Engineering Nature: Water, Development, and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise

CHAPTER THREE: The California Model and the Australian Awakening

CHAPTER 3 The California Model & the Australian Awakening In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, California engineers experimented with different models of irrigation. Their models attempted to deal with issues such as the relative involvement of the government, private capitalists, interest groups, and the market in economic growth. Yet the overall lesson for California had been a lesson in frustration. Simply put, private interests had trumped what many people had perceived as the public good. Despite their mixed success, Californians’ irrigation experiments, technologies , and ideas about modern rural lifewerewelcomed warmly inVictoria , Australia, which many engineers—from both California and Victoria— perceived as possessing conditions that resembled those in the American West. Alfred Deakin observed that the Australian colony was, like California , “a new country, settled by the pick of the Anglo-Saxon race, attracted by the first instance by gold discoveries, and remaining after that excitement passed away to build up a new nation under the freest institutions and most favorable conditions of life.”1 The two regions also experienced similar problems related to the growth of a new state. As in California, Victoria ’s recurring drought, land monopoly, and ambiguous land and water laws hindered economic growth. Settlers generally believed that Victoria’s various land acts had not achieved the yeoman farmer dream that many nations shared in the nineteenth century. As international newspapers and government bulletins alerted Victorian officials to California’s advances in agriculture, the Australians began to look to other regions for guidance.2 Although Victoria’s officials knew of the Indian example, they turned primarily to California, where a common political culture was perhaps the most crucial factor in promoting transfers between the two regions. Not- 68 THE AUSTRALIAN AWAKENING withstanding the different ways that self-governing colonies and independent states operated, Victorians and Californians shared ideas about the state’s role in society. The financially burdened British government forged partnerships with private companies in every Australian colony to build infrastructural works. The mix of local and state, private and public development that characterized both California’s and Victoria’s early years affirmed that the government should have some, albeit not supreme, influence over resource development.3 From the 1880s to the 1920s, a series of exchanges between California and Victoria took place, focusing both on engineering technology and on the ideas and institutions in which particular uses of engineering were embedded. Deakin, for example, visited the American West in 1885. Impressed with California’s land and water policies, he returned to Victoria and adopted California’s statutes. Soon thereafter, he invited the Chaffey brothers to replicate their Southern California colony of Ontario in Victoria . A decade later, under the leadership of Elwood Mead, the Victorian government implemented its closer settlement policies, a form of stateaided agricultural development that Mead subsequently tried to reproduce in California. Despite such auspicious beginnings, neither region fully implemented the other’s projects. Various factors help explain these successes and failures . Economic depression, inadequate planning, environmental conditions , and railwayand market development significantlyaffected how these exchanges worked.Thesevariables, in turn, helped to shape California’s and Victoria’s political cultures as they diverged in the early twentieth century. Victoria moved toward state socialism, while California embraced Progressivism . These different paths impaired the further cross-fertilization of technologies and ideas in the twentieth century. The Australian Awakening: The Royal Commission Visits the American West Severe droughts plagued southern and eastern Australia, including Victoria , between 1881 and 1886.The stress caused by such water shortages raised public awareness of the need for water conservation and irrigation. During that time, Deakin, thenVictoria’s ministerof publicworks and water supply, began to study the possibilities of irrigation, and California emerged as the most compelling model.4 “Ergo,” a local newspaper asked, “if the Californian is [irrigating] successfully, why should not the Victorian? . . . Here is 69 THE AUSTRALIAN AWAKENING a bread-basket ready to supply the hungry millions of the old lands with corn, wine and meat.”5 In 1883, Deakin, drawing heavily on the California experience, introduced the colony’s first irrigation legislation. The Water Conservation Act of 1883 created irrigation districts like those then pending before the California State Legislature—a decentralized system of water users monitored by the state. Deakin placed California’s bill almost directly into Victoria’s statutes. Thus began the great “Australian awakening,” Victoria’s foray into irrigation agriculture.6 Agricultural development had of course evolved since the first...