It has been dry here lately, and my lawn is a series of green circles where the water from the sprinklers falls. At the edge of the spray's reach, the grass goes from green to grey in the width of a pencil, as if someone had drawn round it with a compass.
This lawn is at the top of a limestone cliff overlooking the River Murray, at Waikerie in South Australia. From my patch of European growth, I can see the gentle curve of the earth against the sky. The pea-soup river sweeps across in indolent curves, waters still and warm. The gums are grey and the soil is pink or rusty red, and dry, dry, dry.
Near the horizon, on the rise of a sand hill, I can see another patch of deep green where the orange trees and the grapes and the stone fruit are grown; irrigated, like my lawn, with the warm, rank water of the river.
When the river is low, that water can be salty enough to wither the leaves on the vines. No one drinks it. It has, after all, already drained and watered a fifth of the continent ...
The story of the Murray River, named more than 150 years ago for some otherwise long-forgotten colonial secretary, is a fair metaphor for Europeans in this foreign, bright land, and our uneasiness with it. These river towns would not exist were it not for Victorian engineering, and the pride people took in turning the dry 'waste' of this continent to a use they could understand. It was a time of hope and confidence in a new yet ancient land.
Yet today the engineering feats to which we are wedded seem not so much a testimony to our power as to our continued foreignness. In a land where water is everything, the Murray River is our only major watercourse. It is in fact many rivers, draining a vast basin that covers most of the fertile parts of the continent.
There is a history of the river, written by Ernestine Hill in 1958. It is called Water into Gold. She begins her book thus: 'Here is the beginning of a great story, the transfiguration of a continent by irrigation science ... the radiant twin cities of Mildura and Renmark, the Garden Colony in that lucky horseshoe of Murray River that unites two Australian States, will always be our first national shrine to