It told the story of how “water merchants” of the 19th century made fortunes by diverting the flow of the Nine Mile Creek - Stanley’s old name - to serve diggings down the hill. In just one wet year, 1856, the exhibition informed us, “thousands rushed the Nine Mile Creek; in consequence, there was great trouble about water and water rights, which caused endless litigation ... all the hills for miles around were tunneled for water, and an astonishing number of springs were opened up”. Litigation about water rights and springs, as it happens, remains Stanley’s story today. Wandering the exhibition at the Athenaeum over summer, you might have heard the bellowing of a big motor at the roundabout outside. Most days, a truck hauling two massive stainless steel containers disturbs the peace of the village, grinding away down the narrow winding tourist road towards Beechworth, eight kilometres away.

It’s a two-way trip. The truck - a B-Double - first has to come up the road to fill its tanks with bore water. This is how a single modern water-miner transports 19 million litres of water a year from the water table beneath Stanley’s plateau to Albury, where it is bottled by the Japanese company Asahi Beverages. A lot of the villagers and fruit and nut-growing landholders of Stanley have been angered by this venture ever since 2013, when a fellow named Tim Carey, whose family owns the Ballarat-based Black Mount Spring Water, blew in and purchased a small farm and orchard on Cue Springs Road, south of the village, under the name of Stanley Pastoral. The Cue Springs water mining plant near Stanley. Credit:Jason South The property had a generous water allocation for irrigation: 50 million litres a year from “surface water” - a dam fed by one of those old gold-mining diversion tunnels.

But Mr Carey successfully applied to the local water authority - Goulburn-Murray Water - to swap part of that allocation for the right to build a bore 60 metres deep and to extract 19 million litres of groundwater each year. His property, locals learned soon enough, would become a water-mining exporter, with all 19 million litres trucked off to the big bottling plant in Albury. Other Stanley properties use a fraction of their allocations to irrigate their chestnuts, walnuts, apples, berries and grapes - water that soaks back into the plateau’s water table. Stanley Pastoral’s entire groundwater allocation would become high-value “spring water”, guzzled from plastic bottles by people willing to pay for the privilege rather than bothering to turn on a kitchen tap. The locals and their Indigo Shire weren’t impressed. The shire complained to the Victorian government citing environmental concerns, and unanimously knocked back Mr Carey’s application to build infrastructure required for his business to go ahead.

And thus began a new history of litigation over Stanley’s water. Stanley residents protest against water mining in the district. Credit:Jason South A citizens' group, estimated by the shire mayor of the time to represent 99 per cent of the Stanley district’s 700 or so residents, got riled when the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) ruled against the council and declared Mr Carey’s plan was valid. The villagers began raising money to take the matter to the Victorian Supreme Court. Raffles were organised, with famed Yackandandah potter John Dermer donating pots, while artists and fine furniture makers offered their wares, too. The group hosted dinners and held trivia nights, supporters opened their gardens, a crowd-funding campaign was launched.

Over several years, the Stanley Rural Community Inc would raise somewhere between $40,000 and $50,000. Their lawyers operated pro bono. The Supreme Court action, however, failed. A judge ruled that VCAT had interpreted the Water Act (1989) correctly. The Stanley community proved tenacious, and argued for the right to appeal. But a few days before Christmas last year, three Court of Appeal judges deemed the Supreme Court’s previous ruling was “fundamentally correct”. Leave to appeal was refused. The community was crushed. Water mining had won. The Water Act, of course, doesn’t take into account the effect of big trucks transporting large amounts of water over narrow country roads.

Indeed, the nearby Alpine Shire, which now has three water-mining sites from which trucks rumble off to the Asahi bottling plant, and the Towong Shire, which worries it will be next, have joined an alliance with the Indigo Shire to figure out strategies. Meanwhile the big trucks, each hauling 38,000 litres of water, rumble along the narrow roads of the north-east, startling visitors in places like Beechworth and Yackandandah - and here and there, landholders who can’t make a go of their farms look at the money to be made from bottled water and start thinking about sinking a bore. And just as everywhere in this dry land, no one quite knows what’s happening to the aquifer beneath Stanley. Locals say they remember bores running dry during the last great drought.