Leah Maree Gibbs

A beautiful soaking rain: environmental value and water beyond Eurocentrism

Current approaches to valuing nature within environmental and natural resource management are based on and limited by Eurocentric knowledge and experience of northern temperate nature. Methods based on separation and domination marginalise other ways of knowing nature and thinking about value. The aims of this paper are to unsettle current ways of thinking about water values; to decentre Eurocentric thinking about water management; and to present a different way of thinking about values associated with water, based on an empirical study of the Lake Eyre Basin in central Australia. The paper takes a multidisciplinary approach, drawing on multiple knowledges of Australian water, including indigenous, local settler, and scientific knowledge, and on lessons from Australian Aboriginal people and the academic discourse of Aboriginal Studies. In particular, it considers how a focus on variability—a concept emerging from the Australian landscape (rather than from northern temperate landscapes)—might foster different thinking about water and value. Variability takes as a starting point the diversity, change, and complexity of water and values, as opposed to separation and domination. This focus highlights two points currently marginalised in dominant practice of environmental valuation: that the variability of Australian water regimes is valued, and that values themselves are characterised by variability.

Water places: cultural, social and more-than-human geographies of nature

Abstract Cultural, social and more-than-human approaches to nature research are largely held apart in the discipline of human geography. In this paper I argue that these three approaches can be brought together to good effect. The paper presents a situated account of ‘water places’ in inland Australia—namely the artesian bores, boredrains and boredrain wetlands of the Birdsville Track—in order to demonstrate that together, these three approaches can reveal the complex interactions that form particular places, and comprise a more-than-human world. This account explores the layers of interaction that have formed these water places, including their insertion into the landscape through drilling, and their various roles: in opening the country for stock; in the Australian colonial imagination as means for developing the inland and the nation; as tools for displacing Aboriginal peoples from their country; as a focus for life in the desert; as key to mining and petroleum exploration; and in local controversy. It illustrates their physical and conceptual transformation from ‘bores’ to ‘wetlands’. The paper argues that cultural, social and more-than-human geographies are needed in order to effectively govern human relations with ‘nature’, and to better understand how to live in and with a more-than-human world.

Just add water: colonisation, water governance, and the Australian inland

Water has played a key role in the development of the Australian inland and the nation. For European colonists, the dry and variable landscape challenged ideas about nature imported from northern temperate regions. I argue first, that colonists brought with them ideas for ordering nature and tools for transforming landscapes that led to inappropriate and destructive water management and the silencing of local voices and knowledge systems. Secondly, colonial patterns of ordering and transforming landscapes are ongoing, but new ways of governing water, which challenge colonialism, are emerging. In the first section of the paper I discuss colonial relationships with water; in particular the methods of irrigation, river diversion, and bore drilling. In the second section I consider contemporary manifestations of colonial relationships between humans and water, focusing on the bureaucratic separation of land and water, the problematic definition of a river, and the ongoing desire to drought-proof the inland. In the third section I examine emerging ways of governing Australian water, which emphasise knowledge and interconnection, and in so doing challenge ongoing colonial relationships. I describe these two ways of governing water as existing in tension; a tension between engineering-based and knowledge-based approaches to water governance.

Arts-science collaboration, embodied research methods, and the politics of belonging: 'SiteWorks' and the Shoalhaven River, Australia

Arts-science collaboration is gaining increasing attention in geography and other disciplines, in part due to its ability to ‘do’ social, cultural and political work. This paper considers the work of SiteWorks, a series of projects initiated by Bundanon Trust – an Australian public company. SiteWorks involves arts practitioners, scientists, other scholars and local people creating works in response to the Bundanon site, on the Shoalhaven River, southeastern Australia. The paper draws on my experience as a SiteWorks participant, and poses two questions. What does this arts-science collaboration contribute to an understanding of the more-than-human world of this site? What are the methodological implications of the collaborative, embodied research methodology? The study finds that SiteWorks informs a politics of belonging. Understanding belonging has implications for thinking and action towards plant and animal life, and for the highly contested realms of human identity, indigeneity and migration. Unsettling fixed notions of belonging is essential for learning to live with the contingency presented by contemporary environmental change. Here I propose a ‘passing-through place’; a place not permanently dwelt in but vital nonetheless. Secondly, the study finds that collaborative, embodied research methodology reveals and challenges our practices, invites new modes of investigation, and presents new questions and insights into place and practice. Embodied methods heighten awareness of the more-than-human world, presenting opportunity for more ethical co-existence. The academy is presently witnessing increasing attention to impact and non-traditional output. Despite ongoing challenges, collaborative, embodied research practice presents one avenue for attending to these imperatives.

