Insight from founder, Tony Oakes, on the inception and international expansion of Rubicon Water
The Dartmouth Dam’s completion and the widespread threat of salinity in the late 1970s marked the end of major developments of the government irrigation schemes in the Murray Darling Basin.. By the early 1980s, the Victorian Government allocated most of the Dartmouth water to private river diverters downstream of Swan Hill, establishing the commercially-focused Rural Water Corporation. This shift emphasised productivity improvements, including the computerisation of operational logistics, which significantly streamlined the management of the daytime manual workforce. However, the drive to enhance customer service through computerisation highlighted a drop in overall water distribution efficiency due to operators prioritising customer needs over water conservation.
The introduction of water trading allowed high-value agricultural investments to purchase water from irrigation districts, relocating it downstream where near on-demand service was available. To counter this, the mid-2000s saw the launch of the Food Bowl initiative in Shepparton, aiming to modernise the Goulburn-Murray Irrigation District (GMID). By the mid-1990s, it became clear that continuous 24/7 network operations were essential for water conservation and improved customer service. Initial retrofitting of instruments and actuation equipment at gate structures and the implementation of Supervisory Control and Data Aquisition (SCADA) technology enabled remote, office-based operations. While effective on single sites, these methods struggled to scale across multiple sites.
In 1997, the University of Melbourne, supported by AusIndustry and Rubicon Water, embarked on research to tackle this scalability issue, achieving significant breakthroughs. New design and manufacturing methods were developed to mass-produce precision measurement and control devices, replacing 8,000 drop board regulators and numerous Dethridge Wheel meters. The WaterLine software was upgraded to process real-time customer orders, ensuring the Total Channel Control (TCC) technology constraints were met. The TCC pilot near Murchison in 2002 was an “unbridled success,” paving the way for a larger implementation in Tatura, funded by the Victorian Government’s water-saving initiative.
The Food Bowl initiative secured $1B from the Victorian Government, later doubled with Federal support. In 2020, Australia’s Federal Minister for Resources, Water, and Northern Australia described this investment as, “one of the most significant infrastructure projects ever undertaken in this country when it comes to delivering water savings and benefits for farmers, communities and the environment.” Known as the Connections Project, it aimed to recover 429GL of water annually, surpassing this target by February 2022.
Fast forward to 2024, the technology that transformed the Goulburn Valley’s irrigated landscape over the past two decades is now delivering tangible water and energy conservation outcomes in 22 countries. Originally designed to combat water challenges in the MDB, this technology is now enhancing the efficiency and productivity of water on the world stage, produced right here in Shepparton. For more on Rubicon’s impactful projects, both locally and globally, explore articles online at The Shepparton Adviser.
