The Pera Bore Experiments

This is the unique story of two radical experiments on the same piece of ground on the red soil plains 20kms West of Bourke.
 
It’s 1887. Picture a cluster of burly, sunburnt men watching anxiously day after day as the bit of their American oil drill wound deeper and deeper into the red soil at the back of Bourke. Then, hats were thrown high with an exuberant shout as water from 300 metres below gushed fifty meters into the air. The American boring team had struck the Great Artesian Basin – 1.7 million square kms of life-giving liquid lying untapped beneath a fifth of the continent.
 
Ninety years later in 1978, I arrived at Pera Bore with my family – about 70 kms South of Kerribree Station where that dramatic first deep artesian well had gifted entrepreneur William Walter Davis ‘liquid gold’ to prosper his sheep station. Ahead of us lay an experiment that we hoped would prosper Australia. 

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