Cr John Holmes moved the motion as he and his elected colleagues debated what to do after the paper wrote to the council complaining its water had been cut off before it went to print on January 25 1872.

It delayed an entire print run.

Another council leader had just lambasted the paper, saying it had also been publishing "childish" complaints from members of the public raising their own concerns about water supplies.

It was as if the council didn't think supplying water to Bendigo was its problem.

Here's the thing, though: It had just begun operating Bendigo's beleaguered water system and was spending £100,000 (AU$22,707,493.9 in today's money, by one estimate) buying the vast network of pipes and reservoirs.

So the Advertiser felt it was perfectly reasonable to complain.

"As it is essential that we should have a supply of water for the boiler of our printing-machine; this neglect on the part of the Council's servants was not only annoying, but absolutely injurious to our own interests and those of the public," the editor said in an article following the blow-up in council chambers.

Just what were these councillors thinking?

Bendigo's councillors had no doubt when they took over the Bendigo Water Works that it was one of the most important decisions they would ever make.

The stakes were high.

Droughts, a booming mining industry and a growing population were wreaking havoc on water supplies.

The city had already narrowly avoided running out in the mid-1860s.

Mines had shut because they could not get the water needed to crush gold-bearing rocks. Large numbers of workers were laid off.

"Should it [the drought] continue much longer the results will be most disastrous," the Advertiser reported in a grim story in the dying days of the year 1865.

The problem, ultimately, was that no major watercourse ran anywhere near Bendigo. The city's creek had always been small and was often awash in polluted mining sludge.

A business called the Bendigo Water Works Company had been operating a series of rainwater reservoirs but it was looking to sell.

The water game was too unreliable. The BWWC was struggling to find investors willing to pay to upgrade its struggling infrastructure.

Victoria's government had been talking up a solution for years involving a huge water channel connecting Bendigo to rivers in the Great Dividing Range but the council was not holding its breath the project would be completed any time soon.

The "Coliban Scheme" had already been beset by delays, cost blowouts and well-founded allegations of government incompetence.

A year earlier, an astronomically expensive pipe designed to syphon water through one part of the scheme had literally exploded, twice, during testing.

Water had surged out with a bang some compared to the sound of an eight pound cannon in an incident later blamed on penny-pinching bureaucrats using the wrong building materials.

So the council was not crazy to think it might be prudent to buy into the water game itself.

Its time in charge of the Bendigo Water Works got off to a rocky start.

People complained of weak water pressure.

The hospital's pipes ran dry at one point.

And a boiling hot, unsanitary summer that would end with a dysentery outbreak and 20 deaths.

The council thought it was doing a great job and pointed to a series of improvements it was making throughout the system.

A number of councillors could not understand why the Advertiser had had the temerity to criticise it.

Why, the council had never fielded a complaint through its official channels, even if the Advertiser was publishing a steady stream of them from people presumed to be ratepayers.

"There is no paper whose comments on the proceedings of local bodies are so ... unpatriotic ... bitter and unfair," mayor Dugald Macdougall would say at one point that summer.

For its part, the Advertiser concluded the council was completely out of its depth.

"It might be thought that a body of men, finding themselves placed in a difficult position, and knowing as they must know that everything has been going wrong with the water works since they fell into their hands, would avail themselves of the earliest change of frankly meeting public complaints, and of making some statement of a reassuring character," the editor said after Cr Holmes suggested cutting off the Advertiser's water supply.

"Instead of doing this, however, they have met the first remonstrance made against their mismanagement with indignant bluster."

Maybe people were being harsh on the council, historian Geoffrey Russell says.

"To be fair, [it] had inherited a tired system that would have failed that hot summer regardless of who ran it, but this excuse held little water with angry ratepayers as their complaints flooded in," he wrote in his 2009 book Water for Gold! The Fight to Quench Victoria's Goldfields.

Whatever the case, Cr Holmes' idea to shut off the Advertiser's water supply came to naught.

Mayor MacDougall conceded complaints should go to a specially convened water committee for review.

As the months wore on, a number of councillors found themselves beset by a niggling question that hung in the back of their minds.

Like this story? Here are some more from this regular history series:

What if the Coliban Scheme was completed and turned the council's very expensive water works purchase into a white elephant? Wasn't that effectively what would happen when the government finally connected Bendigo to the Coliban Scheme?

Competent engineers were now in charge of that project and were making headway.

Councillors ended up talking themselves into asking the colony's parliament to cancel its works to link Bendigo to the Coliban Scheme.

The matter got as far as the floor of parliament before it was booted out on a technicality, which was just as well. It would have left the city to rely on rain water.

The 150 years that have followed have proven the city would not have lasted without a proper, consistent water supply.

"Ironically, instead of halting the Coliban Scheme, [the] motion spurred the government to advance its plans to buy the ... Water Works and complete the scheme unhindered," Mr Russell wrote in Water for Gold!

The government buyout began in February, 1873. The Coliban Scheme linked into Bendigo in 1877.

This story is the latest in the Bendigo Weekly's regular history series entitled WHAT HAPPENED?

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