This chapter focuses on literacy and linguistic diversity in Australia. Literacy educators in Australian schools face challenges, including cultural and linguistic diversity among students, communities, and workplaces; variable support from governments in fiscally unstable times; and continual professional and public debates over curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment, and over the role of research and policy. But Australian educators also encounter distinctive, and some at least distinctively inflected historical, cultural, and economic features that have a bearing on their literacy efforts. To background our discussion of those efforts, the chapter opens with a selection of Australia’s demographic and administrative characteristics. This is followed by a discussion of the challenges and opportunities presented to research, practice, and policy by educational engagements with Aboriginal and migrant communities. Implications for the close relationship of literacy to community languages, to pedagogy, to policy formation and maintenance, and to research are also highlighted. Finally, international perspectives on Australian literacy education are presented, including those based on national and international assessment programs.

At the beginning of the new millennium, Australia's cities and their peri-urban and rural hinterlands were in the midst of a worsening drought. Having developed in the mid-1990s, the Millennium Drought finally broke in 2010, at least in south-eastern Australia. It was the most severe drought experienced in southern Australia since instrumental records began in the early twentieth century, thanks to a combination of natural variability and anthropogenic climate change. The urgency of water restrictions and supply augmentation that had characterised the drought years gave way to more pressing matters of the electoral cycle. As Australian cities continue to grow, it remains be seen as to whether plans to shape the urban form as a water catchment of its own materialise beyond model suburbs and local initiatives and what their implementation might mean for the water infrastructure and cultures of the past.

After World War II, Australians and new migrants rushed to build their dream home and garden. As housing estates proliferated in the suburbs, local authorities struggled to keep pace with increasing demand for water supply and sewerage connection. In all five cities, suburbs were constructed with no roads, kerbing and channelling, or sewerage. New subdivisions had reticulated water, but manual night cart collection continued in some suburbs and septic tanks were common until sewer lines were built. As the housing stock increased and septic systems were replaced with reticulated sewerage, water supplies were stretched beyond capacity. Authorities turned to the well-worn path of dam construction to increase supply, but when consumption exceeded capacity, especially in hot, dry seasons, unpopular water restrictions were implemented, with hoses and sprinklers banned. The sight of green suburban lawns turning brown undermined the myth of unlimited supply at the turn of a tap, but expectations were reinstated as soon as it rained.

Both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians have learnt to cope with climate variability in meeting water needs over a range of time-scales. The five cities are locations that Aboriginal people cared for and maintained relationships with water over tens of thousands of years, knowledge of which is maintained today. In the face of a changing climate and continuing population growth, the five cities face challenges in developing and maintaining sustainable and equitable approaches to water provision and management. Each response to water management problems is shaped by path-dependent effects of earlier decisions and the ‘wicked’ nature of problems that defy simple solutions. The five cities are marked by climatic diversity, and all are at least partly built on floodplains. Each has a distinct relationship with the natural water of its hinterland and the proximity of ocean outlets for sewage disposal.

The diverse water systems and ecologies of the places that would become Australia’s capital cities sustained Aboriginal peoples for thousands of years because of two key factors: Aboriginal knowledge of water and associated wetland and riparian ecologies, and respect for life-sustaining water as a central tenet of Aboriginal cultures. For millennia, and often enduring in the wake of the violent rupture of colonisation, Aboriginal peoples understood the affordances and risks of different forms of water and preserved these understandings in robust oral traditions. This enabled them to follow seasonal abundances of water and avoid its seasonal hazards. For all Australian Indigenous cultures, water is a storied medium that connects the past and present in the ‘long now’: a living and lively substance that sustains their Country.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the replacement of labour-intensive methods of obtaining household water and disposing of wastes by networked infrastructure made possible a change in Australian housing layouts. The informal, mixed-use cottage gave way to the ‘bungalow’ with more specialised interior spaces and internal bathrooms, allowing rising living standards in working-class households. The extension of networked water supplies and sewerage, and increasing lot sizes with more space for gardens and lawns increased per capita water consumption in the five cities. To improve the sanitary condition of the ‘respectable’ working-class, State governments intervened in housing markets by providing access to low-cost suburban housing, but disparities in domestic water facilities persisted, with much of the inner city housing stock lacking internal bathrooms, laundries, toilets, hot water services, and taps. At the end of World War II, the five cities faced serious housing shortages, and with rising prosperity came strong demand for new suburban housing.

White settlers domesticated water by shaping and regulating natural water features into systems of dams, piped networks, and waste disposal facilities. Clean water is a common resource when there is no restriction on its use, and each use of the resource makes less available to others. Overuse of common water resources was an early feature of the five cities, and effective solutions were the product of democratic institutions that empowered citizens to take collective action and express demands for improved infrastructure. In Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide, sanitary reform through investment in networked water infrastructure in response to the threat of cholera was underway by the mid-nineteenth century; the development of effective sewerage was delayed by the costs of extension across large metropolitan areas and the fragmentation of political authority between local councils. The smaller cities, Brisbane and Perth, were slower to invest, and water supplies continued to be unreliable and subject to pollution from cesspits. By the start of the twentieth century, variations in water infrastructure systems reflected the path-dependent nature of earlier solutions, which would constrain the options available to future decision makers.

The signs of climate change continue to signal themselves through increased weather extremes. These events have major implications for the continued reliable supply of fresh water and safe removal of waste. As the limits to the environment become increasingly obvious and pressing, these constraints will serve as a significant challenge for future generations. In the past 200 years, Australians have learned a great deal about the fragility of their environment and the need to work within its limits – the wisdom of the country's first peoples still has much to teach us in our future responses to change.