Journal of Religious History Vol. 32, No.

1, March 2008

MELISSA BELLANTA

Engineering the Kingdom of God: Irrigation, Science and the Social Christian Millennium, 18801914

Irrigation was a hot issue in turn-of-the-twentieth century Australia. Most often, it was embraced by booster-visionaries who wanted it to provide Australia with a place at the table of nations. Not all irrigation enthusiasts placed the same emphasis on wealth and national power, however indeed, there were some who believed it would help achieve a just distribution of social opportunity. In this article, I look at two Australian social Christians, the Melbourne minister, Charles Strong, and the South Australian journalist, Harry Taylor, who saw irrigation as an agent of Gods Kingdom on Earth. This belief was part of a more general conviction, shared both by these men and other social Christians, that it was possible to merge millennial religiosity with evolution, progressive politics and rational principles.

In 1893, a group of irrigation supporters met for a conference in Los Angeles. Across the conference stage was a banner which read: Irrigation Science Not Chance.1 Irrigation was often associated with science at the turn of the twentieth century, along with the movement to a more rational and modern society. At the same time, however, it was promoted in stridently Biblical terms. Geologists, politicians, and journalists alike described the likely effects of irrigation by quoting Isaiah, both in America and Australia.2 Its this interlinking of science and religion by advocates of irrigation that interests me here. In particular, Im interested in the fact that irrigation was linked to the millennium by so-called social Christians: people who actively sought a
1. Ian Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1880 1930 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 108. 2. John W. Gregory, The Dead Heart of Australia: A Journey Around Lake Eyre in the Summer of 19011902 (London: John Murray, 1906), 271; Tom Price, cited in Gerard OCollins, Patrick McMahon Glynn: A Founder of Australian Federation (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1965), 221; cf. William E. Smythe, The Conquest of Arid America (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1969), xxi. Melissa Bellanta is a postdoctoral fellow and cultural historian at the University of Queensland.

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rapport between millennial religiosity, evolutionary science, modern rationality and progressive reform at the turn of the twentieth century. For the two social Christians I explore here the maverick Melbourne-based Reverend, Charles Strong, and the South Australian journalist, Harry Taylor irrigation was appealing precisely because it promised to combine all these things. Like most social Christians, Strong and Taylor wanted to establish the Kingdom of God on earth in the here and now, rather than at some vague point after the end of time. They believed that the millennium would be developed incrementally through human intervention in the social and political realms, rather than being created by an act from above. Gods Kingdom was to be evolved over time; a belief which sat well with their unorthodox conviction that theology itself was open to development, in much the same way as science. The gradual way in which irrigation made arid lands fruitful was the perfect metaphor for this idea. As far as they were concerned, irrigation slowly created an abundant new landscape over time, and this process was analogous to the way in which the millennium would be evolved through God-inspired social reform. Heightening this view was the idea that irrigation itself was a way to engineer the millennium. By facilitating cooperation and a more equitable distribution of wealth, and by allowing for a more rational approach to land-use, irrigation would be both an agent and a metaphor for the creation of the Kingdom of God. The social Christian approach to irrigation is fascinating for two key reasons. Firstly, it allows us to see how millennial religiosity could be linked to modern rationality and science at the turn of the twentieth century. This connection was closely associated with the views of progressives indeed, Strongs friend Alfred Deakin, perhaps the most well-known Australian progressive, made a similar association of divinely inspired progress and rationality with irrigation. In Strong and Taylors case, however, both irrigation and the millennium were given a distinctively Christian emphasis, and so too was the vision of rational modernity they espoused. Secondly, Strong in particular imagined a future Australia which was different from the grand nationalist visions described by many other irrigationists at the time. Unlike Deakin, he didnt link irrigation to the creation of a powerful high-tech Australia capable of taking its place at the modern table of nations. Instead, he linked it to a vision of a little mans paradise, in which social equity was far more important than national clout or riches. Irrigations appeal was thus that it promoted both small cooperative communities and the social Christian millennium. In both cases, it worked counter to the big secular visions of Australian with which modernity is usually associated. Irrigation History Until the late 1990s, the historical geographer J. M. Powells work on irrigation was a rarity in Australia. This was because he didnt focus exclusively on the nuts and bolts of irrigation history: the rst private experiments in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, its public promotion in Victoria during the 1880s, the rash of small government-funded initiatives that followed, and so
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forth.3 Instead, he talked about the cultural imagery and desires informing irrigation promotion in Australia: the yeoman myth, utopian visions, and millennial ideas.4 Few if any other geographers were concerned with this, and the same could be said of historians at the time. Even though irrigation gained some attention from environmental historians in the 1980s and early 1990s, their key concern was its link to the degradation of natural resources rather than a detailed exploration of its place in turn-of-the-twentieth-century culture.5 From this perspective, the landmark work on irrigation is Ian Tyrrells True Gardens of the Gods (1999), a history of the ideas underlying horticultural and environmental practices between 1870 and 1930. Focusing on California and Victoria, Tyrrell makes hopes and dreams central to his understanding of irrigation. He talks of the hope that irrigation would transform the interiors of Australia and western America into a white mans country. He also notes the desire that it would create an equitable society: one in which the demands of the market would no longer ride roughshod over the needs of people and nature.6 While he observes the signicance of millennial references to the Promised Land to irrigationists in both America and Australia, however, his work isnt concerned with a sustained analysis of the religious longings nurtured by various enthusiasts for the irrigation cause. Nor has any other Australian work since and its in this context that I place this discussion.7 What this paper provides, in other words, is a more detailed discussion of the millennial dreams of irrigation enthusiasts than that provided by either Tyrrell or Powell. Social Christianity and Progressivism The growing emphasis on the need for a more socially oriented Christianity has been the subject of a great deal of commentary on western culture in the

