In 1896, WA’s water dreamer, engineer C.Y. O’Connor, designed a pipeline to transport water from the Darling Range to the thirsty goldfields, nearly six hundred kilometres away. Even the engineering schemes of ancient Rome had not been so bold as to pump water such a distance, let alone uphill. At its 1903 opening, WA Premier Sir John Forrest, referred to Isaiah when he suggested that future generations would remember this achievement: ‘They made a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.’

But the scale and purpose of the pipeline did not go unquestioned. Water from the capital would be pumped to the edge of the desert, which meant the isolated goldfields would have a reliable water supply – a privilege yet to be extended to many Perth households. I examine how this tension was debated, and its persistence into the twentieth century, once the pipeline became the means of reticulating the wheatbelt. In doing so, this paper explores WA's urban-rural colonial hydrology at the turn of the twentieth century and its persistence. This analysis reframes the scale at which urban water supplies are commonly understood to shed light on the politics of water provision in semi-arid climes.