Person

Chaffey, William Benjamin (1856 - 1926)

Born
21 October 1856
Brockville, Ontario, Canada
Died
4 June 1926
Mildura, Victoria, Australia
Occupation
Irrigation expert

Summary

William Chaffey established irrigation companies in both Mildura and Renmark with his brother, George, in 1887. The company, Chaffey Brothers Ltd, went into liquidation in 1894. He remained in Mildura, establishing an orchard and the Mildura (later Mildara) Winery Pty Ltd.

Skip to

Published resources

Book Sections

  • Westcott, Peter, 'Chaffey, George (1848-1932), irrigation pioneer, engineer, inventor and entrepreneur, and Chaffey, William Benjamin (1856-1926), agriculturist and irrigation planner' in Australian dictionary of biography, volume 7: 1891 - 1939 A-Ch, Bede Nairn and Geoffrey Serle, eds (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1979), pp. 599-601. https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/chaffey-george-5544. Details

Conference Papers

  • Peake, Owen; and Venus, Richard, 'Chaffey brothers irrigation works in Australia', in 19th Australasian engineering heritage conference: putting water to work: steam power, river navigation and water supply edited by Engineers Australia and Engineering Heritage Australia (Barton, Australian Capital Territory: Engineering Heritage Australia, 2017), pp. 401-430., https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.385229438798747. Details

Journal Articles

  • Churchyard, J. N., 'Pioneers of Irrigation in Victoria, Number 5. The Chaffey Brothers. Engineer and Horticulturist', Aqua: Official Journal of the State Rivers and Water Supply Commission, Victoria (1957), 110-113. Details
  • Miller, Glenn, 'The Chaffey Brothers: Irrigation Pioneers', Australian Heritage, 2010 (Autumn) (2010), 57-63. Details
  • Peake, Owen; Venus, Richard, 'Chaffey Brothers Irrigation Works in Australia', Australasian Journal of Water Resources, 23 (2, October 2019) (2019), 116-128, https://doi.org/10.1080/13241583.2019.1606475. Details

Resources

See also

  • Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, Technology in Australia 1788-1988, Online edn, Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre, Melbourne, 3 May 2000, http://www.austehc.unimelb.edu.au/tia/index_c.html. Details
  • Engineers Australia ed., Wonders never cease: 100 Australian engineering achievements (Barton, Australian Capital Territory: Institution of Engineers, Australia, 2019), 236 pp, https://www.engineersaustralia.org.au/sites/default/files/2025-08/EA1_Wonders%20never%20cease.pdf. "Bringing the water to the basin", pp.144-5. Details
  • McCann, Joy; Churchward, Matthew, Victorian steampower : an illustrated social history (Melbourne, Vic.: Victoria Press, 1994), 179 pp. pp.15,68-69,70. Details
  • Oram, J. A. F., 'Pioneer irrigator designed his own pumps [George Chaffey]', The Chartered Engineer Victoria, 9 (10) (1965), 17. Details
  • Serle, Percival, Dictionary of Australian biography (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1949). Details

Rosanne Walker

Created: 25 May 2001, Last modified: 9 March 2018

EOAS ID: biogs/P003423b.htm

This Edition: 2026 February - 1926 Centenaries
Kooyang - Gariwerd calendar - Late summer: late January to late March - season of eels
Reference: https://www.bom.gov.au/resources/indigenous-weather-knowledge/indigenous-seasonal-calendars/gariwerd-calendar#bom-anchor-list__item-kooyang-season-of-eels

Publisher: Swinburne University of Technology.

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What do we mean by this?

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation uses the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a relational data curation and web publication system developed by the eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors at the University of Melbourne 1999-2020. The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020.

Cite this page: https://www.eoas.info/biogs/P003423b.htm

For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260