Introduction

Abstract

In the introduction, I outline the conflicts about irrigation and water in Australia in the early twenty-first century. Irrigation, once hailed as a “nation-building” endeavor, has become a questionable enterprise to many Australians due to its notoriety for using great amounts of water and its negative impact on the environment. Irrigation is most intensive in Australia’s agricultural heartland, the Murray–Darling Basin. During the previous century, irrigation was known as the reason for an environmental hazard—the salinization of soils and water, which was dubbed “Victoria’s and arguably Australia’s greatest environmental threat” in 1987. Nowhere was salinization as prominent as in Victoria’s largest irrigation region, the Goulburn–Murray Irrigation District, making it a useful lens to capture the transformation processes that were induced by a slow-growing environmental threat to the district’s rural communities. The main object of study here is Kerang, while its neighbor community, Shepparton, serves as a comparison. Finally, I reflect on the purpose of environmental history in the Anthropocene, making a case for histories that inform how we currently think and act with the entanglement of human society and the environment in mind.