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Within Australia almost since colonisation, there have been debates about whether water supply would pose a ‘limit’ to expansion of settlement. The seminal work by economist Bruce Davidson, ‘Australia Wet or Dry?’ in the mid-twentieth century critically examined the public money invested in large-scale irrigated agriculture in the north of the continent, and indirectly critiqued irrigation schemes in the Murray Darling Basin. Davidson coined the term ‘the Northern Myth’ to describe a widely held belief in the ability of Northern Australia to accommodate vastly expanded irrigated agricultural operations because of abundant water and land. This paper examines the current policy promoting northern development, including proposed significant extensions to dams and other water supply projects in Northern Australia. It places the latest push for northern water development in the broader historical context of Australian water resource management, finding continual reiteration of ideas that engineers can ‘create water’ and find technical ‘solutions’ to overcome the limitations of a ‘drought-ridden continent’. We argue future policy directions in Northern Australia must draw on the lessons of past water resource policy with respect to two crucial aspects: redressing the historical and current exclusion of Aboriginal peoples’ rights to water, and the embedding of environmental values in strategic water planning.

This article was finalised prior to the Copenhagen Conference of the Parties (‘COP15’) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (‘UNFCCC’), held in December 2009. At the COP15, parties failed to agree on a new, binding international pact to supplement or replace the UNFCCC for the period after 2012 (when current targets set under the Kyoto Protocol expire). Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries (‘REDD’) was one of the few issues to achieve significant, widespread support at COP15. The non-binding ‘Copenhagen Accord’, agreed by a group of parties at COP15, and noted by the Conference of Parties (‘COP’), recognised ‘the crucial role’ of REDD and agreed on the need to provide ‘positive incentives’ for REDD through ‘the immediate establishment of a mechanism … to enable the mobilization of financial resources from developed countries’.[1] Given this international endorsement of REDD at COP15, the implementation issues discussed in this article are all the more pertinent.

The Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms (1831) have been characterised by David Scott (1995) as marking the transformation of colonial Sri Lanka from one kind of political rationality – that of mercantile sovereignty – to another – that of colonial governmentality. Whilst consonant with the view that the Commission marked a moment when the colonial administration moved away from a strategic reliance on Asokan or Buddhist forms of authority in the earliest phase of British rule, we argue that there is a more nuanced genealogy to this transition. The Reforms, while directed to the administration, judicial and political institutions of the colony, also contemplated extensive commercial restructuring that inculcated a self improvement mode into ‘everyday life’. Drawing on colonial archives, we show how elements of a logic of governmentality, such as educational, land, and fiscal reform, were utilised at different times by the colonial administration to commence the modernisation of the colony well before 1832. It is also evident that the transformation was partial, and at points strongly resisted by local Buddhist communities. Instead of marking a clear point of transformation, the Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms gave legibility and a national imprimatur to a process already in train, while providing further impetus to a socio-political rationality that had begun to shift decades prior. The secular logic of the colonial State, however, was later to unleash a movement of Sinhalese Buddhist reform and cultural revaluation that generated, ‘a more modernised Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism to create expanding areas of social, cultural and religious life for the nationalist cause.’