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Clip description
The clip illuminates the hopes and dreams for irrigation in the Murrumbidgee and Murray Valleys, which turning the waters of the Snowy westward will achieve.
Curator’s notes
Shot in the early 1950s, the sequence contains classic footage of the irrigated agriculture of Australia’s food bowl. It explains the way in which the waters from the Snowy Mountains Scheme will flow into irrigation channels, which will then feed the farmlands west of the ranges. Farmers and farmhands are at work in the fruit orchards, rice fields and grazing paddocks, harvesting the water-dependent crops and produce we now associate with the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area and places like Griffith, Leeton, Ardmona, Shepparton, The Riverina and the Murray-Goulburn Valley.