3. See Gerard Blackburns work for the most comprehensive account of nuts and bolts irrigation history in Australia: Pioneering Irrigation in Australia to 1920 (Melbourne: Scholarly Publishing, 2005). 4. J. M. Powell, Watering the Garden State: Water, Land and Community in Victoria 1834 1988 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989), 9194; Powell, Mirrors of the New World: Images and ImageMakers in the Settlement Process (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1978), 127 29; cf. 14472. 5. Michael Williams, The Making of the South Australian Landscape: A Study in the Historical Geography of Australia (London: Academic Press, 1974), 22762; William Lines, Taming the Great South Land: A History of the Conquest of Nature in Australia (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991), 12526, 21213, 262 63; Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People (Melbourne: Reed, 1994), 357; Geoffrey Bolton, Spoils and Spoilers: A History of Australians Shaping Their Environment (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1992), 137, 13940. 6. Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods, 103 4, 13738. 7. Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods, 112. Tim Bonyhadys The Colonial Earth goes a way to remedy the dearth of discussion of the relationship between religiosity and irrigation in Australia, but given the broad scope of that work, his commentary is necessarily brief: The Colonial Earth (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2000), 282307; cf. my earlier discussions of irrigation for an emphasis on religiosity: Melissa Bellanta, An Ideal Synthesis: Agarianism and the Utopian Imagination in Australia, 18841900 (Unpublished Ph.D. diss., University of Sydney, 2005), 210 41; Bellanta, Irrigation Millennium: Science, Religion and the New Garden of Eden, ERAS, no. 3 (June 2002). [Cited 4 January 2008]. Available from URL: http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/ eras/edition3Index.htm.
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turn-of-the-twentieth-century period.8 In the mid-Victorian era, evangelical religiosity cast the home as the site in which religiosity was most profoundly experienced, emphasising individual salvation and domestic relationships over social reform.9 By the end of the century, a reaction against this was gathering momentum among Christians in England, America, Australasia, and Europe. Its this general reaction that I describe as social Christianity throughout this paper. Ive used the term very broadly, in other words, to refer to all attempts to nd Christian solutions to social problems, from conservative to radical.10 In most if not all cases, these attempts were founded on the belief that the public realm was the key site in which spirituality should be expressed. They were also characterised by an emphasis on establishing the Kingdom of God on earth. It was to this end that most social Christians worked to infuse secular institutions with Christian principles.11 Just as it wasnt conned to a particular political position, social Christianity wasnt conned to a particular denomination. There were Catholics as well as Anglicans and Nonconformists who could be described as social Christians, and the liberality with which these people interpreted their respective theological doctrines similarly varied.12 The social Christians I discuss in this paper, however, were both maverick Nonconformists, and its their unorthodox approach to theology and social reform that I will accordingly focus upon here. Charles Strong was a Scotsman who came to Australia in 1875 as the new minister for one of Melbournes Presbyterian churches. In the late 1880s, he gave up his connection to Presbyterianism to head the newly formed Australian Church in Melbourne, an independent denomination.13 Taylor was a lay preacher for the Congregational Church, and was also connected to Adelaides Primitive Methodist community in the early 1890s. Unlike Strong, who never elaborated a clearly dened political programme, Taylor was a fanatical
8. For a few examples of this vast commentary, see James Moorhead, World Without End: Mainstream American Protestant Visions of the Last Things, 1880 1925 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999); Paul T. Phillips, A Kingdom on Earth: Anglo-American Social Christianity, 18801940 (Pennsylvania, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996); Renate Howe, Protestantism, Social Christianity, and the Ecology of Melbourne, Historical Studies, no. 19 (April 1980): 5973; Ronald C. White and C. Howard Hopkins, The Social Gospel: Religion and Reform in Changing America (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1976); Peter dAlroy Jones, The Christian Socialist Revival, 18771914: Religion, Class and Social Conscience in Late-Victorian England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968); Henry May, Protestant Churches and Industrial America (New York, NY: Harper Row, 1967). 9. John Tosh, A Mans Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (London: Yale University Press, 1999), 34 39. 10. Following Henry May, I see the term social Christianity as less particular than Social Gospel or Christian socialism. Social Gospel is most often used to describe Progressive-era American Christians committed to state reforms aimed at protecting the underprivileged (although it also had some currency among British Christians of roughly the same views). Christian socialism is also a term used relatively specically to refer to attempts to blend socialist prescriptions for change with Christian doctrine: Phillips, Kingdom on Earth, xviixviii; cf. May, Protestant Churches, 170, 235; cf. Howes similar use of the term social Christianity in an Australian context: Howe, Protestantism, 59 73. 11. Moorhead, World Without End, vx; Phillips, Kingdom on Earth, 1. 12. For example, see the Anglo-Catholics discussed by dAlroy Jones, Christian Socialist Revival, 99163. 13. C. R. Badger, Charles Strong (18441942), Australian Dictionary of Biography (hereafter ADB), vol. 6 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1976), 208 9.
