One of the popular white settler views around Federation was the need to create a culture and society premised on the conquest of nature; that human beings needed to establish mastery domination over nature; the natural world was seen as waste; and it was a waste to let the flowing water of the rivers in the Murray-Darling Basin run to the sea.
The society that was to be established was an agrarianism premised on a nation building project of irrigating inland Australia.
Under Alfred Deakin Victoria led the way to drought proof inland Australia through a water management regime to establish irrigation-based settlements at Mildura and Swan Hill. These were communities of property-owning independent small farmers who would be the foundation for a democratic society.
Nourishing Terrains 
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