The bitter irony of the current drought in Australia is that it has again called forth the same myths and false beliefs that got us into trouble in the first place.

Mingled with a genuine desire to help farmers and rural people caught in a spreading tragedy are the age-old calls to “drought-proof’ the continent, to turn the rivers inland, to harvest all their water lest it run to waste in the sea.

We now know that these are not solutions but recipes for disaster that fight against the nature of the continent instead of working with it. Yet they recycle every generation and dominate the populist rhetoric of the public debate. They are simplistic solutions that will destroy Australia.

It isn’t the drought that is the problem. It is our delusions

Like the lotus-eaters, we inhabit a dreamworld where water is plentiful and the landscape resembles the soft, green hills of Europe. It is time to awake and accept where we live. The Australian psyche is dominated by dreams of water. Early settlers found the landscape harsh and arid, lacking the verdancy and park-like qualities of Europe. The rivers were untamed: within weeks the vast floods that spread across the plains became a chain of muddy pools.

Yet like spectres from the dying land­scape, the old myths have arisen once again with the present drought. Myths burnt into our psyche and captured in our folklore that keep us forever locked into unsustainable dreams. Dreams advocating we should try to bash Australia into submission instead of accepting its nature and learning to live within it.

The three great myths that still haunt our thinking are that:

• any water allowed to run to the sea is wasted;

• we must make the desert bloom; and

• we must “drought-proof” Australia

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Consider the three myths in turn. The natural flow of water down a river to the sea is part of a healthy system. It is when we prevent this by damming, building weirs and, especially, by taking out too much of the flow for other uses that the river’s health is placed at risk. If the river cannot flush itself, it has no way to remove the salt, nutrients and pollution that build up in it, quite apart from river flows driving many critical carbon and nutrient cycles critical to our marine ecosystems.

The Australian landscape, its plants and animals have evolved to cope with episodic flooding. By removing the water and preventing floods, we are also destroying that landscape and rivers functions that give life to it. The key lies in striking a better balance between the needs of the natural environment, agriculture and our cities. It also lies in being a lot smarter in how we use our water. For example, almost all of our urban storm water and most of our sewage effluent is not recycled.

The second myth – of making the desert bloom by turning coastal rivers to run inland – is as much in vogue today as it was 100 years ago. The drought has prompted calls to revive the Bradfield scheme, a 1930-40s plan to turn the Tully, Herbert and Burdekin rivers back across the Great Divide into central Queensland and connect to the Murray-Darling. Two centuries of development in Australia seem to have taught us little about the hazards of salinity, soil and water degradation, loss of habitat and species and the simple fact that the communities from which the water is taken will one day want it back. An awful political dilemma.

The third myth of “drought-proofing” our drier areas is equally fraught with risk because it invites us to grow things in areas where the nature of Australia makes it inadvisable to do so. It involves bringing water to places where it is normally only an episodic event, and can cause unforeseen problems. From a national perspective it is also unnecessary. Australia has a huge “fertile crescent” of reliable high rainfall country and fertile soils around our coastline, on which we could develop sustainable agriculture and horticulture.

But instead of growing food, we have chosen to use these lands for urban sprawl, tourism and hobby farms. So we have squandered our most precious resource in an arid, infertile continent. What other country would put its best farmland under concrete, race­ horses and golf courses?

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We now have the tools to predict risk in farming. We can say, with high confidence, how many crops you can expect to get in a given area over a decade, and what sort of cash flows they will yield. There is no need to grow things in places where failure is likely. There is no need to risk landscape destruction.

Learning to farm Australia sustainably is about having a good grasp of these risks. All that stands in the way are the mirages and myths with which we surround ourselves.

Our rivers and landscapes are suffering once again and it is not due to drought. It is caused by poor policies and poor management. And these are driven by populist myths.

The critical need is not to drought­-proof the inland, for that is impossible.

It is to myth-proof Australians.