Queensland farmers were relatively late entrants into large-scale irrigation activity on the Murray-Darling Basin, with Queensland having played no part in the major intergovernmental agreements about the Basin prior to 1996, when it joined the Murray-Darling Basin Agreement. In the 1980s, Queensland irrigators were using less than 1% of the total water extracted from the Basin for human purposes, but this proportion was to rise rapidly to 5% by 2007. Although the use of Murray-Darling water by Queensland farmers remains low compared to the other states, this fivefold increase in their relative share has drawn considerable attention, and some criticism, from political leaders and the media, in light of a growing national concern about the long-term sustainability of the current level of irrigated farming taking place across the Basin.

In early 2007, against the background of this growing criticism and in the context of intergovernmental discussions about the Howard Government’s newly announced $10 billion ‘National Plan for Water Security’, Queensland Premier Peter Beattie chose to revive the ‘Bradfield Scheme’: a nation-building proposal from 70 years earlier that was devised by John Jacob Crew (‘Jack’) Bradfield (1867-1943), the Queensland-born chief engineer of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Brisbane’s Story Bridge. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Bradfield had developed and promoted the idea of building a network of dams, pipes and channels to bring water from the Tully, Herbert and Burdekin rivers (which flow into the Pacific Ocean in tropical north Queensland) across the Great Dividing Range and south to the arid plains of western Queensland and NSW and north-eastern South Australia. Beattie’s 2007 version of the Bradfield Scheme, which he presented in an ‘open letter to all Australians’, was tailored specifically to address growing national alarm about the long-term health of the Murray-Darling system. Beattie proposed to take the water further south than Bradfield envisaged; all the way to the Warrego River, a tributary of the Darling. He claimed that this would increase the flow through the Darling and Murray into western New South Wales and South Australia by up to 1000 gigalitres per annum: approximately the same amount drawn from the system by Queensland irrigators.^[1]

Beattie’s proposal gained widespread attention, and provided media outlets with an opportunity to display photos and archival footage of Jack Bradfield supervising the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. However, within a few days, the proposal had faded from public debate. During its fleeting time in the spotlight, the Beattie version of the Bradfield Scheme was subjected to criticism from engineers, economists, environmental scientists and other experts on the basis of the same objections that had been repeatedly raised since it was first promoted by Bradfield in the late 1930s.^[2]

It is not my intention here to explore in detail the various criticisms that have been made of the Bradfield Scheme over the past 70 years. Interested readers can access these in many other published works. Typically they have revolved around concerns that the massive costs of the Scheme would outweigh any conceivable benefits and that evaporation and other technical problems would mean that little of the water taken from the northern rivers would ever reach those further south and west.^[3] Recently, Tom Griffiths and Tim Sherratt have produced an alternative ‘what if’ history in which the Commonwealth Government is imagined to have chosen to invest in the Bradfield Scheme rather than the Snowy Mountains Scheme as a centrepiece of post-World War II reconstruction. Griffiths and Sherratt have painted a fairly grim picture of both the environmental and economic consequences of such a decision, illustrating the spurious nature of many of the scientific claims underpinning Bradfield’s proposals.^[4]

Instead of criticising Bradfield’s proposal, I will attempt to identify those aspects of the national psyche to which it most appealed. My thesis is that the short-lived resurrection of the Bradfield Scheme in political debate during 2007 is a symptom of a longstanding tendency for grand hydraulic engineering or land redistribution schemes to come to the forefront of public consciousness at times of major uncertainty about the long-term economic, social and environmental sustainability of our inland communities. Such periods of uncertainty have typically coincided with periods of drought and economic downturn in inland areas; as was the case in early 2007, when most parts of rural Australia were entering a sixth successive year of major drought, a drought which former Prime Minister Howard described as ‘the worst in living memory’ and which South Australian Premier Mike Rann claimed was a ‘one in 1,000 year’ event.^[5]

There appears to be a longstanding tendency for Australians and those who govern them to panic about the future prosperity of inland Australia during periods of drought and economic uncertainty and to reach out for grandiose, expensive and unrealistic nation-building schemes which will allegedly secure that prosperity. Psychiatrists and psychologists describe a personality that veers between despair and unrealistic optimism as labile, and our shifting attitudes towards the inland over the past two centuries has warranted the use of this term.

For the most part we have perceived the inland areas of Australia as having almost unlimited potential as future sites for nation-building projects such as dams, irrigation areas, railways, roads, new towns and cities and vast mining and industrial projects. However, during times of drought or uncertainty, our optimism has rapidly dissipated and we have become haunted by apocalyptic visions of decline and despair which we have attributed to our own selfish and heedless actions in neglecting or unsustainably exploiting the environment. At these times, we have demonstrated an urge to reach for all-embracing solutions; the grander and more unrealistic they are, the better we seem to like them. As I will now discuss, the most popular of these possible solutions has always been that of building dams, channels and pipelines to bring water from where it is plentiful to where it is scarce.