Following the water: environmental history and the hydrological cycle in colonial Gippsland, Australia, 1838-1900

Abstract

This thesis explores a new approach to writing the environmental history of settler societies through an explicit focus on ecological processes, as distinct from the more commonly used landscape or geographic units. In this case, I focus upon the hydrological cycle and four key processes that constitute it. The processes are precipitation; flow above and below ground in rivers, creeks and aquifers; stored or still water in lakes, ponds and wetlands; and evaporation.

The work examines the impact of the ecological processes that make up the hydrological cycle within the context of the daily life of colonial settlers in the catchment of the Gippsland Lakes in south eastern Victoria, Australia, from the commencement of white colonization in the late 1830s up to the turn of the century. This time period was selected because by 1900, the principal changes which laid the foundation for the Lakes seriously compromised ecological health in the late 1980s and early 1990s were all in place.

Inspired by gestalt psychology, it examines the interaction of those processes with settler knowledge of biophysical processes, their religious and cultural beliefs, economic and political forces at work in their world, work and leisure time, their language and expressions, values and aspirations for themselves and their families. Each of these aspects informed their perceptions of the ecology around them, and particularly, their perception of the significance of water. The findings confirms the critical importance of cultural values, generated through myth, story and action, to understanding environmental changes. Colonial Gippslanders were committed to: a belief in progress, or alternately, banishing wilderness; a belief that the world was made by God for human benefit; and the desire for certainty versus the actual uncertainty in hydrological conditions.

Collectively, colonial Gippslanders believed in progress as much as they believed in God, believed themselves largely separate from nature and plumped for certainty. They set to re-plumbing the catchment to eliminate, as far as possible within their technical capabilities, the natural variations within the hydrological cycle. The tools which they applied to achieve this radical re{u00AD}plumbing included the application of engineering knowledge, supported by increasing amounts of technology and machinery and by sophisticated socio{u00AD}political lobbying.