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supporter of Henry Georges single tax movement in the last decade of the nineteenth century. As such, he campaigned to abolish the investment property market, advocating an annual tax on unearned land values at the same time as the abolition of all other taxes.14 Inspired by a belief in what he called Christian communism, Taylor also went to Paraguay in 1893 to take part in William Lanes New Australia.15 He became decidedly less radical in his politics after he returned to Australia in the late 1890s, and set up as a journalist in the irrigation town of Mildura, located on the Murray River just over the Victorian side of the border with South Australia. Over the ensuing years in Mildura and the nearby South Australian town of Renmark, however, Taylor continued to advocate a support for a land tax and a more equitable distribution of wealth. Such measures, he believed, would help to establish Gods Kingdom on earth.16 Taylor and Strong each brought to their differing versions of social Christianity a belief that theology was like science. As they saw it, theological doctrine wasnt xed. Instead, it was constantly changing in line with new social developments and discoveries. Both men were also interested in the resolution of science and religion. Like the other unorthodox Nonconformists with whom they mixed, they aspired to a religion based on rational principles.17 In this, they had much in common with progressives, many of whom were also among their friends and colleagues. As Ive already indicated, one of Strongs close friends was the progressive Alfred Deakin.18 Closely mirroring the views of Theodore Roosevelt and his colleagues in America, Deakin and other Australian progressives believed in both the virtues of rationality on the one hand, and the importance of being emotive and mystical on the other.19

14. Malcolm Saunders, Harry Taylor (18731932), ADB, 12:17980; Malcolm Saunders and Don Gobbett, With Lane in Paraguay: Harry Taylor of the Murray Pioneer, 1873 1932 (Rockhampton, Queensland: Central University of Queensland Press, 1995), 5. On Strongs vague politics, see C. R. Badger, The Reverend Charles Strong and the Australian Church (Melbourne: Abacada, 1971), 114; Howe, Protestantism, 66. 15. Harry Taylor, Is Communism Possible?, Renmark Pioneer, 30 November 1917. 16. For Taylors emphasis on the Kingdom of God, see: Harry Taylor to Helen Birks, Chartier Papers, Mortlock Library, PRG 263/3; Renmark Pioneer, 21 December 1906, 5. For a reference to his belief in land taxation as a Christian policy, see: Harry Taylor (aka The Rambler), Mildura Cultivator, 25 July 1903, 240; Harry Taylor, The Reward of Labor, Renmark Pioneer, 17 January 1908; cf. Renmark Pioneer, 27 August 1909; 21 December 1906; Harry Taylor, A Measure of Social Regeneration, Mildura Cultivator, 24 January 1903, 56. 17. Charles Strong, The Relation of the Australian Church to Creed and Dogma: Anniversary Address, 6 December 1896, 9, and The Broad Church: A Sunday Evening Lecture, 1889, 6, both in Charles Strong Papers, MS 2882, Series 4, Australian National Library, Canberra; Howe, Protestantism, 60. My comments on Taylors views here are drawn from knowledge of his admiration for Reverend Hugh Gilmore, who preached a similar theology to Strong: Hugh Gilmore, Sermons by the Late Hugh Gilmore, 18891891 (Adelaide, 1892), 1832, 5159; Saunders and Gobbett, With Lane in Paraguay, 7. 18. Al Gabay, The Mystic Life of Alfred Deakin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 82; Michael Roe, Nine Australian Progressives: Vitalism in Bourgeois Social Thought, 18901960 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1984), 18 19. 19. Roe, Nine Australian Progressives, 66; cf. Mays commentary on the close links between social Christianity and Progressivism in America: May, Protestant Churches, 170 81.
