Sold Down the River –
How Robber Barons and Wall Street Traders Cornered Australia’s Water Market by Scott Hamilton and Stuart Kells.
Published by The Text Publishing Company, Melbourne, Australia, 2021
Reviewed by Jacinta Agostinelli
Sold Down the River is a book all Australians need to read, for it tells a story that sadly too few of us know or understand.
When I was in primary school, I remember doing projects about the food bowl of Australia, the regions of eastern Australia within the Murray-Darling River Basin. These regions, fed by the Murray-Darling River systems (and which include our very own town of Yea) were rich and fertile with plenty of water available for irrigation and food production. So started my curiosity and love for regional Australia, for its stories, its mighty rivers and dusty country roads. Since then this connection has grown to encompass much more.
So, for me, reading Sold Down the River was a revelation. Due to failure of water policy stretching from the big drought of the 1880s until the present, the great food bowl has in more recent years, become an agricultural and ecological mess. In Sold Down the River, Kells and Hamilton detail how decades of water policy have contributed to the Basin’s degradation.
The authors describe water policy in Australia as ad hoc and reactionary. They explain how free market economic thinking led to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, and why and how the Plan failed.
But this is no history book. It is a page turner. I found myself getting angry at the water robber barons and the Wall Street traders and at the extent of foreign ownership of Australia’s ancient waters. I sympathised with the farmer’s whose voices are as real in the pages of the book as if those farmers were sitting at my kitchen table. Did you know computer bots owned by foreign companies, controlled water in the Basin?
It is a pitiful history that I wasn’t fully aware of. But it is not a doom and gloom book.
Dive deep and learn what the authors propose for the future of farming and the environment in the Murray-Darling Basin. I am hopeful that children in the future will be doing projects on how we saved the Murray-Darling Basin from economic and environmental disaster.
