The Water Dreamers: How Water and Silence Shaped Australia

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.

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.