The long view on water in Australia: An amateur’s view

Australia is frequently billed as the driest populated continent in the world (Aussies are fond of applying superlatives to their homeland). South Australia is even the driest state in Australia. We came here for the year specifically so that Chelsea could study water policy here because so much research has been done on the various facets of water policy. Water is of such interest to Australians precisely because they have so little water to go around for all the different users: cities, industry, agriculture, and river ecosystems.

Like most countries, agriculture uses the majority of water. In Australia, the lion’s share of agriculture takes place in the Murray-Darling Basin. And agriculture occupies an important place in both the national economy and the psyche of Australians—quite similar to the importance of the American heartland and its residents to our national identity.

In the mid-1800s, surveyor George Goyder laid out what is known as Goyder’s Line, a boundary that separated land that receives enough rainfall for farming from land that was suitable only for light grazing. While Goyder’s Line exists only in South Australia, it would not be hard to continue the line through the other southern and eastern states—it would essentially follow the crest of the Snowy Mountains and the Great Dividing Range. Alarmingly, the entire Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) lies on the wrong side of Goyder’s Line.


So how is the breadbasket of Australia located in a semi-arid climatic zone that is poorly suited to agriculture? The answer comes in two parts. First, farmers and ranchers spread into the Murray-Darling Basin in two waves, following the first and second World Wars. The decade following World War I was a time of unusually high rainfall and the Australian Government, eager to reward its loyal soldiers and settle the empty plains of the interior, granted land and water rights without restraint. Importantly, the water rights were based on the rainfall during those exceptionally wet years. When climate returned to its normally arid self, many of those farmers found themselves struggling to survive (in fact many did not, causing the first of a number of periodic waves of farm consolidations). Following a second wave of land grants to soldiers returning from World War II, farmers similarly found themselves unable to be financially successful in the climate of the Murray-Darling Basin. The second part of the answer to the question comes in the response of the government, which built a massive series of dams (weirs) along the River Murray and to impound the streams draining the Snowy Mountains (the latter being the so-called Snowy River Scheme). These massive construction projects served a number of purposes: they employed many returning soldiers, they encouraged huge numbers of European immigrants to come to relatively unpopulated Australia, they provided flood control (viewed as needed after the 1956 flood of the Murray, which had submerged the entire ground level of most structures in communities along the river), and they engendered confidence in the abilities of the still-young Australian nation. They also forever turned the river in to a series of what are essentially lakes—a geomorphologic subsidy for Australian farming.


Even with huge amounts of water to make the land agriculturally productive, the problems of the Murray-Darling Basin were not at an end. Intensive agriculture has drawn down the water table, adding substantial amounts of salts (primarily gypsum, calcium sulfate mineral) into the Murray-Darling hydrologic system (much of the MDB is underlain by Miocene carbonates and evaporites). Experimental projects have used mechanical means to remove salt, but they are small and expensive. Ironically, the only system large enough to remove the amounts of salt now present in the Murray-Darling system are the wetlands that line the river—wetlands that are stressed and disappearing because of the fundamental changes that were made to the rivers in the 1950s. Because of this, Australia has become one of the first countries to widely accept the need for environmental restoration.

To make matters worse, some have tried to sidestep the water crisis by tapping groundwater supplies. Use of “bore water,” as groundwater is commonly called here, is widely encouraged. Unfortunately, this fix won’t even last as long as the Ogallala Aquifer in the central United States—groundwater reservoirs in Australia are mostly small and shallow, and often saline.

Being a geologist, I tend to see the debate in a slightly different light—from a longer-term perspective. Fundamentally, the climate of most of the agricultural regions of Australia makes agriculture there impossible without huge additions of water for irrigation. Would it make sense to put in hundreds of square miles of rice paddies in Arizona? Australia is the largest producer of rice outside of southeastern Asia, and the growing takes place in relatively arid regions. (To be fair, the US government has massively subsidized similarly senseless agriculture in much of the arid western US.)

Today, Australia is struggling with what to do about water—there simply isn’t enough for municipal use, growing industry (both mining and power generation use substantial amounts of water), and healthy wetlands (that can hold salt levels down to manageable levels) as long as huge amounts of water are diverted to make what is essentially a desert into productive farmland. Something has to give, and in that situation the errors of the past century are glaringly apparent: overallocation of water rights and a climatically foolish choice of a main agricultural region. The United States shares both of these elements, particularly the former. The primary difference between the two seems to be that Australians are actively discussing (and disagreeing) about what to do about the problem. And how they are trying to solve the problem is a topic for another post…