The Water Dreamers: The Remarkable History of Our Dry Continent

Front Cover
Text Publishing, Aug 2, 2010 - History - 336 pages

The long-awaited history that will change the way Australians think about their country.

The Water Dreamers is the story of the settlement of Australia: of the scarcity of water and the need to fill an imagined silence with the sounds of civilisation. From the moment the First Fleeters stepped ashore, water determined progress. The Tank Stream that flowed through what is now the Sydney CBD provided fresh water until settlers and their livestock fouled it. Then water from a nearby swamp was piped into the growing settlement. When it ran dry sights were set further afield.

The Water Dreamers is an illuminating account of the ways people have imagined and interpreted Australia while struggling to understand this continent and striving to conquer its obstacles. It’s an environmental history and a cultural history with an unmistakable sense of how, today, we are part of that continuing story.

 

Selected pages

Contents

INTRODUCTION
1
The Valley of the Tank Stream
19
Mr Busbys Bore
39
Sounds of Water
66
The Myth of the Inland Sea
82
River of Dreams
99
Silence Victorious
124
Mapping the Silence
148
Dick Hardwicke to the Rescue
179
Change of Heart
198
Australia Unlimited
219
New Beginnings
246
NOTES
261
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
299
INDEX
320
Copyright

The Great Artesian Basin
166

Other editions - View all

The Water Dreamers: The Remarkable History of Our Dry Continent
Michael Cathcart
No preview available - 2009

Common terms and phrases

Aborig Aborigines Adelaide arid Artesian Basin Australian explorers banks Batman Blue Mountains Botany Bay Bradfield British Brock Busby's Busby's Bore bush central Australia centre Charles Sturt civilisation coast Collins colonial colonists continent convicts Creek dams Darling Darling River dead heart Deakin declared desert dream drought engineering Eora expedition farms Flinders flood flowing forest frontier Golden Lake Governor grasslands groundwater harbour historian hydro-engineering Idriess imagined imperial inland Australia inland sea interior irrigation John Journal kilometres Lachlan Lake Eyre land Leichhardt Lemurian Lemurian novels lost Macquarie Maslen Melbourne metres Mitchell Murray named nature officers outback Oxley Phillip poem Queensland quoted rain rainfall region river Rock scheme settlement settlers sheep Snowy South Australia South Wales squatters story swamp Sydney Cove Sydney Gazette Sydney’s Tank Stream Taylor Tench terra nullius transformed trees Uluru vast Victoria water dreamers Water Supply waterholes wetlands wild wilderness writing wrote

About the author (2010)

Michael Cathcart was born in Melbourne in 1956—the year that television came to Australia. He was educated at Melbourne Grammar, the University of Melbourne, ANU and a tyre factory in Port Melbourne. He has worked as a schoolteacher, university lecturer and theatre director.

Cathcart has presented several Radio National programs, including ‘Arts Today’ and the ‘Radio National Quiz’, and for ABC TV he has presented the history magazine show ‘Rewind’ and the documentary series ‘Rogue Nation’. Cathcart is the author of Defending the National Tuckshop (1988), an expose of a secret militia called the White Army formed in Victoria in 1931, and he has published an abridgement of Manning Clark’s epic A History of Australia and an anthology of Australian speeches.

Michael Cathcart’s latest book is The Water Dreamers.

Bibliographic information

TitleThe Water Dreamers: The Remarkable History of Our Dry Continent
AuthorMichael Cathcart
PublisherText Publishing, 2010
ISBN1921656557, 9781921656552
Length336 pages
Subjects › 

History / Australia & New Zealand
  
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