Historically, Australian society has often faced up to important problems only when disaster –apocalyptic and undeniable disaster — forces us to face facts. I am currently seeking support for a history of the Black Friday bush fires of 1939. These fires were the most calamitous in the recorded history of Australia. More than 10% of the surface area of Victoria was burnt, scores of people were killed, and whole settlements reduced to ash, rubble and twisted metal. The disaster was of such magnitude that it forced Australian society — in rural areas, at any rate — to change its attitude to the natural environment and to fire, and to forge stronger and more civic-minded communities.[11] It took the fall of Singapore to make us realise that we could no longer place our trust in the British Empire. It took the calamitous road toll of 1970 in Victoria — the total was over 1000 — to change our attitudes to cars and how we use them. It took the AWB bribery scandal to make us realise the truth of an Adam Smith truism: that a privatised monopoly is the one thing worse than a state monopoly. There are many other examples.
That disaster should act as an agent of change is not surprising — but really it should not require disaster, not when we pride ourselves on our clear-eyed realism, and when there is plenty of warning. That Australia would face a water crisis in the early years of the twenty-first century was predictable — and was predicted. In 1968, C.H. Munro, a professor of civil engineering at the University of New South Wales, gave a public lecture on Australia’s water future. Munro was scathing of our culture of waste, of how in our large cities ‘the use of water for roses and lawns and car washing are taken for granted as essential human needs’.[12] He was thinking long-term, and saw trouble ahead:
Planning authorities contemplate a population of five million people in Sydney by the year 2000. To some this is a horrible thought. Certainly it poses many problems to the engineer and town planner in regard to transport … provision of water supply and sewerage and the like.[13]
We can’t say that we were not warned; we just didn’t listen.
In 1966, as a severe drought affected much of New South Wales and Queensland, a senior agricultural economist wrote:
Government policies … and skewed values which allow us to regard the failure of an electrical retailer as divine retribution but the bankruptcy of an under-capitalised and inefficient farmer as a blot on the social escutcheon, may well cause the cost of [future] droughts to be avoidably high.
There is need for farmers and governments to confer in evaluating the lessons of past droughts and in planning for the future. All proposals, particularly those with a strong political bias such as for widespread irrigation development, should be judged by business criteria [and] … in terms of … the population generally, which has, in the end, to bear the cost.[14]
We can’t say that we were not warned; we just didn’t listen.