 When we think about Australia, we think about one of the world's driest continents, driest but inhabited continents in the world. But there are people who have been living in this continent for thousands of years and they have lived with the dryness and all the things that come with the driest continent in Israel. So however at the same time we see that a different kind of knowledge about water is propagating in this country and sometimes it becomes important for young people like Jessica to step aside and look into what made this possible. You know the thousands of years of living within the dryness and all the continent in the world. First met Jessica, she was when I first came in, I was actually at that time very unsure of myself 10 years ago and Jessica was a PhD student came to say hello to me and I have heard you work on water and I also work on water and we struck a friendship with each other and I guess in a way we understood each other's perspective where we were coming from although we worked on very different areas and I worked on India and she was working at the time beginning her PhD. The other common ground that we have is both of us are human geographers and both of us have had very long interest in ecological and social justice issues. But what she has done is fantastic, she has published this book, Mary River Country, an Ecological Dialogue with Traditional Owners that really has exposed the way indigenous people of Australia have seen water, lived with water in this country. And as a research fellow in Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies she continued these interests with respect to native title issues. I guess that was a very unbiased aspect of her work and that she is expanding now. She has recently accepted her role as a senior research fellow at the University of Canberra. So it's again having her over here is a sort of midi between the Australian National University and the University of Canberra and she's examining the integration of bushfire risk in urban and regional planning and I'm sure water is playing a very important role in that study. Thank you for that lovely introduction. I'll be working on earth and air next. It's really lovely to be here. I just wanted to reiterate the acknowledgement yesterday of the Traditional Owners of this country where we meet and also the Traditional Owners from along the Mary River who supported my research with whom I have a research agreement with who support me to give presentations such as this one and also the people in the Whamber Whamber and Brapa people have been working with more recently and I'd like to thank the conference organisers for giving me this keynote spot. It's a real pleasure. I like this photo. I took it in 2009. We'd been having about 10 years of drought and the drought was just about to break but I didn't know that then and you can see the dry grass and the storm clouds. This is the Murrumbidgee River floodplain in Gundagai. You can see the bridges that go over it. The town used to be built on this but they moved it up the hill after a flood came through. In Marguerite's keynote yesterday which I keep joking was an introduction to my keynote today. We learned about the importance of knowing nature's cultures or social nations as well as situated knowledges. To this I want to add ecological dialogue and I will get to that in this talk. My talk builds on the work of Marguerite and others about how this situated nature's cultures knowledge is expressed with respect to water management framed by Cartesian dualism. But I speak from the intercultural context in Australia that is the negotiation of indigenous peoples water issues in the Murray-Darling Basin and specifically the southern part of the Murray-Darling Basin. Just in case you don't know where it is, here it is and the Murray-Darling Basin has the three largest rivers in Australia. The Murray River, the Darling River and the Murrumbidgee which flows into the Murray. We've heard a lot already about how the narrow perceptions of water are part of the nature culture binary. When water is framed a simple matter as a resource for the nation as Rowan also spoke about last night, water is separated from its history, ecology and place. As a discrete resource that humans manage through engineering and technical feats water can be moved without regard for the consequences of all the relationships that it holds in place. This is a picture of the Murray River as a plumbing system I suppose. So this is sort of an extreme version which is used. It's a way that people work with the Murray River. We can get a job as a river operator in Canberra to operate the river. To be fair the Murray-Darling Basin Authority have many other images of the Murray River that are not so bleak I suppose would be the term. It's an arid place, most of the Murray-Darling Basin. This is the Darling River and just a couple of photos. This is just some of the incredible industry that we have from the river water out in this semi-arid country. This is Malwala. Lake Malwala used to be a river red-gum forest. And another one, another river red-gum forest. This is under the Hume Weir during the drought. This is now under water because we've been having the rain. This is the Chow Wheeler. No, that's just water, that's a dam. It's a Hume Weir. It's at the headwaters of the Murray. This is out on the Chow Wheeler floodplain, which you heard about yesterday from Anna. This is one of the results of our water management. So we have places that are drowned. We have places that are dry. I encourage you to go there. You have to see it to believe it. This is a salt place, Psyche-Benne Lagoon. This is right next to Milgera. It's almost suburban Milgera. And it's become a salt dump. And that's improved the salt levels in the main Murray River. But we've lost this place. And this very close is another toxic billabong. This one's sulfuric acid. It's more toxic than battery acid. There are many, many billabongs like this in Australia where water was held. And I don't know about