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Australias Irrigationists There was no easily denable community of people supporting irrigation in Australia between the 1880s and the rst decade of the 1900s. Those advocating irrigation were instead a motley collection of people from disparate social groups: land developers, utopian novelists, politicians, preachers, journalists, engineers, government bureaucrats, and farmers affected by drought. Individually, many of these people had little in common. There was little love lost, for example, between the conservative Reverend James Ballantyne and the dissident Charles Strong although there was a close friendship, as Ive said, between Strong and Deakin.20 The soberly rigorous engineer Hugh McKinney similarly bore little resemblance to Harry Taylor, particularly at the apogee of his enthusiasm for the single tax in the early to mid-1890s.21 According to the environmental historian Donald Worster, irrigation was most often linked to visions of money and world power in the early to mid-twentieth century. The emphasis of most American irrigationists in this era was on bigness, he suggests: on national greatness, large populations, and the accumulation of massive fortunes.22 The same was the case in Australia. In South Australia, for example, the booster-politician David Gordon argued that irrigation would facilitate the development of Australia as the economic centre of the Pacic. Transforming Australias deserts into arable lands, irrigation would allow great numbers of people to settle in the interior, with enormous wealth consequently to be forged.23 This emphasis on bigness was coupled with what has been described as closer settlement policies in early twentieth-century Australia: the attempt to enlarge existing rural communities or to create new rural centres in the interior, vastly increasing the size of Australias population.24 The rhetoric of closer settlement wasnt always harnessed to dreams of a bigger, more grandiose nation among Australian irrigationists. As Tyrrell points out, some enthusiasts of irrigation linked its ability to create more intensive land-use with visions of a small-scale gardenlike vision of society which existed as an alternative to the giantist tendencies of the age.25 The land radical Patrick McMahon Glynn, for example, believed that irrigation would replace the ravaged mine-scape of Kapunda (the South Australian copper town in which he lived) with a garden-like countryside.26 At the same time, he
20. James Ballantyne, Our Colony in 1880: Pictorial and Descriptive (Melbourne: M. L. Hutchison, 1880), 116; Badger, Reverend Charles Strong, 75 82. 21. On McKinney, see C. J. Lloyd, Either Drought or Plenty: Water Development and Management in New South Wales (Parramatta, Sydney: Department of Water Resources New South Wales, 1988), 172. On Taylor, see Malcolm Saunders, For Renmark and the South Australian Riverland: Harry Samuel Taylor and the Murray Pioneer, 1873 1932, Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia, no. 23 (1995): 8296; Pioneer (Adelaide), 2 April 1892, 95. 22. Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York, NY: Pantheon, ca. 1985), 116. 23. David J. Gordon, Problems of Transportation and their Relation to Australian Trade and Commerce (Adelaide: W. K. Thomas, 1914), 44 45. 24. Powell, Watering the Garden State, 136 92; Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods, 166. 25. Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods, 1 4, 121 40. 26. On McMahons interest in irrigation, see Mr Glynns Ideas. He Favours Small Irrigation Schemes, Adelaide Advertiser, 7 February 1894.
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fulminated against the concentration of land and wealth in 1880s South Australia. So long as absolute private property . . . is sanctioned by law, he wrote in 1884, the inequality of the distribution of wealth must continue to increase. This may make a splendid, but it will not make a happy country.27 During the 1890s depression in Victoria, Charles Strong also looked to irrigation to make a happy rather than splendid country. He argued that irrigation would facilitate a rapid expansion of intensive farming on small acreages, forging a society where anyone could choose to work for themselves, and where land would be fairly distributed. By dramatically increasing the productivity of small farms, he argued farms of ten, twenty, perhaps up to two hundred acres irrigation would allow those without large means to begin earning a living on the land.28 In spite of these differences of social vision and emphasis, what Australias irrigationists had in common was a commitment to rationality. As Worster puts it, one of the commonest defences for irrigation was that it was the epitome of scientic agriculture, (and) that therefore it advanced the cause of progress to a more rational society.29 Similar claims were made for the intensive agriculture with which irrigation was associated. With intense culture, said the Mildura Cultivator, we may look for a rational and intelligent method of dealing with the soil on true scientic principles in place of the slovenly wasteful processes we are so accustomed to.30 The close link between irrigation and true scientic principles was one of the reasons that the former held an appeal for Strong, as it resonated with his interest in scientic discovery and more broadly with rational endeavour in late Victorian society. The cause of scientic agriculture held a similarly fertile allure for Taylor. In the late 1890s, Taylor was a journalist for the Mildura Cultivator, specialising in a combination of scientic tips for horticulturalists and oratorical religious language. Mildura was in its infancy at this time: it had been established by North American entrepreneurs, William and George Chaffey, in 1889, as an enlightened irrigation community.31 An ideal intelligent cultivator was frequently eulogised in the Mildura Cultivators columns, and this was precisely the sort of person the Chaffey brothers wanted to attract to the town. For them, as for Harry Taylor, the model Mildura citizen was a horticulturalist who was interested in the latest modern innovations, in soil chemistry and irrigation, in orderly combination with other cultivators for the distribution of produce, and in high-minded social ideas.32
27. South Australian Land Nationalization Society, The Accumulation of Wealth (Adelaide, 1884), 3. 28. Australian Herald, August 1892, 210, 223; Charles Strong, Undated handwritten speech, Strong Papers, Series 3 Folder 6. 29. Worster, Rivers of Empire, 114. 30. Mildura Cultivator (Mildura: 1888 89), 19. 31. Powell, Watering the Garden State, 120 27; cf. J. A. Alexander, The Life of George Chaffey: A Story of Irrigation Beginnings in California and Australia (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1928). 32. See descriptions of the ideal Mildura and Renmark citizens in the Chaffey brothers promotional volume: J. E. Matthew Vincent, ed., The Australian Irrigation Colonies on the River Murray in Victoria and South Australia (London, 1898), 12, 104; cf. Taylors appeal to residents moral responsibility to cooperate in the use of natural resources: The Rambler, Mildura Cultivator, 6 December 1902, 4; 24 January 1903, 28.
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Irrigation and the Efficacy of Prayer: Towards a More Rational Australia In late Victorian Britain, scientic naturalists such as John Tyndall, Thomas Huxley, and Herbert Spencer, were vigorously involved in an equally highminded promotion of a secular society. They attacked the power wielded by the clergy, seeking to invest it instead in their own profession.33 They took particular exception to the Anglican and Presbyterian practice of appointing special days for prayer and humiliation in response to temporal affairs. As Frank Turner tells us, church leaders continued to appoint such days in response to a diverse range of issues throughout the nineteenth century: outbreaks of cholera, for example, of undue quantities of rainfall, or cattle plague. This practice was one of the ways in which the clergy hinder[ed] the dispersion of scientic explanations of natural phenomena, and was thus a prime target for the scientic naturalists in their mission to secularise society.34 Conict about public days of prayer had been a feature in Britain since at least the 1860s. In 1872, the British surgeon Henry Thompson weighed into the debate by calling for the Church to test the physical efcacy of prayer. He proposed that a ward of patients should form the subject of prayer over a set period. At the end of this period, the rate of the patients recovery could be measured against the ordinary rate for their particular diseases. Thompsons proposal was never put to the test, but it provoked a controversy in Britain, known as the Prayer Gauge debate, over the material efcacy of prayer and the role of the Church in public affairs.35 A similar debate took place in Australia, but there it was focused on irrigation. At various junctures during the drought of the late 1870s to early 1880s, for example, Australian clerics had called for days of prayer to plead with God for rain. James Moorhouse, the outspoken Anglican Bishop of Melbourne, had publicly mocked these calls. Never one to suffer fools gladly, he argued that scientic methods, most notably irrigation, were the only effective way to deal with natural disasters like drought. Simply praying for them to end was ridiculous.36 The phrase Dont pray for it, dam it was attributed to Moorhouse at this time, its pithy rumbustiousness appealing to Australias liberal press. In 1882, the Age reiterated Moorhouses claim that it was absurd to expect prayer to alter the weather. During another bad drought, a Sydney paper denounced prayer as a foolish attempt to substitute religion for irrigation.37 For the journalists responsible for these claims, irrigation was attractive because it promised to rid the world of superstition and re-create it on rational grounds. It also promised to allow farmers to be condent of their harvest, without

33. Frank Turner, Between Science and Religion: The Reaction to Scientic Naturalism in Late Victorian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 78. 34. Frank Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 153. 35. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority, 15152. 36. Stuart Macintyre, A Colonial Liberalism: The Lost World of Three Victorian Visionaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 125, 122. 37. Cited in Bonyhady, Colonial Earth, 29294.
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having to resort to crossing their ngers, or their chests, in the weeks and months beforehand. Like the scientic naturalists in Britain, these proponents of secularism were eager to strike at the power of the Church in order to make way for a scientically enlightened society. Whilst Moorhouse was involved in his theological skirmishes over the practice of praying for rain, Charles Strong was creating a sensation through his earlier-mentioned belief that theology was a science. Shortly after Strong had come to Victoria in the 1870s to head Melbournes Scots Church, he formed a Religious Science Club, seeking to promote the view that religion and science were in harmony with each other. In the pulpit, he continually made admiring references to agnostic scientists such as Tyndall and G. H. Lewes. Science is Gods teaching, he told his congregations. Lyell, Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and those who follow after, are not authorities on the deepest problems of the soul, but, within their own sphere, they are messengers sent from God.38 After this and still more unorthodox pronouncements, Strong was hounded from the ministry by Melbournes Presbyterian hierarchy in the early 1880s. In 1887, he struck out on his own, taking part in the establishment of the Australian Church. During the 1890s this church was a forum for many Victorians disenchanted by existing Christian churches, including a fair number of Theosophists, spiritualists, and other soul-searching freethinkers. The Churchs journal, the Australian Herald, reected this diversity of interests. Edited by Strong, it featured articles on evolutionary theory, Theosophy, romantic poetry, the womens movement, the need for improved health services and sanitation, cooperative enterprise, land reform, and irrigation.39 Strong himself did not subscribe to the various forms of esoteric spirituality apparent in Australia at the time, but he happily associated with many of those who did. With Deakin, for example, he was a member of Melbournes Society for Psychical Research, populated largely by spiritualists.40 As unorthodox Christians with a social conscience and an interest in scientic progress, the Australian Churchs members emphasised the essence of Christianity over its doctrine. Christianitys emphasis on charity, cooperation, and justice mattered far more than its so-called articles of belief. Each of these qualities was spiritual, they believed, and was entirely compatible with rational principles. The Australian Church was devoted to the promotion of a reasoned and practical religious faith, Strong wrote in the Australian Herald, in what could easily be seen as a manifesto for social Christianity. The Church was also devoted to the advocacy of a wider charity, and to the cause of social progress and reform, he added. We believe in religion as having its underlying root in mans rational nature.41

38. Strong, Broad Church, 6. 39. Badger, Reverend Charles Strong, 105 8; Gabay, Mystic Life of Alfred Deakin, 82. 40. Jill Roe, Beyond Belief: Theosophy in Australia, 1879 1939 (Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1986), 98. 41. Australian Herald (Melbourne), July 1891.
