"It was incredible. Thousands of people drove out to the north and south headlands to gaze on the spectacle. The navy rang me to tell me where to moor the first iceberg they had ever welcomed to an Australian port. I announced my electronics company was going to carve it into "Dicksicles" that people could use to chill their cocktails.
And then the penny dropped, but fortunately, everyone had a good laugh."
It became immortalized as one of the world's best April Fool's Day jokes of all time.
But now Australia is desperately short of fresh water. It has been gripped by drought since 1999. Its major cities, where two in every three Australians live, will start to run dry in as little as four years, as much from the evaporation of dwindling catchments swept by remorselessly hot winds as from (increasingly restricted) consumption.
"I'm going to look at this again," says Smith, who says the age of more efficient super tankers may have met the dire need for more water at just the right time.
"We don't need to try and get the giant tabular bergs all the way to Adelaide or Perth at all," he says. "Why not just nudge them a little bit faster to latitudes where they will start to melt copiously, and meet them with a properly equipped flotilla of super tankers to take the water on board and then more efficiently deliver it right into city water supplies."
Smith is very well connected in business, government and conservation circles. "People might laugh at the idea," he says, "but perhaps not as much as before. Then we might all have another good long think about it."
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