights, which, as Cathcart points out, has its own problems as a vehicle to rehabilitate our depleted rivers and wetlands.
With copious footnotes and bibliography, The Water Dreamers is an interesting viewpoint of Australia's history, and worth reading.
Check out my other reviews at http://aviewoverthebell.blogspot.com.au/
Much more and much less than a history of White Australia's interaction with water in Australia, Cathcart has also written about how the British (and others) took possession of the country through their imaginings of what it might be, and how those imaginings have been rebuffed by the country itself.
Starting with the arrival of the First Fleet, Cathcart shows how a people used to copious rain and riverflows struggled with the erratic nature of Australia's rainfall and water catchments. He delves further into the literature of early Australia than others have to show that some of the received knowledge that we thought we knew about what early White Australia thought of water and the interior may not be actually what we think we know.
Apart from Sturt, most early explorers soon realised that there was no great river, lake or sea in the centre of the continent. This did not stop them from over-estimating the carrying capacity of the water that was available, encouraging pastoralists to venture too far inland, and destroying many watercourses in their search for reliable water.
Cathcart chronicles two differing schools of thought that developed regarding the "Dead Heart", or "Red Heart", depending on the view taken. The centre of Australia was either a place of despair and death with no possibility of permanent settlement, or a potential food bowl and living place for millions, after man's hand was run over the countryside to provide it with water.
Cathcart chronicles much of the work and literature of the "water boosters" as he calls them, including the strange "Lemurian" literature, a kind of pulp fiction that spoke of lost tribes and ancient seas around which the "Dead Heart" was once civilized. Ever one for facts rather than fantasy, he pops the bubbles of those who would generate a history of the continent through their words, rather than from the actuality of water, or lack of it. As he writes in his introduction his book "is an investigation that returns again and again to one overwhelming fact. In Australia, the success or failure of settlement has been largely determined by rainfall."
As still happens all too often in this country, those that talk sense, such as Griffith Taylor, were hounded until he left. Taylor's commentary, that much of Australia is too dry to settle in the way that politicians hoped to, still holds up today. Cathcart pricks the "populate or perish" bubble as well - why would the "teeming Asian hordes" want to take a desert country - they are hardly going to parachute into the Western Desert and invade from the inside out...
The book finishes with a short section on the current policy of trading water rights, which, as Cathcart points out, has its own problems as a vehicle to rehabilitate our depleted rivers and wetlands.
With copious footnotes and bibliography, The Water Dreamers is an interesting viewpoint of Australia's history, and worth reading.
Check out my other reviews at http://aviewoverthebell.blogspot.com.au/
January 25, 2015
I enjoyed this book, but I feel it relied too heavily on settlers and explorers stories and had too sparsely linked these to modern water issues. Cathcart gives interesting insight and context to water engineering in the Australian psyche. He explains racism, nationalism and optimism has often been inserted into public debate about water, often more loudly than the nature of the land itself, hence his use of "dreamers" to describe many characters. I would recommend to anyone interested in water management, history and engineering. Though I lament his lack of diversity in the characters he chooses to look into. No women or indigenous voices are explored in any trap way, though the subject makes it difficult to do so.
April 15, 2015
Lively and engaging prose. Engaging story or thesis. I can relate to all that Michael Cathcart so expertly draws together. There's a need for a sequel - on the topic of the water schemes in northern Australia. There's still plenty of water dreaming in process there. This is an important topic for rural Australians and I found MC's work illuminating and engaging.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews