The Making of White Water Citizens in Australia and the Western United States: Racialization as a Transnational Project of Irrigation Governance

This article examines the role of settler irrigation systems and water governance in establishing and reinforcing tenacious imperial geographies of whiteness. Through an analysis of the lives and work of two powerful men who made foundational contributions to establishing irrigation economies and water governance systems in Australia and the Western United States, we investigate the racialized sociospatial processes that bound whiteness to water. Alfred Deakin (1856–1919) and Elwood Mead (1858–1936) were men of science, technology, and politics who actively circulated in and shaped transnational flows of knowledge about whiteness and racial hierarchies. As Deakin and Mead vigorously promoted particular social and political systems associated with irrigation, steering water flows toward uses regarded as modern and productive according to taken-for-granted norms, they imagined, naturalized, and privileged a white water citizenry. In the process, they contributed to the dispossession and displacement of Indigenous peoples as well as marginalizing Other water users, most notably Asian migrants. These men's hydro-imaginaries, which were endorsed and enacted by their respective governments, served to motivate a form of state protection of family farms, inculcate civic self-reliance and local organization, and establish the white water citizen, a baseline against which others were expected to conform. By examining the making of white water citizens, we hope to contribute to Indigenous geographies and studies of racialization in rural places, as well as the effects of irrigation in settler nations.