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Strong rst became close to Deakin during the 1880s.42 He would thus have been aware of Deakins passionate advocacy of irrigation, leading as it did to Victorias Water Supply and Irrigation Act 1886, Australias rst legislative encouragement of irrigation on any notable scale.43 In one of his editorials for the Australian Herald, Strong lauded the fact that want of water in the colony was being overcome by national cooperation in the shape of Irrigation Trusts, a direct reference to the provisions of Deakins Act.44 In the early 1890s, Deakin had returned from a tour of India in which he combined the inspection of irrigation works with pilgrimages to sacred sites. Strong later published his enthusiastic articles on kharma and reincarnation in the Australian Herald. Presumably he also listened to Deakin waxing lyrical on the marvels of Indian irrigation upon his return.45 Deakin and Strong held powerful sympathies in common: a commitment to rational spirituality, social reform, and modernity; an open-minded interest in religious ideas and traditions; and an interrelated enthusiasm for irrigation. Their friendship was long and affectionate: Strong would often address his letters to Deakin with a teasingly demonstrative air, referring to him as My dear Satrap.46 They were by no means identical in their opinions, however, as their approaches to irrigation make clear. Deakins own fervour for water engineering developed in the early 1880s, when he was a young and ambitious politician, and Victoria was in the midst of an economic boom. With its promise of opening up arid territories for settlement, he saw irrigation as a means to expand Victorias already thriving economy. Admittedly, he spoke of the need to prevent irrigation from falling entirely into the hands of capitalists, creating trusts for the administration of hydraulic works, and attempting to promote small farms rather than massive estates. At the same time, however, he was profoundly attracted to the private enterprise he had witnessed during a tour of American irrigation. He was particularly impressed by the entrepreneurial pluck exhibited by the irrigation-developers, George and William Chaffey so impressed, indeed, that he arranged for them to receive 50,000 acres for the development of an irrigation colony (Mildura) on the Victorian side of the Murray.47 Strong, on the other hand, was far more enamoured than Deakin by the idea of cooperation in the administration of water and the construction of hydraulic works. Throughout Victorias land boom, he delivered relentless attacks on the colonys materialism and speculative excess.48 His primary interest in irrigation arose from the belief that its association with intensive cultivation would facilitate small cooperative communities on the land.
42. Gabay, Mystic Life of Alfred Deakin, 24, 82. 43. Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods, 124 27. 44. Anon., Land Settlements Bill, Australian Herald, August 1892. 45. Roe, Beyond Belief, 69; Gabay, Mystic Life of Alfred Deakin, 82. 46. Gabay, Mystic Life of Alfred Deakin, 139. 47. Michael Cannon, The Land Boomers: The Complete Illustrated History (Melbourne: Lloyd ONeil, 1986), 75. 48. Geoffrey Serle, The Rush to be Rich: A History of the Colony of Victoria, 1883 1889 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1971), 269 70.
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During the depression of the 1890s, Strong was involved in the Tucker Village Settlements, a scheme for the creation of agrarian cooperatives for the unemployed. Based in Gippsland, this scheme created some seven cooperative villages, a number of which involved irrigation works. His colleague in this scheme was an Anglican canon, the Reverend Horace Tucker, a socialistic pastor whose own interest in irrigation is said to have inspired Bishop Moorhouse.49 Tucker wrote a utopian novel based on his joint venture with Strong, entitled The New Arcadia (1894). In it, he depicted the wonders to be wrought through cooperative irrigation settlements. Such settlements, he wrote, would eradicate poverty and advance workers interests worldwide.50 Social Christianity and the Irrigation Millennium In Britain, many of the scientic naturalists used an expressly religious language when articulating their mission to secularise society. Lewes argued that in the struggle of the soul with the mystery of existence, Science is a bringer of light, attempting to colonise the Churchs territory through the use of its own rhetoric.51 By the turn of the twentieth century, there were plenty of Australian nationalists who used similarly religious rhetoric for rhetorical purposes. The irrigationist politician David Gordon published Conquering the Desert (1907), a work strongly inuenced by William E. Smythes The Conquest of Arid America. In the latter, Smythe had argued that Americas arid regions had been deliberately left unnished by God. This was because God wanted humanity to enter into partnership with Him, taking up the labour of irrigation to complete the arid lands as arable territories. There are far less references to God in Conquering the Desert, although a nod to the Creator appears in those passages modelled most closely on Smythes work. According to Gordon, God relied on evolution to further His creation of the world. White Australians could assist in this process by becoming practical evolutionists, locking the countrys rivers, using them to water the desert and to carry out closer settlement policies. In so doing, they would forge an epoch grand enough to eclipse the ideals of religious millennialists. We are at the beginning of . . . [a wonderful] era, Gordon argued, echoing the cadences of the sentimental preachers of his time, an era in which experiment and learning would transmute the labour bestowed upon the land into wealth and health and happiness and length of days.52 In spite of Gordons secular triumphalism, many of Australias irrigation enthusiasts were highly religious. The cry dont pray for it, dam it had a robustly secular ring, but it was uttered by a bishop and supported by others deeply committed to Christian ideals. For some irrigationists, too, the rhetoric of Judeo-Christian millennialism was far more than a device to conjure secular
49. Weekly Herald (Adelaide), 15 March 1895; Badger, Reverend Charles Strong, 130. 50. Horace Tucker, The New Arcadia: An Australian Story (London: George Robertson, 1894). 51. Turner, Between Science and Religion, 10. 52. David Gordon, Conquering the Desert. Conservation Reclamation Irrigation, A National Policy for Progressive People (Adelaide: W. K. Thomas, 1907), 32, 31.
