Three months later, as I farewelled him at the airport, he turned to me with a smile and said: ‘I will never believe another word you write, my friend. Australian summers are cold and wet and the rivers are always flooding!’ In fact, one of the longest and most intense droughts for a century had broken spectacularly just as he had arrived. But while the contrast between the recent drought and floods was huge, Aboriginal and European Australians have experienced this ‘boom-and-bust’ climate in southern Australia for almost as long as they have walked this land.

The role of the ‘boom and bust’ – and its associated floods and, to a lesser extent, droughts – in shaping the story of settlement and development of the Murray–Darling Basin is the subject of Emily O’Gorman’s Flood Country. O’Gorman uses case studies of iconic floods – and intervening dry periods – in the Murrumbidgee in 1852, the Darling in 1890, the Murray in 1956, and the Warrego in 1990, to explore how settlers, communities, businesses, bureaucrats, scientists, and conservationists have responded to climatic extremes. She uses a multitude of primary sources to piece together how people behaved as they realised (or not, in case of the Gundagai flood of 1852) that rivers were going to break their banks and that only levees would keep them and their property dry. She details the loss of infrastructure and life, and describes the aftermath: the blame, reconstruction, compensation, rebuilding, and attempts to find ways to better predict future floods and/or reduce their size through control.

Flood Country is particularly timely, given the recent Queensland floods and our continued insistence upon living alongside, and then expressing our surprise when people and houses are swept away by, what are fundamentally uncontrollable natural systems. As Doctor Who says in the 2009 episode‘The Waters of Mars’ (in which a virus transmitted through water infects the inhabitants of a colony on Mars and the inhabitants think they are safe behind hermetically sealed doors), ‘Water always wins.’ And it does; it always wins, despite our delusions of control. It is a lesson that the inhabitants of Gundagai, ignoring Aboriginal advice not to build on river flats, learned in 1852. It is a lesson that the residents of Bourke should have learned after spending countless time, effort, and money to construct levees which eventually failed under the pressure of the 1890 flood. Mind you, building a railway embankment which essentially funnelled floodwaters into the town didn’t help. Flooding is a fact that communities in the Murray–Darling Basin still struggle with after more than a century and a half. But, as with the residents of Gundagai all those years ago, while floods will continue to cause destruction and havoc, the towns were settled and continue to exist because of the life brought by the rivers.

If floods and droughts do one thing, it is to focus the mind of farmers and others living near rivers. It is Flood Country’s main thesis that these events and their unpredictable recurrence have had a profound effect on the local, as well as the Australian, psyche. The isolation of Bourke by floodwaters and the fight to save the town from inundation captured the imagination of the whole country, including its writers, like Henry Lawson, and its painters, like W.G. Piguenit. It also galvanised governments and scientists to collect and analyse climate records in attempts to predict future floods. The certainty of ensuing drought also gave rise to ideas about how all this water could be ‘conserved’ to insure against future scarcity. From the periodic floods and droughts grew debates about how to tame rivers, and whether it was more important to control them, with locks, for river trade, or to control them, with dams, for irrigation.

The 1956 mega-flood throughout virtually the whole of the Murray–Darling Basin, followed by an unusually dry period in the 1960s, saw a rapid increase in the construction of water storages, partly for irrigation and partly to mitigate against flooding. But instead of allaying people’s fears, there was a shift in perceptions about who was responsible for flooding. With the construction of dams, governments were in the business of managing flows and could be blamed for failing to do so. An interesting debate at the time, proposed by the economist B.R. Davidson, was that dams were uneconomic. He contended that farmers did not contribute to dam construction, bought water cheaply, and were inefficient in its use. That debate seems to have evaporated, with social imperatives largely replacing economic ones. It is helpful to know the background to our current dilemmas, especially in the light of the recent attempts at reform through the Murray–Darling Basin Plan (2012) and of the environmental concerns that have evolved over the last thirty years.

O’Gorman’s Flood Country, with its detailed narrative of the role of floods and droughts in development of the Murray–Darling Basin since settlement, will be useful to those who are seeking information on the history of this region and to those who want to understand the path which led us to where we are today. It is unique in this regard; an important gap in Australian history has been filled. However, more insight and comparisons with developments elsewhere in the world would have allowed greater contextualisation of what was going on in the Murray–Darling Basin. The format, mostly focusing on case studies, is powerful as a narrative, but is not ideal for the sort of critical analysis that would have made this book more substantial and broadened its appeal. Notwithstanding, Flood Country reminds us starkly of a number of things: how European settlers should have asked for and heeded the advice of the people who knew the vagaries of climate and water; how enormously variable our river flow is from one year to the next and how difficult it is to make a living from the use of water; and that we have always been, and will continue largely to be, at the mercy of floods and drought, no matter how much we would like to have it otherwise.