A history of irrigation

I have not checked the veracity of my great-grandfather’s claim, but certainly he was never averse to raising a loan, whether on private or public account.

My great-grandfather’s enthusiasm for irrigation was common for the times.

“Irrigationists of the late nineteenth century … saw the plains [of northern Victoria] as ultimately transformable through the alchemy of irrigation.” (The Murray, Paul Sinclair, page 61.)

I checked views north of the Murray, and to my surprise, in the 1860s the Pastoral Times included 120 articles and advertisements referring to irrigation, albeit some only fleeting.

One correspondent wrote in 1864, “No country offers a finer field for irrigation than Riverina”. (Pastoral Times and Echuca and Moama Chronicle, 30 July 1864, page 4.).

Some were prescient: “by means of irrigation … [on] the Swan Hill flats, the cultivation of rice might become a profitable pursuit.” (Pastoral Times and Echuca and Moama Chronicle, 10 March, 1866, page 1).

Early in the twentieth century Jõ Takasuka pioneered rice growing in the Swan Hill district, and 80km from Swan Hill, irrigated rice was grown in the Wakool district during WWII.

I was able to readily locate these references to irrigation because generous community donations have funded the digitisation of the Pastoral Times for the Trove website, managed by the National Library of Australia: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/?q=.

Editions from 1859 to 1895 are already available and editions to around 1950 should become available next year (see article ‘Grant helps make our history more accessible’, page 4 in last Friday’s Pastoral Times).

In the 1880s, Victoria and NSW each established Royal Commissions to examine water resources, conservation, and the potential for irrigation.

Intensive, small holder irrigation projects were established at Mildura and Renmark in 1887-1895: and the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area (MIA) at Griffith and Leeton, in the 1910s.

The latter scheme was enabled by the construction of Burrinjuck Dam on the Murrumbidgee River which had commenced in 1907.

Both schemes encountered serious difficulties in their initial years of operation.

In 1915 the River Murray Waters Agreement between the Commonwealth, NSW, Victorian and South Australian governments enabled the construction of the Hume Dam up steam from Albury.

Construction of the initial stage extended from 1919 to 1936.

The Agreement was amended in 1934 to allow the construction of a diversion weir at Yarrawonga, and construction of the Mulwala Canal to supply the Berriquin Irrigation District started in April 1935.

In contrast to intensive irrigation of small holdings in the MIA, the Berriquin Domestic and Stock Water Supply and Irrigation District heralded ‘a somewhat new policy’ by the Water Conservation and Irrigation Commission (WCIC).

Districts “were intended primarily for existing landholders who could use additional water for domestic and stock purposes, taking advantage of limited irrigation to cultivate lucerne and other fodder crops for sheep, fat lamb raising, and mixed farming” (Either Drought or Plenty, Clem Lloyd, pages 247-8).

On October 12, 1933 my father, Don Henderson, attended a meeting in the Blighty Hall to hear the chief executive of the WCIC, FC Brewster, outline arrangements for the Berriquin District.

My father’s water rights under the scheme were gazetted in 1934 and water was flowing onto his property, Wolngi, by September 1940.

In the ensuing drought years, his diaries indicate that stock were being rotated through an oasis of lucerne and other irrigated pastures.

It became a mixed farm with irrigation to reduce vulnerability to drought, consistent with the ‘somewhat new policy’ envisioned by the WCIC.

That was the farming enterprise I worked on during my school and university holidays in the 1950s and 1960s.

How things have changed.

Irrigated farming increased rapidly between WWII and the 1990s in the Murray Darling Basin, with dramatic increases in cotton production in the north and rice production in the south, with a rice mill established in Deniliquin in 1970.

In recent decades, the impact of climate change has been more evident.

The historical analysis of total Murray River system inflows over the period 1895 to 2020 presented in the Keelty report “illustrates that more than half of the driest 10 per cent of years in the historical record have occurred in the past two decades. The pattern of such dry years occurring back-to-back is also not observable to the same extent at any other time prior to 2000.” (Impact of lower inflows on state shares under the Murray-Darling Basin Agreement, 2020, page 7).

The Keelty report also noted that compared to NSW, the Victorian and South Australian governments adopt “more conservative allocation policies [and] therefore … have more water to allocate to irrigators in dry times.” (Page 21).

This may be related to another significant change since my youth, namely, that the electorate of Murray is no longer represented by the National Party, formerly Country Party.

The National Party is an enthusiastic supporter of dam building and irrigation, but party leaders have generally represented central and northern NSW electorates.

At the state level, there have been 14 Country or National party leaders since 1921, but none represented southern or Riverina electorates.

At the federal level, there have been 14 leaders since 1920, and of the eight from NSW, only Tim Fischer and Michael McCormick represented southern electorates. But neither held portfolios involved with the regulation of water.

The current Minister for the Environment and Water Tanya Plibasek is responsible for the Murray Darling Basin, but when the Liberal Party member for Farrer Sussan Ley was the Minister for the Environment from May 2019 to May 2022 in the Morrison Coalition Government, the ministers responsible for water were Queensland LNP ministers, David Littleproud, and later, Keith Pitt. Curious that.

In Opposition, however, the National Party have appointed a local as the Shadow Minister for Water - Senator Perin Davey.