Credit: John Bull/COSMOS
I'm sitting in the office of Anne Howe on the 13th floor of one of the taller buildings of Adelaide's central business district. Howe is the chief executive of the South Australian Water Corporation, and her office is spacious and comfortable - as one would expect. But Howe herself is refreshingly devoid of pretension. A warm, competent woman, lines are beginning to crease the corners of her eyes and mouth. You get the sense they were formed during enjoyable evenings with friends rather than through the stresses of running a big company.
Howe's assistant enters the room, bringing with her two tall glasses of cool water and sets them down in front of us. I eye mine dubiously.
Adelaide has a reputation for having the worst water in Australia. Many Adelaidians prefer tank water, or bottled water; most have in-built water filters in their kitchens.
Adelaide takes its water from the Murray River. By the time it gets to Adelaide, countless small towns have extracted their local supply and returned their waste to the river. Larger towns too: the toilets inside Parliament House in Canberra drain, eventually, to the Murray.
And here am I in the office of the chief executive of the company that provides Adelaide with its drinking supply, about to drink that water that has travelled a journey of over 3,000 km from its wellspring as the Condamine River in the Darling Downs, Queensland. This water has passed through countless sets of kidneys, across so many paddocks, through so much treatment, before ending up crystal clear and cool in an air-conditioned office in the heart of Adelaide.
The water is delicious.
Australian are fond of telling visitors that they have the best water in the world. Melburnians, particularly, will describe the pristine forests that filter their water, providing them with water of unparalleled purity. And that's true.
But even Melbourne is not completely shielded from the infiltration of 'faecal coliforms', the indicators that faecal matter has found its way into the drinking supply. The upper reaches of the Yarra River provide a small portion of Melbourne's drinking water. The towns on its banks, in the wine-growing Yarra Valley, treat their waste with septic tanks: a method notorious for leaking and polluting local waterways.
Testing Melbourne's Sugarloaf reservoir water prior to treatment registers a miniscule four E. coli bacteria per 100 mL of water. It may be small, but it's enough to indicate that the excrement of a warm-blooded creature is in the water supply. It might be cow, bat or human, but somehow, somewhere the proverbial hit the water.
The reality is all water supplies in Australia need techniques to combat potential faecal contamination. They work. No one in Australian cities dies from dysentery or cholera. However, raise the prospect of reusing treated sewage - let alone drinking it - and you'll struggle to contain the hue and cry.
The irony is that Australians live on the driest inhabited continent in the world - only Antarctica gets less rain. Of all the places in the world where it is essential to make the most of every drop of water, Australia is it.
"There's energy around and a debate about it; a sense of crisis across Australia about water," said Howe. "I think the last five years have really heightened everyone's interest in it, from an environmental perspective - dying rivers, dying red gums, loss of fish species - every state's got its own issues."
