George Chaffey

In 1884, after a series of droughts, the Victorian Government began looking into how to irrigate its large areas of farmland. In 1887 the Canadian brothers George and William Chaffey started building Australia’s first ‘irrigation colonies’ at Mildura (Victoria) and Renmark (South Australia) on the Murray River. The first harvests were excellent. But by 1896 the Chaffeys’ Mildura Irrigation Company was in liquidation and hundreds of settlers faced losing their farms and businesses.