the chemistry, but when that water was released and the soil was exposed to air, it became toxic and went orange. You can see the orange along the edge there. So these were the places that sustained life in Australia that we write our national poetry about and now they are not just supporting life, they're threatening life. So in this context, Indigenous people bring a knowledge and a language of connection and place, but are of course constrained in how they can express that knowledge in discourses that privilege science, rationality and reason. The history books tell us that the spiritual homelands of the Murray River peoples have given way to the contemporary priorities of modern agricultural production in this Australia's agricultural heartland. But this portrayal of history is actually what, is actually false. It's what the tool would call modern thinking. Aboriginal people's stories get positioned as a narrative that is spiritual or traditional, whilst the narrative of nation-building is one of economic growth or development. From the modern thinkers' perspectives, these narratives cannot coexist and one must be sacrificed for the other as part of a theological path of progress. This way of thinking is false and critically disables our responses to ecological devastation. The far-reaching relationships that are sustained by water in mesh, both water as a resource for production and water as an ancestral life force. And this is the analysis I undertook by bringing the work of theorists such as Latour, Harroway, Timothy Mitchell, Val Plumwood and many others into dialogue what Indigenous people are saying and doing in response. We've heard a lot about modern, universalist, rationalist knowledge. Let's talk now about the Indigenous knowledge of country. So countries and term Indigenous people use to generally describe their lands and waters that they inherit from their ancestors and their ancestral creator beings. In a very profound sense, country is the place where the rules for existence come from, where law, language and culture are embedded in the landscape. Nature and culture are blended. Humans are within the world and not taking a view of it. We have multiple agencies. This is sort of the more-than-human context. We have multi-species relationships, solidarities and obligations within a sentient ecology, feelings of love, care and attachment towards the environment, moving us away from causal relationships of power. These are communicative relationships. There is an ecological dialogue going on all around us, all the time. This is a photo of Lee Joakim, who has many children, and here are four of his kids. He's standing in front of a canoe tree. So this tree, bark was... The tree was cut and a canoe was made. Many years ago, it's a huge one outside the Yoriyoda Aboriginal Corporation in Barma. You can see some old pictures there of Aboriginal people using canoes to get out onto the river and spearfish. Lee Joakim is a Yoriyoda man and he talks about how he must listen to the river country as part of understanding and responding to poor river health. He told me... He was wondering why people don't listen to the river country and I said, what do you mean by that? And he said, you know, the creatures, the frogs and the crickets, they're not making those noises that tell you that they're healthy and alive. And as Debbie Rose has said, to hear is to witness and to witness is to become entangled. Another really important part of Indigenous knowledge about country is the focus on connections rather than separations and elsewhere, I've called this connectivity, which goes much further than the ecologist concept of connectivity to include history, culture, law, language and so on. This is not a messy, undifferentiated holism but an opportunity to focus on connections and identify those relationships that are important. Crucially, water is not just another participant in connectivity but is a key connecting life force because all living things near water to survive. The life supported by water is not through weak or distant networks, but strong life-giving connections. And once we can understand this, that our lives are held in the hands of other beings and vice versa, we have the groundwork for building physical obligations between species and between all sorts of life forms. As Lee Joakim has said about the Murray River, the importance of the river is to ensure that it is seen as a continuing living being, that it is respected like any other person should be respected, it has got the ability to cleanse itself, it has got the ability to nurture itself and it has got the ability to ensure that the life that it touches upon also has an ongoing process. Now you can no longer spear a fish from a canoe on the Murray River because the water is too murky to even see them, it's carrying 40 times the sediment load. In any case, the native fish are outnumbered by the introduced carp. Mary, money money elder, Mary Papin, has talked to me about how she can't take her kids and grandkids to collect bush tucker because river regulation has reduced the frequency size and extensive flow regimes and little creeks that used to flood up now and then and were the best places to go, they no longer do so. Not in Jerry Elder, Agnes Ringney has talked to me who's now passed away now has talked to me about how she grew up on the Murray River and how the food from the Murray River supplemented the mission food and how they used to go go fishing with spears from bamboo. She talked about how the river is in her blood and she feels part of the river because the river sustained her. She also told me about a place along the river that they were forbidden to go to and about the beauty of the place the clear water and the white sand. Now a slow muddy flow of regulated water goes past this place. Traditional owners are talking about a culture that is not taught in school or through books but through active practice on country. This is indeed a situated knowledge. In their lifetimes the elders have experienced