Jack Beale

Jack Gordon Beale AO (17 July 1917 – 7 June 2006) was an Australian politician who championed the need for Australia to conserve and develop its water resources. He was also Australia's first environment minister. In his obituary in The Sydney Morning Herald, he was described as "a visionary, one of the first to realize what would become vital issues in Australia: the potential of water resources and the limited capacity of the environment to sustain abuse." Known as the 'Water Man,' he was quoted as saying:

"Australia is the lowest, flattest, hottest and driest continent on the earth and we have to manage it accordingly."

Most of Australia's rivers flow relatively short distances to the sea. As early as 1963, Jack Beale called for water from Australia's rivers to be diverted to the arid inland.

Jack Beale was born in Manly, a suburb of Sydney, on 17 July 1917, the second child of Rupert Noel Beale, a stock and station agent whose business failed in a drought. His mother was Esther Anderina Green from New Zealand. He attended state schools in rural Scone and the industrial city of Newcastle, and earned an honors diploma in mechanical engineering from Sydney Technical College. He joined the New South Wales Department of Public Works in 1936, where he saw the irrigation and energy potential of the state's rivers and developed a passion which was to last a lifetime for water conservation and irrigation. At age 48 he earned a Masters of Engineering degree from the University of New South Wales with a thesis on water irrigation efficiency.

Jack Beale's father Rupert was elected a Member of the Legislative Assembly in the New South Wales state parliament in 1941. After Rupert Beale's death in 1942, Jack Beale ran in the by-election for his father's electorate, South Coast, winning as an independent and becoming at the age of 25 the youngest member of the NSW parliament. He served in parliament for 31 years and won three elections as an independent and 8 as a member of the Liberal Party. He was an independent or in opposition for 22 consecutive years of his parliamentary career, and was a cabinet minister in the Askin government for the last nine 9 years. When Askin became Premier in 1965, he offered Jack Beale the Minister of Public Works portfolio, which ranked fifth in state protocol. He declined the position and asked for the Minister for Conservation portfolio, which ranked thirteenth, but which was responsible for the state's water, soil and forests and which interested him more. He embarked on a program to develop the state's water resources, initiating comprehensive river valley surveys and an infrastructure program constructing new dams and weirs. While his primary motivation was to support farmers, he also directed water releases from state dams to preserve the ecology of the Macquarie Marshes Nature Reserve.

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