Australia’s insane plan to green the Outback

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Kayak.

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When the well is dry, people know the worth of water. Sitting on the Southern Hemisphere's subtropical belt, Australia is the driest inhabited continent on earth. A vast desert dominates its interior, confining major settlements to the coast. But since the 1930s, major infrastructure projects have been proposed to master the country's forbidding geography. Proponents argue that the vast deserts can be converted into arable land by redirecting coastal floodwaters inland. By doing so, Australia could become a regional breadbasket, meeting the consumption needs of a growing population across Asia. Australian lawmakers have long feared being eclipsed by their Asian rivals, and the plan to green the Outback might be enough to boost economic development and raise Australia as an important regional power. For Australians, this mega project would provide both economic benefits and a sense of national purpose. Desert draining efforts are already underway, and advocates are pushing the government to expand these plans even further. Yet not all are convinced. Critics say the plans are unfeasible due to costs, logistics, and environmental impacts. So, can Australia's Outback be turned into an oasis, or is the plan just a mirage?

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The Great Artesian Basin dominates Australia's eastern interior. Stretching from the Great Dividing Range to Lake Erie, it covers 1.7 million square kilometers, an area three times the size of Ukraine. When dinosaurs ruled the world, the basin was home to an inland sea. When it dried up, the underwater sandstone transformed into a continental desert. Even so, this outward appearance was only skin deep. The porous sandstone layer below the desert contained vast amounts of groundwater. These aquifers were held in place by the impenetrable rock layer underneath. And over time, rainfall on the basin's eastern fringe replenished the underground water supply.

This was sufficient to sustain indigenous Australians, even in the harshest climates. One would dig a borehole, and fresh water could be drawn from the desert. But this water source was finite. Slow replenishment rates meant that it could not sustain large human populations or industrial agriculture, as overuse soon diminished water pressure and flow speeds.

After forcing their way into the interior, European settlers had to contend with this reality. Harsh weather conditions and enormous distances raised the costs of farm production. And without a steady water supply, frontier development stalled. Geopolitical concerns eventually drove Canberra to revisit the issue. In February 1942, three months after Pearl Harbor, Darwin was attacked by Imperial Japan. Meeting little resistance, Japanese planes snatched an easy victory, dropping more bombs on the Australian town than they had on Hawaii.

The incident revealed a vulnerability in Canberra's strategic posture. Even though the empty northern half of the continent provided strategic buffer, low population density left it wide open for an Asian power to gain a military foothold. For this reason, nation building projects soon became Australia's chief strategic priority. Post-war reconstruction planning began in late 1942 and had two key aspects. The first was immigration-driven population growth. Widespread xenophobia meant non-white peoples were barred from immigrating. But for the first time, mass migration opened for southern Europeans. The second aspect was increasing Australia's industrial base through large-scale infrastructure projects. Wartime mobilization had shown what state planning could accomplish, and many such projects were realized in the post-war era. A hallmark policy in this time was the Snowy Mountain Scheme. It consisted of 16 dams, 9 power stations, and 225 km of pipes. By redirecting river flows to hydroelectric dams, the project provided power for southeastern Australia while providing work for the new immigrants, who comprised two-thirds of its labor force. It was in this context that terraforming proposals first gained traction. Of these, the mega project advanced by John Bratfield was especially striking. As an engineer, Bratfield achieved notoriety for his work on major dam projects and the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Awash with confidence and inspired by the American New Deal, Bratfield set in motion a plan to green Australia's interior. Beginning in the far north, Queensland, Bratfield's scheme would enclose the Tully River. A short channel or tunnel would feed this water through the Blunder Creek to another dam on the Herbert. From there, water would be diverted to the upper Burdekin before ending up at yet another dam at Hell's Gates. This backlog of water would then creep up the Clark before being funneled into the Flinders. Here, another large dam would create a massive reservoir from which a constant flow of water could be directed via Tower Hill Creek into the Thompson. This stream would eventually end up in South Australia, where it would drain into Lake Erie. Bradfield claimed this project would irrigate over one million hectares of arid land and provide hydroelectricity for the Australian Outback. Moreover, restoring Australia's inland sea would alter the hydrological cycle, stimulating rainfall, gradually terraforming the interior and creating a breadbasket in the Australian heartland.