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visions of greatness. As a member of South Australias radical land reform movement in the 1890s, for example, Taylor was a sincere believer in the possibility of establishing Gods Kingdom on earth. He and other radical Adelaide Nonconformists referred to themselves as sociological Christians in the 1890s, arguing that their beliefs were perfectly compatible with socialism.53 They also spoke explicitly of Henry Georges single tax as a means of bringing on the millennium. Taylor echoed Georges millennialism when he argued that the reforms they sought would bring about the inauguration of His kingdom of justice and of righteousness, who, 1900 years ago, came raising a standard for the peoples, that Labor might have its due, and every man his just reward.54 In later years, when he no longer saw the single tax as a utopian x for society, he still maintained that a programme of benecent reforms would evolve a noble and majestic Order out of the present social Chaos; an order grounded in the principles of Christ.55 It is interesting to see how closely the secular language of practical evolution used by Gordon echoed the millennial language of social Christians such as Taylor. As Ive just suggested, Gordons views may be seen as a kind of secular millennialism, common among many nationalist gures in turn-ofthe-century Australia and America. As David Nash observes, forms of secular millennialism had ourished in western culture ever since the enlightenment, based on the idea that it was possible to achieve a mutally advantageous rapprochement between science and religion in the pursuit of progress.56 Progressives such as Deakin were particularly taken by this idea although given the priority they placed on spiritual forces guiding the upward movement of history, the term secular is not adequate to describe their ideas. As John Hirst points out, Deakin was a rm believer that God participated in the progress of Anglo civilisation. His God, however, was not at all the gure of Christian belief ; instead, he was the Spirit or Force or Principle leading humankind to higher forces of life and deeper understanding.57 This was a sometimes hard-to-spot but nonetheless signicant difference between the millennial views of progressives such as Deakin and social Christians such as Strong. In the latters case, it was still the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition who was assisting in the creation of a wonderful society on earth, and his motivations were to be interpreted in the light of Christs ministry and teachings. As the historian James Moorhead points out, social Christians were postmillennialists of a kind peculiar to the late 1800s and early 1900s. Unlike premillennialists, they did not believe that God would end the world before the millennium was instituted. Any talk of a cataclysmic end of the world
53. Arnold D. Hunt, A Tall Cedar in Our Lebanon: Hugh Gilmore and Primitive Methodism (Salisbury East, South Australia: Uniting Church of South Australia Historical Society, 1977), 29; Taylor, Tucker Prize Essay, 37. 54. Taylor, Tucker Prize Essay, 37. 55. Renmark Pioneer, 29 December 1906. 56. David Nash, The Failed and Postponed Millennium: Secular Millennialism since the Enlightenment, Journal of Religious History, 24, no. 1 (February 2000): 75. 57. John Hirst, Sentimental Nation: The Making of the Australian Commonwealth (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000), 6.
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was to be postponed indenitely, or at least until after an epoch of happy righteousness had been enjoyed on earth. Turn-of-the-century social Christians were also unlike postmillennialists of the early 1800s, in that they dispensed with a belief in a literal end-point to history. Adopting a sort of spiritual Darwinism, they believed that God wanted the establishment of the millennium to be a process rather than an event, achieved through human effort rather than an act from above.58 As Taylor wrote in the Adelaide Voice in 1894: Faith is the most potent factor in progressive evolution that the world has ever seen. Faith in liberty had destroyed the shackles of political despotism, and faith in cooperation would eventually cause the constricting bands of wagedom . . . to fall [my emphasis].59 From the time that Taylor moved to the irrigation towns of Mildura and Renmark on the Murray River, he was an unstinting publicist for the irrigation cause. As a columnist for the Mildura Cultivator between 1899 and mid1905, he wrote extensively about irrigated horticulture. As the proprietor and editor of the Renmark Pioneer from late 1905, he was even more ambitious. Taylor claimed that irrigation had inaugurated a sort of modied socialism in the Murray River region, fostering communities reliant on cooperation in the use of water and irrigation works, in which there existed an equitable distribution of land and wealth.60 In our community of Renmark, he said, the capitalist is practically non-existent. Land speculation was rare, and any tendency to land monopoly was held in check by a tax on water usage.61 Clearly for Taylor, the development of irrigated horticulture was one of the key ways in which Gods noble and majestic Order was to be realised on earth. By promoting cooperation and self-employment, irrigation would help burst the bands of wagedom. Its intelligent and rational approach to cultivation would similarly help to develop society on orderly lines.62 As another prominent social Christian, Strong was exemplary in his unremitting social work and activism. Amongst many other things, he was an advocate for unmarried mothers through the Society in Aid of Maternity Hospital Patients, an activist for a Model Lodging House Company, the founder of the Melbourne Peace Society, a member of the Victorian Fabian Society and of the Social Democratic League. He was also a member of the Council of the Working Mens College and of the Anti-Sweating League, both ofces he shared with Bishop Moorhouse.63 His public pronouncements reected the optimistic belief in progressive evolution that other social Christians espoused. Speaking at a Model Lodging House Company meeting, for example, he pronounced himself convinced that the difculties which
58. Moorhead, World Without End, xv. 59. Voice (Adelaide), 3 March 1894, 5 6. 60. Saunders, For Renmark, 87. 61. Harry Taylor, The Reward of Labor, Renmark Pioneer, 17 January 1908. 62. See the resonances between this idea and the irrigationists discussed by Tyrrell, True Gardens, 10440. 63. Badger, Reverend Charles Strong, 34, 114, 108; Race Mathews, Australias First Fabians: Middle-Class Radicals, Labour Activists and the Early Labour Movement (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 3; Gabay, Mystic Life of Alfred Deakin, 158.
