MAKING A RIVER IN THE DESERT

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 132, 5 June 1937, Page 27

MAKING A RIVER IN THE DESERT

Induced by the rise in the price of gold, the revival of mining in Australia at .deep levels on an unprecedented scale owes its present success to a 350-mile pipeline from the coast to the arid interior, through which water must travel for three weeks before it reaches its destination, writes R. L. Carthoys from Melbourne to the "New York Times."

The project, which has cost £3,600,000, . has made possible the winning of" £100,000,000 worth of gold in Western Australia. From the main pipeline 1500 miles of subsidiary mains have been laid, over 900 of them to serve wheat-growing. Eind .other farming country. The farms, indeed, now consume more water than the goldfields. Acreage under wheat increased from 74,000 in 1900 to nearly 4,000.000 in 1930.

"They made a way in the wilderness and a river in the desert." The words of Isaiah well describe this remarkable engineering achievement. If the pipeline began at Berlin it would stretch to Warsaw; from New York almost to Montreal.

When gold was discovered a little less than fifty years ago on what is now the world-famed Golden Mile, in Western Australia, the immediate problem was the supply of water. Agricultural and pastoral communities in the colony had been served well enough—for each was but a handful of people—by the building of dams and the sinking of wells. But the gold rush soon attracted tens of thousands of men to an area with an uncertain annual rainfall of only nine inches, 350 miles distant from the coast.

When winter rains filled catchments, prospectors could get about, but when summer shrank the. waterholes to muddy pools operations were brought almost to a standstill and the ravages of typhoid fever were appalling.

In C. Y. O'Connor, the Chief Government Engineer, the young colony

had just the man for the emergency —a pioneering spirit full of courage and imagination. He proposed to solve the dilemma of the goldfields by collecting water from a storage in the hills, 20 miles' from Perth, and transporting it through a steel pipeline to Kalgoorlie. Nature, he pointed out, had given the coastal districts an ample rainfall, most of which ran unused to the.sea, while the people of the interior were thirsting. But immediately the conservatives were up in arms. O'Connor, they declared, was a ridiculous dreamer.

And when O'Connor produced his estimates of cost, and it .was found, that he proposed to saddle a population of 200,000 with an expenditure equivalent to £2,500,000 his critics asked whether there .could any longer be doubt of Ms.sanity.

But there were far-seeing men who rallied to his defence, among them Premier Sir John Forrest. In 1896 Sir John, in the face of a storm of bitter abuse, drove through Parliament a Bill authorising a loan to finance the undertaking. In the following year O'Connor went to London to seek expert advice. The London engineers decided that his plan was practicable, though in some respects it would be the greatest undertaking of the kind ever attempted.

The work began in 1898. But O'Connor's enemies did not relinquish their attacks, and when, with the coming of the Federation of the Australian colonies in 1901, Sir John Forrest abandoned State for Federal politics, he found that he had no strong champion in the new Government and that he must face the storm alone. It was too much for him. One morning early in 1902 he did not. return from his daily ride. Racked by the torture of false criticism, he had taken his life. A successor was found and a year later the work was completed and the water came to the Golden Mile.