Flying to Melbourne from Canberra the plane takes to off the north. As it gains height, it turns west and from the left-hand side there’s a view across the hobbyfarms and ‘twelve acre block’ country. The morning sun catches hundreds of farm dams, shining like coins scattered across a worn carpet. It is such an overwhelming pattern of water redistribution that one cannot help thinking about how water once moved across this landscape before the building of these multitudinous dams – each now making its offer of evaporated water to the sky. There are marks of the old hydrology – creeks, some of them dry, Lake George, the Molonglo River – but the old patterns are not visible to me as they might be to a hydrologist, geologist or geographer. Some of the creeks are probably new – formed from sheepwalks – and I cannot easily trace the marks of drained swamps or old rivercourses.