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separated man from man . . . would be more and more broken down as time went on, and that they would be more and more brothers all over the world.64 Publicising the Tucker Village Settlement Scheme, Strong argued similarly that its combination of irrigation and cooperation would progressively transform Victoria. Making regular tours of the village settlements between 1892 and 1894, he inspected their newly dug irrigation ditches and exhorted their inhabitants never [to] give up until they had turned the wilderness into a fruitful garden.65 Bit by bit, he argued, the colony was becoming a place of justice and charity, in which fruit and corn [would come] to adorn the waste, howling wilderness.66 As he saw it, the physical impact of irrigation making brown pastures green, and barren earth fruitful was both a powerful analogue for, and an instrument of, the process of building the millennium. The analogous power of irrigation was a signicant part of its appeal to religious-cum-rational gures between 1880 and 1910. Water and fruit were potent symbols in the Judeo-Christian tradition: baptism, of course, was a water ritual symbolising spiritual transformation. As Al Gabay notes, water also featured as a common symbol for the psyche and the unconscious in occult literature. Throughout his life, Deakin kept journals in which he recorded his spiritual experiences and visions, and water featured in some of the most momentous of these. In one particularly vivid experience, he found himself bathed in a cascade of light; in another, light bubbled up in boiling fountains around him, giving way to forms of architectural majesty . . . gardened . . . with fresh and ower enriched landscapes.67 This vision was similar to Deakins description of irrigated America during a visit in the mid-1880s. Travelling across the American countryside, he found himself enraptured by lands divided into gardens, and decked with owers and bright with fresh-springing pasture.68 It was no coincidence, it seems, that during his intense involvement with irrigation in the 1880s he was equally possessed by mystic fervour, irrigation and legislation by day and Sinnett and Swedenborg by night.69 *** Frank Bongiorno has talked about a reluctance on the part of Australian . . . historians to recognise the role played by esoteric belief and unorthodox religion in the making of Australian modernity.70 Certainly there is a growing

64. Strong, cited in Argus (Melbourne), January 1885, newspaper clipping in Strong Papers, Series 6. 65. Tucker Village Settlement Association, The Tucker Village Settlements: A Handbook (Melbourne, n.d.), 23. 66. Australian Herald, August 1892, 210, 223. 67. Gabay, Mystic Life of Alfred Deakin, 129, 83. 68. Alfred Deakin, First Progress Report of the Royal Commission on Water Supply. Irrigation in Western America, Victorian Parliamentary Papers, 2, no. 19 (1885): 9. 69. Roe, Beyond Belief, 15. 70. Frank Bongiorno, A Short History of New Thought in Australia, 1890 1914, Australian Cultural History, no. 23 (2004): 25.
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awareness of the relationship of turn-of-the-century occultism and Theosophy to modernity in both Australian and international scholarship.71 In an Australian context, Jill Roe has also spoken of Theosophists desire to discover a common ground between science and religion. Both Roes groundbreaking work on Australian Theosophy and Al Gabays biography of Deakin are evidence that connections between esoteric belief and modernity have been made in Australia.72 Of the links between irrigation and the social Christians unorthodox religiosity, however, we have heard very little indeed. The history of Australian irrigation is most often associated with big nationalist visions of the country, geared at the expansion of rational agriculture, the accumulation of big money, and the domination of the Pacic region. Drawing on Tyrrells observations, I have shown here that some turn-of-thecentury irrigationists married a passion for rationality with other, smaller, visions for Australia, concerned more with the creation of a happy than a splendid country. What social Christians such as Taylor and Strong had to say about Australias future, of course, became increasingly lost amidst the pro-development clamour of post-federation Australia. In the process, their notion of irrigation as a way to engineer Gods kingdom on earth was also lost. By providing a glimpse into an age in which secularists could turn out to be deeply religious, in which rationalists could be ardent Judeo-Christian millennialists, this paper has explored some of these lost resonances to the history of Australian irrigation.

71. Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Joy Dixon, Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2001); cf. a discussion of the growing scholarship on the links between occultism and modernism in Helen Sword, Ghostwriting Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 160. 72. Bruce Campbell, cited in Roe, Beyond Belief, 7.
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