| Book Review | Labour History, 95 | The History Cooperative

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BOOK REVIEW

*Richard G. Hartley, River of Steel: A History of the Western Australian Goldfields and Agricultural Water Supply, Access Press, Bassendean, WA, 2007. pp. 522. $45.95 paper.*
The year 2003 marked the centenary of one of the world's greatest engineering feats: the construction of a water pipeline from Mundaring Weir in the hills east of Perth to the Eastern Goldfields centres of Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie. The statistics are impressive. The scheme to carry water to the arid Goldfields involved building at Mundaring what was then the highest dam in the southern hemisphere; constructing the world's first major steel pipeline and creating 'by far the longest water supply pipeline in the world' – the latter a feat which apparently has only recently been surpassed. In the words of its historian (Introduction), In terms of technological innovation the Goldfields pipeline was the equivalent of I.K. Brunel's ship The Great Britain, the world's first iron ship, or of the Firth of Forth railway bridge in Scotland, which was the world's first large bridge to be built of steel. All this was achieved against the background of a gold boom that had seen Western Australia's population rise from around 50,000 in 1890 to 300,000 in 1910. Add to this, the scandals surrounding the project, which resulted in the Chief Engineer, C.Y. O'Connor, taking his own life before the scheme was completed, and you would expect to find a fascinating story.	1
While The River of Steel is painstakingly researched and technically accurate as far as this reviewer is able to judge, Hartley's engineering background has prevailed and what we have is very much an engineer's account of the Scheme. Much of the social history is disappointingly confined to text boxes holding excerpts from interviews undertaken over several years in a massive oral history program, but there are some interesting glimpses into the lives of the people who kept this massive enterprise functioning.	. . .

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