Utopus?: a consideration of the life of Irrigationist, George Chaffey

Abstract

The inland city of Mildura, Victoria, is the brain chid of a Canadian engineer, George Chaffey, who had pioneered irrigation colonies in California with his brother, William Benjamin Chaffey. He was swept up by the prospective wealth that irrigation could bring to dry lands, and devised a campaign of land development which included Australia. Chaffey publicly presented himself as a pioneering visionary, thereby masking the driving ambition which led him to engage in highly-suspect business practices. The latter half of the nineteenth century was a time of optimistic global migration, and Chaffey's clarion call to lure people to his developments was both timely and effective.