Per-capita consumption of domestic water peaked in the 1980s. Under the combined effects of ‘user-pays’ pricing, regulation (for example, restricted-flow shower heads, dual-flush toilets, drip-irrigation systems, water restrictions, and so on), public-awareness campaigns, and a prolonged drought, usage has since declined, although not enough to dent the underlying problem of water insufficiency.

Australia’s current domestic water-using regime is a product of long-term and short-term, technological and cultural influences. Some of these may be easily modified; others — and not just the technological ones­ — may be changed only with difficulty. One of the effects of urbanisation and of the adoption of large-scale engineering systems of water supply and sewerage was to make less invisible the connections between the behaviour of water users and the natural systems on which they ultimately depend. This disconnection may have been reinforced by the adoption of market systems of delivery that tended to commodify water, encouraging users to expect that supply should simply expand to meet demand. Only when we recognise the historical and cultural forces that have shaped our present patterns of dependence on water for drinking, washing, watering, flushing and swimming, and institute cultural practices, technologies and feedback mechanisms that inculcate habits of sustainable water-use are we likely to ameliorate the present crisis.

The adoption of water-carriage as the main method of sewage disposal, for example, was the product of ideas characteristic of the mid-nineteenth century, but the assumption it has created, that human-waste disposal should be ‘unseen, unostentatious [and] self-acting’, dies hard. Any move towards a more environmentally sustainable system of waste disposal, such as composting toilets, would not only have to modify a massive infrastructure of underground pipes and pumping stations, but overturn a deeply engrained ‘somatic culture’ of odour, purity and danger.

Other domestic practices, such as the habit of daily showering, were shaped by more recent technological changes, notably the availability of ‘instant’ hot water, and cultural shifts, especially of hedonistic preoccupations with bodily comfort, privacy and self-care. Could bodies be pampered by less environmentally wasteful means? Or does the solution lie in technological fixes, such as water recycling, or the installation of monitoring devices such as shower-clocks? Showering and bathing is, by its nature, the most private form of water consumption, and hence the least open to external monitoring and control, although shorter and less-frequent showers would both reduce consumption and improve health, especially through the prevention of skin disease.

The consumption of water for clothes-washing may be reduced somewhat by the adoption of front-loading water-efficient machines, although the volume of washing is probably determined much more by the size of people’s wardrobes and the rapidity with which they ring changes of garments from day to day and even hour to hour. Any move to modify this pattern logically begins, not in the laundry, where water is used, but in the department store, where clothes are bought, and in the nation’s bedrooms, where decisions are made about to what to wear and when.

Policies to develop more-sustainable water-use in Australian cities have concentrated on the most visible site of water consumption, the suburban garden. It is easier to monitor use outside the home than inside, and the large amounts of water used for gardening and swimming, especially in cities with low rainfall and high average temperatures, seem to offer more scope for conservation than activities like bathing, showering and washing, which stand higher on the city-dweller’s ‘hierarchy of needs’. Outdoor water consumption varies considerably across Australia’s cities, from approximately 173kl per household in Perth to 73kl per household in Sydney (State of the Environment Report). High rainfall and high population densities both probably play a part in Sydney’s lower outdoor water consumption. Whether policies favouring greater urban concentration elsewhere would produce more-sustainable patterns of urban water-use, however, is much more doubtful. There is little evidence that flat-dwellers actually use less water per capita than residents of traditional family dwellings (Troy and Randolph 2007). Furthermore, any economies in water consumption from urban consolidation would be likely to appear only slowly and would have to be set against the reduced opportunities for water recycling on larger lots, the increased stormwater run-off from the greater area covered by impervious roofs, drives, roads and yards, and the subtle changes to micro-climate brought about by the loss of vegetation. Cities, as Edwin Chadwick was among the first to recognise, are complex systems in which the causes and consequences of human actions are manifold and often contrary to our expectations. There are no shortcuts and panaceas for the water shortages that have now become endemic in Australia’s cities.