rapid change. Many of the large dams have been built since the 1930s and they have grown up being able to live off the river and now they are unable to teach their children. This is a rupturing knowledge that has been passed down through the generations. Unique to this place, it's a contemporary dispossession of Indigenous people's cultural heritage and Lee Jo Aiken explains it in explicit terms that he feels that he, as the river dies he as a Yorta Yorta man his people are also dying. I want to now turn to Indigenous people's agency around cultural flows and their rights. There's a lot of amazing Indigenous leaders from this part of the country who have been strategising about creating a space where you've got a degraded river over allocated competition for water and of increasing economic value. Now the logo here is the Marila Darling River's Indigenous Nations an alliance of Indigenous people from along the rivers that I did my doctoral thesis with and there's a group photo of them next to Blaring Dam and a photo from when they signed a memorandum of understanding with the Marila Darling Basin Commission also some photos from another workshop and a protest which they held about the dying river red gun forests which they held in Melbourne with environmental groups like that. In lobbying for greater recognition of their water issues Indigenous people in South East Australia have developed strategies and theories around an Indigenous water allocation and the broader notion of cultural flows in response to two key triggers the poor environmental health the inland river country and the historic and contemporary failure of the Australian state and common law to recognise the property rights and political status cultural flows is a term that strategically follows the language of environmental flows I can just imagine the meetings where you'd be hearing environmental flows environmental flows and someone saying what about cultural flows Indigenous people use the term as an intercultural translation tool that expresses the connection between culture and water and the absence in water policy and management of Indigenous water values this is now is now a changing space. They cannot rely on environmental flows to look after country because environmental flows is blind to law, language and culture Mary Papin those little creeks of value to her will not necessarily match the environmental priorities for the very small environmental water allocations. A minimal definition of the concept of cultural flows is that it is a way of returning water to the river country envisioned by the traditional owners so it's very much in this context of over allocation. In keeping with a holistic approach cultural flows are often articulated by the traditional owners as a flow of water that reconnects diverse values that depend on healthy freshwater ecologies, spiritual, social, environmental, economic values and so on. As Yorta Yorta elder Henry Atkinson has said cultural flows are a natural flow which allows everything to grow cultural flows include your history and your culture so you see the mixing of the binaries unfortunately the use of the word culture is a double-edged sword for Indigenous people and here's a table I use sometimes in talks just to articulate the difference between natural resource management and caring for country which is of course a simplification but people have talked to me about how they challenge to communicate caring for country in a natural resource management context where NRM is characterised as modern universal rational technical and cultural neutral and caring for country is traditional local, emotional, spiritual and culturally specific and very easily marginalised and interpreted in a very narrow frame. Another key problem by adopting the term culture Indigenous people express their values embedded in water but they run the risk of reducing their legal and political rights to narrowly define cultural activities. Another key problem is with cultural flows is how to interpret a philosophy about country into an amount of water that can be recognised as an Indigenous water allocation yet emphasising the importance of an Indigenous water allocation as part of their water rights arguments is to reduce the language of connectivity to a slice of the water pie. These are the contradictory binds that Indigenous people face when translating meaning and rights to binary frames that hyper separate tradition and change nature and culture and so on. No doubt environmentalists have had to face strategic compromises with environmental water allocations are thinking that posits the river as just another consumer of river water and not the source of the water. Regarding Indigenous water issues it's not an either or decision that needs to be made. To deal with the complexity and breadth of the Indigenous water agenda strategies require a suite of approaches in combination and there's a lot of discussion about things like the Indigenous governance of environmental water and so on. Consumptive water allocations, domestic water, they have tartar water, cultural water as well as more opportunities to do participatory decision making and so on. So as to begin to meet the broader cultural flows caring for country and Indigenous rights agendas. The language of connectivity country and cultural flows will continue to be a part of this intercultural translation process that resonates with an audience with big ideas about framing water and how we can build a better water ethic. Now I want to turn now to some of the work that Yakula are doing which is an Indigenous corporation with a membership of Whamber Whamber and Parapapapa people who are the traditional owners of country in southern New South Wales and Northern Victoria around Denilikwyn. And this is a map of the Edward and Wakul rivers and the Murray rivers as well. The yellow areas that the Edward and Wakul river system but they're also the forest that are sustained here. So it's a network of rivers and wetlands and forests and it's surrounded