Killing Sharks: cultures and politics of encounter and the sea

Australia Day 2014 began badly for sharks. The day before-25 January-lines of large baited hooks were rolled out, 1 km from the shore along some of Western Australias most popular beaches. Within 24 hours the first shark was caught. Hauled alongside a boat, the animal was shot four times in the head with a rifle and its body dumped further offshore. It was a 3m tiger shark.

Bottles, bores, and boats: agency of water assemblages in post/colonial inland Australia

Australian water politics is marked by conceptual and bureaucratic separation of water as discrete matter. The source of this politics of separation is colonial relations with water and the Australian continent. Yet, analysis of the materiality of water illuminates the agency of water as part of an assemblage. This paper seeks to unsettle the treatment of water as separate, discrete matter. It asks how political responses to the public problem of water would change were we to take seriously the vitality of nonhuman bodies. In order to investigate this question, the paper presents an analysis of six objects from the inland deserts of eastern central Australia—two bottles, two bores, and two boats—derived from field and archival research. The analysis draws on recent material approaches and a broadly postcolonial literature to argue that ‘taking seriously’ the matter of water might provide a productive means of reframing the politics of water, by using the concept of the ‘agency of assemblages’ to replace the notion of water as separate. Furthermore, paying greater attention to local Indigenous knowledge provides an alternate epistemology upon which to base decision-making, which both unsettles the separation of water and contributes to an ongoing process of decolonisation.

Social media experiments: Scholarly practice and collegiality

We draw out and seek to build on two key insights in Kitchin et al. (2013), namely the possibilities of social media for transforming knowledge production practices and for generating new spaces of collegiality and communality. Most promising are capacities to shape the terms of academic labour and to disrupt binaries of core/periphery, research/impact and academic/public.

Urban Water Governance Failure and Local Strategies for Overcoming Water Shortages in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

In Tanzanias largest city, Dar es Salaam, water supply does not meet the needs of the community. In response, people adopt multiple strategies to secure adequate water for their daily requirements. This paper investigates urban water provision and governance in Dar es Salaam, and has two aims: to investigate the causes of urban water failure; and to examine the full range of strategies employed by the local community to overcome water shortages. We critique the socioeconomic implications of both water shortages themselves and the methods used to overcome them. The paper draws on a household survey and key informant interviews in Temeke, one of the citys three municipalities. We find that failing urban infrastructure and rapid urbanisation place additional pressure on water supply, but argue that the primary cause of water shortages is water governance failure.

Conflict in Common: Heritage-making in Cape York

ABSTRACT The outstanding natural and cultural values of Cape York have been acknowledged for decades, but those decades have been characterised by deep conflict. Non-government organisation intervention in local politics has seen a forceful push for nominating some or all of the Cape York Peninsula as a World Heritage Site. We illuminate the authorised heritage discourse at work in heritage-making, and highlight contested issues of ownership, governance, authenticity, and value. These themes contribute to the possibility of marginalising the voices of local people who wish to contribute to heritage-making in Cape York. Politics infuses all aspects of heritage-making in Cape York, and the specific experiences on Cape York reflect larger political processes occurring in World Heritage discourse. The paper draws on interviews undertaken in May and June 2012.

Understanding Place as ‘Home’ and ‘Away’ through Practices of Bird-watching

ABSTRACT Bird-watching is an increasingly popular leisure activity. Previous research has taken for granted the identity of people who watch birds, often categorised by their level of skilled practice as ‘dude’, ‘birder’ or ‘twitcher’. Feminist geographers encourage us to explore identity work as an outcome of the reciprocal relationships between practices and place. Our feminist approach illustrates that the practices of bird-watching are always much more than categorising birds as species. This paper illustrates how the practices of bird-watching are integral to the making and remaking of sense of place as ‘home’ and ‘away’, to sustain identities beyond accepted categories of ‘dude’, ‘birder’ and ‘twitcher’. The creation and application of different types of ‘bird-lists’ helps to explain the ways in which practices of bird-watching facilitate making sense of place as simultaneously ‘home’, ‘away’ and habitat, as well as the identity work of home-maker, citizen-scientist and tourist. Our insights into these leisure practices of bird-watching are drawn from analysis of data gathered from 21 people who actively bird-watch and reside on the South Coast, New South Wales, Australia by combining research methods of talking, walking, drawing and photography.