Running out?: an environmental history of climate and water in the southwest of Western Australia, 1829 to 2006

[Truncated] Living between the desert and the sea, people in the southwest of Australia have long experienced anxieties about the ongoing availability of fresh water resources in the region. In recent years, evidence of a drying trend across the region since the mid-1970s has heightened these concerns.
The conditions of the present beg for historical understanding of how and why these anxieties emerged, persisted and developed. In this thesis, I have utilised the ecological concepts of vulnerability and resilience to assess the ways in which people in the southwest have tried to come to terms with its climate and water resources since European colonisation in 1829. I examine the development of understandings of the regional climate and how these have changed over time; and how these understandings have shaped and informed water resource use and management in the southwest. I explore the ways in which approaches to water in the southwest became entangled with understandings of weather, climate and climatic variability, and were shaped by cultural, social and political contexts.
I contend that the settler society in the southwest became inherently vulnerable to running out of water because its patterns of settlement and development were founded upon the Western European model of regular, reliable seasons and water supplies; a model fundamentally at odds with the environmental realities of the southwest. The region’s Nyoongar people, in contrast, had developed a way of life that was more resilient to climate variability and water scarcity because of their mobility and land use practices. Yet the forces of colonisation would wear down their resilience.