by really flat plains that are for grazing and rice production and Denilikwyn actually has the largest rice mill in the southern hemisphere it was closed during the drought but it's now reopened and Indigenous people form part of the seasonal labour force in the mill. Yakula at times with the Mildren Alliance from the Murray river and environmental NGOs have been lobbying for land and water manage that is more in line with nature's cultures, situated with country. Some of this work includes getting the state forest transitioned into national park lands an Indigenous protected area for the Weirai forest making arguments about cultural flows and an Indigenous water allocations and many other matters, diverse matters such as community health and so on. They have had some success but it remains a contested space and I'll read to you from sorry I'll read to you from a couple of months ago the State Parliamentary Committee came to Denilikwyn to receive evidence there's a new Liberal Government in the State of New South Wales the Labor Government had previously transferred state forest land to national parks including one area the Weirai forest to become an Indigenous protected area this is now being reviewed under the new Government and the committee asked Yakula Board Member for your see walking here in the forest with her sons they said Miss Flower, we are grappling with the history of this forest and we were told yesterday and it is in numerous submissions to us that the forest in this region were grown by the white man as a traditional owner how would you respond to this statement this is 2012 in Denilikwyn so this is Debbie has to then say well I would respond by saying that the stories that have been passed down from the elders for generations tell us otherwise we have burial grounds that are thousands of years old and mid insights that are at least 10,000 year olds and of course there are these scar lots of scar trees the scar trees being the canoe trees so this is sort of the contested space and you can see the way that I haven't seen the submissions although I'm looking forward to following that up but I suppose asserting that all the trees and the where I forest are planted is either to erase its natural values relying on the nature culture binary or its indigenous values relying on the tradition change binary or both it's a really complex space for indigenous people to express themselves and it's really contested because so many other peoples now call this place home and have their own connections to this country Debbie Flower is reviving the Whamber Whamber weaving tradition along with other women and she is keen for water to be returned to those places in the forest where the best grasses for basket weaving grow there is an opportunity for this with environmental water but only if the criteria is broad and out as basket weaving is not included in ecological values and so getting an indigenous protected area and getting access to decision making over water is really important for this sort of management and I just want to show this is a a little translation tool that Yakora have used in a number of their submissions I've made the fonts higher and larger and smaller just to emphasise it a bit but it's just trying to express the sort of different approaches to how you would look after the where I forest and I think it's a really great way a great communication tool because it shows how the same activities remain but there's just a different emphasis they go from the current, the state forest management which is a focus on commercial timber harvesting firewood collection grazing recreational use and traditional owner use is the hierarchy of use they want this to move to cultural and environmental management with traditional owner use then the management of recreational use and then controlling the firewood collection it is also possible to have selective timber harvesting as part of this management and also as part of their knowledge tradition of country which of course includes economic values so just to don't know how I'm going for time but I'm at the end bit so I hope that's okay forest water culture right now it's raining which is great for nature and culture and you don't have to make a rights argument to have the rainfall on your country the wet conditions however do take the pressure off water reform when the weather goes into the next drought cycle we will see again those pressure points highlighted as competing and aligning arguments are made about water policy and the river ecologies again push to the brink the traditional owners have a language that identifies water as the key connecting life force and they also have a language that expresses loss about the magnitude of what we are losing and they have a language that draws our attention to the stark logic of placing river health first and they are doing things about this and they are getting outcomes for their country we need to peg down the authority of universal knowledge join the ecological dialogue and embrace the uncertainty of river variability in order to better live with water for we cannot live without it there is no cultural flow from a dead river nor are there indigenous or non-indigenous water rights and this is the ecological context that we need to return to and then frame that ecological context within country you can draw on many different knowledge traditions to critique modern water management but why not listen to the traditional owners who call this place home thank you thanks for that beautiful presentation really some serious thoughts to take on do you have any questions yes the water initiative recognized the cultural means of other people but at the time didn't recognize their economic needs but since then I am telling you so far as governments set up a water trust to help our original groups economic means what's happened with that under the government actually I wanted if I may just interrupt I also wanted to ask you you did say that well things are changing a little bit and I would