‘All the Men at the Pump’: Water, Wool, and Squatter Anne Drysdale’s Diaries, 1840–1851

Abstract

Australian wool-growing has long been cast by most writers as a masculine endeavour, from the male squatters who took great swathes of land to run their sheep, displacing First Peoples and transforming ecosystems in the process, to the shearers who became the embodiment of hardy bush masculinity. The pastoral insights recorded by Anne Drysdale in her diaries spanning the 1840s, however, provide rich insights into a female engagement with the industry. In focusing on Drysdale and her partner Caroline Newcomb as part of the renewed interest in ‘invisible farmers’, this article considers their interactions with water. It examines how Drysdale recorded the rain and the river, allowing us to trace her multifaceted uses of them. As her account indicates, water was an economic safeguard and a productive resource essential to the squatting enterprise, as well as a means for neighbourly connection, a source of pleasure, and a site of danger.