In turning more directly to the urban sphere, much of the impetus for the developing statutory models of water governance lay in public-health concerns over water supply. Further, as Davison contends in this volume, the identification of cleanliness with ‘flushing away’ wastes was important for the expansion of extensive sanitary-waste systems that were instigated along British models. In concert with the genesis of much early town planning law, the development of urban water supply and sewerage systems and their associated institutions in Australian cities gave a particular spatial form to these cities. Increasingly water supply was being drawn from ‘clean’ areas beyond the cities. For example, Melbourne has an extensive area of ‘closed catchments’ for water supply instigated in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century that reflected this impetus (Powell 1989). Similarly, wastes from cities were to be carried well beyond what, at the time, were the perimeters of the cities (Davison, Chapter 3). The influence of water utilities in many cities was such that urban form was shaped by the intricacies of the distribution systems of water supply and sanitation infrastructure. Large statutory water authorities became virtually autonomous entities, in many instances having their own unique enabling legislation and institutional regimes. The Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works (MMBW), for example, wielded enormous power in political and economic spheres. At one stage it assumed responsibility for the statutory land-use planning process operating within the metropolitan area and set the parameters for the physical and social development of the city well into the late twentieth century (Powell 1989). The prominence of the water authorities, both urban and rural, reflected the identification of national goals with a virtually unconstrained exploitation of water resources throughout most of the twentieth century. In the post-war period, infrastructure, including water supply and sanitation delivery, came to be regarded as a public good requiring monopoly provision by the state (Connell 2007). Water shaped city form as it still does in a myriad ways in the twenty-first century (Syme, this volume Chapter 6). Most importantly also, it shaped the interaction of capital cities with rural areas by continuing a trend whereby ‘resources’, including water, were drawn from the rural hinterland, and externalities, such as wastes, were visited upon rural areas. However, this neat systemic view represents an oversimplification, as there were many points of resistance to such ‘transfers’ and political compromise and compact reached for exemptions from these dominant trajectories. Yet this underlying pattern of rural–urban interaction has not been directly displaced.