Table of Contents
Australian city-dwellers are a thirsty people. Between the mid-nineteenth century and the present, the average daily consumption of water in Melbourne and Sydney has nearly trebled, from around 100 litres per head to around 300 litres per head. Industrial and other non-domestic users absorb about one-third of the flow but most is consumed in the bathrooms, laundries, kitchens, gardens and swimming pools of private homes. Usage has fluctuated across this period in a stepwise fashion. The first step in the later nineteenth century was associated with the introduction, under the influence of sanitary reformers, of piped water and underground sewerage, and had already pushed consumption to almost 200 litres per head by 1890, much higher than contemporary British cities. Even then it was clear that the Australian city-dweller’s demand for copious supplies of clean water was inspired by a range of climatic, aesthetic and hedonistic, as well as hygienic, motives. ‘More water is required because of the climate’, observed William Davidson, engineer in charge of Melbourne’s water supply in 1889; ‘people bathe more here than at home, and another thing is, Melbourne is built very differently than any town at home, in that the whole of the settlement is on allotments with gardens’ (Dingle and Rasmussen: 29). The second step occurred after the Second World War when suburban sprawl, rising affluence and advances in domestic technology pushed per-capita consumption to an all-time high, around 400 litres per day. And the third step, this time downwards, came after the 1980s as per-capita consumption was curbed by drought, increased prices, the adoption of water-saving technologies and more stringent regulations. Currently, under Stage 3 restrictions, Melburnians use about 280 litres per day.
Running water has long been regarded as an indispensable to any civilised community, but it is more indispensable for some purposes than others. From drinking and cooking, through showering, bathing and washing to flushing, watering and swimming, the household uses of water descend through an implied ‘hierarchy of needs’. For some purposes, such as drinking, there is no substitute for water, while for others, such as disposing of human excreta, there are alternatives, such as the pan system (dunny can) or composting toilet. Our present ways of using water are a product, not of primal needs, but of history. They have been shaped both by culture (tastes, fashions, perceptions of health, virtue and comfort) and by path dependency (the particular array of technologies, governmental and pricing regimes we have created to supply and use water) (Shove 2003). By excavating the history of these arrangements, we are better able to think about how they might be changed or improved. The main reason that water usage in Australian cities is now unsustainable is not, however, that patterns of consumption have changed, but that urban populations have grown beyond the capacity of the catchments, which are themselves now subject to more variable patterns of rainfall. Environmental responsibility does not require us to return to some more virtuous pattern of past usage, for not everything about the past was virtuous and, in any case, the past is past and beyond recall. But it does require us to rethink the nature of our dependence on water, and to imagine how we might use it better. In this respect, history is an aid to imagination, if not a source of ready-made solutions. In this paper I consider, in turn, the changing patterns of water consumption for flushing, bathing, washing clothes, and outdoor uses, especially for irrigation and recreation.
‘Cleanliness’, the eighteenth-century evangelist John Wesley famously declared, ‘is next to godliness.’ His adage reminds us of the strong link between Protestant morality and modern habits of cleanliness (Bushman and Bushman 1988). Clean water, applied inwardly and outwardly, was both an instrument and symbol of Victorian morality. In perhaps the most famous Victorian fable of cleanliness, Rev. Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies (1863), Tom, a poor chimneysweep, falls into a stream and drowns. He is magically transported into a kind of watery paradise where, freed from the cruel tutelage of his earthly master Mr Grimes, and washed clean from the soot that had once covered him from head to foot, he joins the happy company of water-babies. Kingsley’s story draws, of course, on the religious symbolism of water as a medium of baptismal regeneration, but he was also an ardent supporter of sanitary reform, and concludes his tale by addressing his young readers with a more a mundane lesson: ‘Learn your lessons, and thank God that you have plenty of cold water to wash in; and wash in it too, like a true Englishman.’ Nothing, his young reader is assured, can go wrong ‘as long as you stick to hard work and cold water’ (Kingsley 1863: Chapter 8). A belief in the benefits of cleanliness and cold water became one of the pillars of a more general code of respectability, shared by working-class secularists as well as middle-class Christians. ‘What is our doctrine?’ pupils in the Lyceum, Melbourne’s free-thought Sunday School, were asked. ‘Frequent ablutions in cold water’, was the reply (O’Dowd 1888: 16).
Conscious of this heavy overlay of Victorian morality, recent scholars have sometimes treated the fixation of contemporary reformers on dirt and cleanliness as an irrational fetish. Yet there was much in their recent experience to persuade contemporaries of the benefits of clean water. Between the early 1830s and the mid-1850s, Britain was thrice visited by epidemics of Asiatic cholera which together killed over 100 000 people. Cholera did not kill as many people as endemic diseases like typhus and tuberculosis, but its sudden onset, obscure causation and dramatic effects struck fear into the entire population. Victims were carried from their houses, writhing, sweating, vomiting and defecating uncontrollably, to over-crowded hospitals where doctors laboured, often vainly, to contain the epidemic. They were puzzled about the causes of the disease, some believing that it was carried directly from person to person, others that it was caused by miasmas or poisons in the air. Only in 1849, after the second major outbreak, did the London physician John Snow discover the correct explanation: that the cholera bacillus was transmitted through water supplies contaminated by human faeces. In 1853 Snow confirmed his theory by demonstrating that local victims of the epidemic had all taken water from the same contaminated pump in Broad Street, Soho (Longmate 1966: 201–11).