Enacting multiple river realities in the performance of an environmental flow in Australia’s Murray‐Darling Basin

Jackson, Sue

doi:10.1111/1745-5871.12513

Cited by 7 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…Under the regulatory regime of the settler state, water is regarded as a resource derived from hydrologic processes, such as groundwater recharge or monsoonal rain. To be governable, waters that move across or under the ground need to be bounded and rendered divisible into separate categorical units that can be delimited in space and time (Jackson 2022; Norman et al 2012). For Aboriginal peoples, however, water eludes this type of classification and mechanisms such as the Reserve present ‘a profound conceptual challenge represented by this ontological and cosmological difference’ (Jackson and Barber 2013:16).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ontological Collisions in the Northern Territory's Aboriginal Water Rights Policy

Jackson,

O'Donnell,

Godden

et al. 2023

Oceania

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Amid a renewed push to extract water for agriculture and mining, Indigenous advocacy in northern Australia has resulted in the introduction of a new water allocation mechanism: a reserve of water to be retained for the use and benefit of Indigenous communities. Our socio‐legal analysis of the Oolloo Water Allocation Plan shows that the Strategic Aboriginal Water Reserves carry essential hallmarks of neoliberal property relations and are founded in the modernist mode of regulating extracted water as a commodity divisible from land, amenable to partitioning and disarticulated from socio‐cultural relations. Informed by ethnographic material from the Daly River region gathered over almost a century, we describe the hydro‐social relations that are created through customary traditions and practices, water planning and licencing, and the interaction between different scales of water movement and decision‐making by both the state and Traditional Owners. The paper contributes in several ways to research that has identified ontological conflicts as central to disagreements over water and pointed to the difficulty of articulating theoretical framings of ontological difference with the practical work of water negotiations. It shows how the new Indigenous water rights discourse that coincided with the commodification of water in wider Australia shaped the way in which Aboriginal people of this region have more recently articulated their relationships to the Daly River and the limits to state recognition of those relationships. We find that the Reserve model is unable to recognize the capacity of water to connect and unify people and other beings, as well as to define boundaries between them. Within a regime that facilitates resource extraction, a limited opening has been created for Aboriginal people to benefit from this model of economic development, yet we argue that there is reason to fear that the divisions the Aboriginal Water Reserve enacts between waters and land presents significant socio‐cultural risks.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ontological Collisions in the Northern Territory's Aboriginal Water Rights Policy

Jackson,

O'Donnell,

Godden

et al. 2023

Oceania

Self Cite

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“…Listings and management plans suggest that both the preservation of values and additional restoration are possible and a number of activities have been undertaken to support this, including some trap wall reconstruction and an engineered fish ladder (MacClean 2012; NSW Government 2022). The ability to restore water in the area (Jackson 2022) and to support traditional custodians in leading restoration efforts and governance will be key to success. Discussions are ongoing regarding the potential for World Heritage listing and an application is in development (Ngemba CWP 2019).…”

Section: Current Approaches To Preserving and Managing Water Heritagementioning

confidence: 99%

Indigenous Water Engineering and Aquaculture Systems in Australia: The Budj Bim Cultural Landscape and Baiame’s Ngunnhu (the Brewarrina Aboriginal Fish Traps)

Daniell,

Moggridge

2024

Blue Papers

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In Australia, First Peoples have practiced sustainable forms of water management for millennia. They have done so by respectfully caring for Country through their use of engineering and maintenance processes, including sophisticated fish and eel trapping structures and weir systems. Some of the largest continuing sites of water engineering and aquaculture in the world are still visible and used by local Aboriginal groups – the Budj Bim in Victoria and Baiame’s Ngunnhu (Brewarrina Aboriginal fish traps) in New South Wales (NSW). Recent scholarship and successful heritage listings, including the World Heritage listing of the Budj Bim Cultural Landscape and work by and with traditional custodians in these river systems, are starting to bring into public discourse and knowledge these sophisticated and important places of global cultural significance. The principles used in the design of these systems, and the social and environmental contexts of their maintenance and convening power over millennia, are particularly important as we navigate new technologically mediated forms of water management today and into the future. These management challenges include communities in Australia and globally working on the importance of significant places, values, rights, justice and voice for Indigenous peoples in building sustainable futures, including through innovation and safe, sustainable and responsible cybernetic approaches to water governance and the SDGs.

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Drawing from Indigenous ontologies and practices to rethink European water policy

Linton

Pahl‐Wostl

2023

River Research & Apps

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The purpose of this article is to begin a discussion of how Indigenous ontologies and practices might be brought to bear on water policy and management in Europe. Such a discussion represents an ironic historical shift in the sense that these ontologies and practices have survived and continue to evolve in countries that have been characterized by European colonization (i.e., Australia, Canada, US, New Zealand, countries of Africa and South America, and not excluding the Sámi people of northern Europe). Increasingly research and policy interest has been directed toward the inclusion of Indigenous knowledge and perspectives in water governance in some of these places, especially Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Here, we ask whether they might be a source of inspiration for rethinking the water policy in Europe. We argue that certain elements of Indigenous water knowledge and practices can be drawn from to reform European water policy on the ontological premise that people are part of nature and based on establishing and nurturing moral and legal relationships between water and people based on principles of respect and reciprocity.

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Enacting multiple river realities in the performance of an environmental flow in Australia’s Murray‐Darling Basin

Cited by 7 publications

References 35 publications

Ontological Collisions in the Northern Territory's Aboriginal Water Rights Policy

Ontological Collisions in the Northern Territory's Aboriginal Water Rights Policy

Indigenous Water Engineering and Aquaculture Systems in Australia: The Budj Bim Cultural Landscape and Baiame’s Ngunnhu (the Brewarrina Aboriginal Fish Traps)

Drawing from Indigenous ontologies and practices to rethink European water policy

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