OBITUARY
Malcolm Gallasch, First Mildura Irrigation Trust engineer/manager
Born September 22,1932 – died June 22, 2024
By former irrigator Richard Evans
AFTER the recent passing of Malcolm Gallasch, it is now time to reflect on and recognise his significant engineering and innovative skills which have allowed irrigators to access ‘water on order’ or ‘water on demand’ in the pumped-irrigation districts of South Australia and Victoria.
This has been the greatest single contribution to irrigation efficiency in the pumped irrigation districts of the Renmark Irrigation Trust (RIT), and later in Sunraysia’s First Mildura Irrigation Trust (FMIT), since the Chaffey Brothers introduced the highly acclaimed, but very inefficient, intermittent rostered irrigations to the desert in the late 1800s.
Malcom pioneered the system which the current generation of pumped-district irrigators takes for granted, and uses constantly, to order water 24/7/365.
It allows for the irrigation application of the ‘right amount at the right time’ to match the crop needs with the water-holding capacity of the soil in the crop root zone – far from the norm for earlier generations of irrigators.
As recently as in 1967 only four preharvest rostered irrigations were available to irrigators, regardless of the crop’s water needs.
Regardless of whether there was an inch of rain the day before or in summer the fruit was falling off due to moisture stress, water was available to irrigators only in rostered turns.
As the engineer/manager, Malcolm, against all odds, designed and pipelined the RIT district in Renmark and then introduced ‘water on order’ in 1973.
In 1983, encouraged by Sunraysia irrigators, he took up the role of engineer manager of the FMIT in Mildura and introduced ‘water on order’ later that year, similar to what he had previously introduced in Renmark.
Both these areas had been set up in the late 1800s by the Chaffey Bros and. through the years, access to water had barely changed, with most areas still dominated by inefficient, rostered furrow irrigation.
In 1981 Malcolm presented his paper Results Achieved by Rehabilitation of Renmark Irrigation System Using a Piped System at the 11th International Congress on Irrigation and Drainage at Grenoble in France.
In the paper, he outlined the original system of rostered irrigations when “all irrigations were supplied to irrigators by passing on the stream (volume of water supplied for an irrigation) in rostered turns for each stream area”.
The four rostered irrigations, from October to January, covered the fixed costs for the RIT and special irrigations from July to September and were charged per acre.
His paper comprehensively described how “the replacement of the old channel system with a piped system resulted in major improvements in water management with beneficial effects on the economic and social welfare of the community”.
This new system allowing access to ‘water on demand’ in the pumped districts set the standard for all the high-land pumped-irrigation districts.
The State Rivers & Water Supply Commission (SR&WSC) of Victoria, the Central Irrigation Trust (CIT) in the Riverland Districts of SA and Western Murray Irrigation (NSW) all adopted this concept.
Ready access to ‘water on demand’ was the catalyst for efficient on-farm irrigation systems through the adoption of the new technologies coming on stream in the 1970s.
The ‘right amount at the right time’ was now possible.
This facilitated greater water use efficiency, improved crop health and enabled a greater diversity of crops.
This not only was beneficial to irrigators but also hugely diminished the environmental degradation caused by early saline drainage outflows from irrigation districts, a legacy of the Chaffey era.
Malcolm witnessed this firsthand as a member of the first Sunraysia Rural Water Authority Board, which succeeded the State Rivers & Water Supply Commission in Sunraysia in the 1990s.
Consequently, this much more efficient, customer-focused irrigation system has turned environmental degradation on its head.
With ‘water on order’ now generating minimal drainage and the contraction of water tables, the pumped irrigation districts are now truly sustainable.
Their access to ‘water on order’ also made possible the adoption of the new, highly efficient irrigation technologies that were becoming available in the 1970s.
These included low-throw, under-tree systems to manage applications of saline irrigation water, micro jets. and drip and automated irrigation controllers with sophisticated filtration systems, which all relied on daily access to water.
Four or five rostered irrigations per season, with the dates set at the start of each season, was never going to facilitate the introduction of these new efficient technologies which were becoming available.
In his Renmark office, Malcolm had drawn on a pulldown internal window blind a plan which revealed the whole of the Renmark Irrigation Trust system with the irrigation streams available to every farm connection and their capacity.
This was before computers were part of the office furniture, channels were still the norm and furrow irrigation was dominant in all pumped irrigation districts.
He traced in detail the waterflow through the district ‘streams’, from the river pumps to the irrigated crops.
In 1973, when Remark irrigators rang in to request access to water, giving their preferred time and volume, the stream was identified on the blind and then referenced to the running sheet for that stream to confirm the availability of the water.
A phoned irrigation order could be processed and confirmed in minutes, and it was all done manually.
This was the origin of ‘water on order’ in the pumped-irrigation districts as we know it today.
It is recorded in the annual reports of the FMIT for several years how delegations of FMIT staff and customers visited Renmark along with irrigated commodity representatives from dried vine fruits, citrus and wine grapes to see this new system.
They were all interested in getting “a firsthand appreciation of this new concept of water on order”.
At this time, the FMIT was supplying four general irrigations and several special irrigations annually.
Malcolm moved to Mildura’s FMIT in May 1983 to introduce his ‘magic’.
At the time, Mildura was predominantly an open-channel system and, as such, had been deemed not suitable for such a complex system of daily access to water.
As FMIT’s engineer/manager, Malcolm was able to introduce a similar system to the FMIT, with phone-order access to water in spring of 1983.
This was in spite of the difficulties posed by manually regulated channels and was only months after he started work at the FMIT.
This was then followed by the SR&WSC of Victoria in Merbein, Robinvale and Red Cliffs, the CIT districts in South Australia and Western Murray Irrigation (NSW).
Malcolm’s early work was the forerunner of what we have today, where previously four or five rostered irrigations applied up to nine megalitres per hectare ‘not metered’ annually, or 150mm per irrigation – at a time when the soil root zone could hold only 30mm.
His system of daily access to water is now common practice to all pumped-district irrigators.
Today, drip irrigators apply up to 120 irrigations per season yet still apply only a similar volume of eight or fewer megalitres per hectare annually.
The crops and the environment love it.
Now the sustainability of the pumped-irrigation districts and the productivity from water-use efficiency, and benefits accruing to the previously degraded environment, can readily be traced back to Malcolm’s development of the first ‘water on order’ systems in Remark in 1973 and 10 years later in Mildura – more than 50 years ago.
The system has been tweaked and refined over the years, with the introduction of sophisticated technology and programming, now all computerised with only manual oversight.
Malcolm Gallasch’s lasting legacy is a system of access to ‘water on order’ in the pumped districts which has underpinned the irrigation efficiency and productivity of the regions and has had a huge beneficial environmental impact on salinity and drainage within the Murray Valley.
