In the twenty-first century, confronting what was then the worst drought on record, the Australian Government embarked on its most expensive, most ambitious nation-building project: the Murray–Darling Basin Plan. A $13 billion realignment to rescue the nation’s food bowl and to restore its rivers. In 2007 John Howard promised a ‘complete overhaul’ of the interior ‘to confront head-on the over­allocation of water’. And because this was that kind of pastoral undertaking that relied on the mettle of farmers, and not a little because Canberra was handing out fistfuls of cash, a story of reform took hold. Primary producers were to be protected and the rivers returned to life. The paradox of how both could be simultaneously possible was put to one side.

Embarrassingly, when I first turned to examine the Murray–Darling in late 2016 for Four Corners, that was what I believed too. I trusted the plan. That trust was mostly the product of ignorance. But it was also because I lived in a stable, democratic nation where I could trust many things—that my money remained mine to withdraw from a machine in the wall, that my ballot paper counted whenever I cast it, and that the courts, when turned to, would offer a fair hearing. I believed that the federal bureaucracy, and its engineers and scientists, had indeed built what it was that Howard had promised and sown in the popular imagination.