like you to really reflect in more detail about what is changing and whether or not it's a co-option or in what way they are changing which really there's a lot going on and it's national because there's water reform across Australia so indigenous people are involved in that and they are strategically getting involved to on a number of fronts where my work comes from the the destruction of country which undermines rights and culture is really in the forefront of a lot of this language in other places where there may be rivers that are not regulated where country is healthy and where there's not an over allocation of consumptive water use there's more space to be able to talk about economic and consumptive water licenses in the Mara Darling Basin there was a cap put on consumptive licenses in 1994 which has been problematic but it's sort of a line in the sand of there's no more yes under state legislation there are opportunities under the Water Act that for indigenous people to get small amounts of water I mean there's barriers in terms of the cost and the infrastructure involved and so those things are being worked through I don't know if it predates the National Water Initiative actually I think it's 2000 the state legislation whereas the National Water Initiative I think it's 2004 the National Water Initiative was the first explicit recognition of indigenous water values in a sort of national water framing although it was quite qualified and with a focus on Navtado rights and a committed recognition of indigenous relationships and with country as well as their political and legal standing so the space for Yakua to have there's different spaces for example you might not be able to get a consumptive water allocation but it is possible to trade environmental water if the trading is if that money is then used for environmental purposes I don't understand the rules exactly it's a really complicated system but there are opportunities to generate income however it's a really because ecology and economy of course are in the binary tradition in oppositional corners and you can't have their opposites so that binary tells us what happened we necessarily had to sacrifice the Murray River for our agriculture it tells us what looking after the Murray will do it will be at the sacrifice of our agriculture and it denies the logic that a healthy river supports both our economies and ecologies and you do not have economies from a failing river but because of that separation when indigenous people are often matched with environmental issues then bring economy into the conversation it's seen as being authentic it's seen as not being indigenous and it's seen as not being a legitimate part of the conversation but what we're losing out by we're losing out on listening to indigenous people about what they're saying and we're also losing out on thinking about the way ecology and economy relate to each other in the broader water management because of course the indigenous water rights agenda is only ever going to have a small the small amounts of water in small places the whole system needs an overhaul if we're going to be able to turn it around so we need to get those big ideas into the larger conversations Yes, thanks Jessica my understanding is that the negotiations between Murray and the government has recently been decided to give the Bicano River to say this is personal and I wonder what would happen if you gave the river system to say this is personal in the negotiations and what also if we could move it into an international dimension what would happen if Australia signed the UN Charter on the rights of indigenous people and there were coalitions built with other indigenous people like Canadians With regard to the personhood comment I bring up Leslie in this work where she talks about when we say things like that that the river should be given personhood it sounds crazy because of the hyper separation between human and non-human and so the qualities that a human talk, communication agency cannot be part of the non-human world and what Leslie has written about recently but a lot of people are writing about is that we need to address the binary and have a less exclusive notion about personhood in order to make this idea of the river as person less alien and more of a to understand what we share rather than those differences which is that we turn to all the time turn to all the time with respect to the rights of indigenous I'll just say one thing about that I have a friend from Ross who I'm currently co-authoring a report on about Yakua cultural water issues I'll be out maybe this year he went to the UN forum on indigenous water issues that was in New York I think last year and got cultural flows adopted the language of the sort of the strategizing that the indigenous people were doing along the Murray River he got that sort of put into the sort of the not national global indigenous language around water that's really interesting because a lot of the was actually one of the really early you know you have these moments when you hear the hear things and it was what Monica Monica Morgan said to me that the UN's water rights human rights of water takes the agenda in the wrong direction it was one of those ones where you go oh I'm hearing something here what is it you know your humans have this right to water for all their things and when you resituate that into country you can see what Monica is saying so I don't know about about that but a lot of this will be worked out in those these sorts of issues will be worked out in local places in water management plans rather than on the international scene but I think that solidarity across nations is really important okay I don't see any other many questions but I really welcome you to talk to Jessica and also Julie about their work and their presentations and on behalf of everybody and the conference organizers I really express my gratitude and appreciation to Julie and Jessica for two wonderful presentations and wonderful words that you're doing thank you