This volume of essays explores the significance of water and the current ecological crisis and examines this from both scientific and theological insights. It also examines the relevance of key biblical passages relating to water as a positive and a negative force. Contributors to this volume come from Australia, South Africa and the USA and a variety of disciplines. The cover design is an indigenous Australian artists depiction of the biblical theme of the Transfiguration in terms of local water traditions of life and death cycles of the lotus flower.
Voted The Times' Book of the Year, Salt Creek is an Australian historical novel about a family pursuing their dreams, duty, and displacement. ‘Salt Creek is a love song to a lost world' The Guardian A story of love, duty, hardship and intolerance through the eyes of a strong woman in 1850s colonial Australia. The comfortable and respectable life Hester Finch now leads in Chichester, England, could not be further from the hardship her family endured on leaving Adelaide for Salt Creek in 1855. Yet she finds her thoughts drawn back to that remote, beautiful and inhospitable outcrop of South Australia and the connections she and her siblings forged there, far from the city society in which they had been raised. Encounters with the few travellers passing along the nearby stock route and the local indigenous people, in particular a boy, Tully, whom Hester's father seeks to educate almost as his own son, would change the fates of the Finches forever; nor would life ever be the same again for those who had long called the area home.
The book covers the status of Australia.s water resources and their future prospects, the many values we hold for water, and the potential for using water more effectively to meet the growing demands of cities, farmers, industries, and the environment.
In the face of escalating water scarcity, effective water management has become a central concern globally. The Murray–Darling Basin, spanning over a million square kilometres across four states and one territory, is a lifeline for Australian agriculture and rural communities. Cultivating Community: How discourse shapes the philosophy, practice and policy of water management in the Murray–Darling Basin dissects the prevailing environmental discourses shaping water policy in the Murray–Darling Basin and assesses their implications for both the environment and for farming communities. Drawing on five months of extensive field research among farmers and Murray–Darling Basin Authority officials, Dr Amanda Shankland presents a nuanced understanding of farmer perspectives within the broader policy discourse. By examining the interplay between environmental discourses and farmer knowledge, Shankland sheds light on how different ideologies shape policy decisions and, subsequently, impact water management practices. Central to the book’s contribution is the identification and analysis of four key environmental discourses prevalent in the Murray–Darling Basin: administrative rationalism, economic rationalism, democratic pragmatism, and green environmentalism. Against the backdrop of looming water scarcity and the declining health of the Murray–Darling Basin, Cultivating Community challenges these dominant discourses by highlighting a new perspective, community centrism, which emphasises community-based cooperation and engagement in water management. By amplifying farmer voices and advocating for a more inclusive approach to policy deliberations, Cultivating Community paves the way for alternative futures in water management that prioritise social values alongside economic and environmental considerations. Cultivating Community is a timely and indispensable resource for charting a path towards a more resilient and equitable water future in the Murray–Darling Basin and beyond.
Annotation Long-term ecological data are critical for informing long-term trends in biodiversity and trends in environmental change. The Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) is a major initiative of the Australian Government and one of its key areas of investment is to provide funding for a network of long-term ecological research plots around Australia (LTERN). This book highlights some of the temporal changes in the environment and/or in biodiversity that have occurred in different ecosystems, ranging from tropical rainforests, wet eucalypt forests and alpine regions through to rangelands and deserts. Many important trends and changes are documented and they often provide new insights that were previously poorly understood or unknown. These data are precisely the kinds of data so desperately needed to better quantify the temporal trajectories in the environment and biodiversity in Australia.
In The River, Chris Hammer takes us on a journey through Australia's heartland, following the rivers of the Murray-Darling Basin, recounting his experiences, his impressions, and, above all, stories of the people he meets along the way. It's a journey punctuated with laughter, sadness and reflection. The River looks past the daily news reports and their sterile statistics, revealing the true impact of our rivers' decline on the people who live along their shores, and on the country as a whole. It's a tale that leaves the reader with a lingering sense of nostalgia for an Australia that may be fading away forever.
""Whispers. You must have heard that? Closer now, clearer. Things I must repeat, amplify. My head's full of them."" So are these whispers about people, places and myself that have taken shape and floated to the surface of my consciousness in a collection of poems which will move you to uncomfortable extremes at times, grant you space to think and may even, if you are lucky, turn back into whispers for you to keep. These are no shapeless dreams which have wandered past. They have been nurtured and guided such that every word has been placed carefully in a mosaic to not just tell a story but give itself, generously, to the reader as a gift. The challenge does not come in reading or even in understanding these whispers, the challenge comes in the willingness of the reader to hold them, engage them and keep them close enough to take them forward. The question mark will be who the reader might become if they accept the whispers as their own. ""Things I must repeat, amplify. My head's full of them.""
In the name of agriculture, urban growth, and disease control, humans have drained, filled, or otherwise destroyed nearly 87 percent of the world’s wetlands over the past three centuries. Unintended consequences include biodiversity loss, poor water quality, and the erosion of cultural sites, and only in the past few decades have wetlands been widely recognized as worth preserving. Emily O’Gorman asks, What has counted as a wetland, for whom, and with what consequences? Using the Murray-Darling Basin—a massive river system in eastern Australia that includes over 30,000 wetland areas—as a case study and drawing on archival research and original interviews, O’Gorman examines how people and animals have shaped wetlands from the late nineteenth century to today. She illuminates deeper dynamics by relating how Aboriginal peoples acted then and now as custodians of the landscape, despite the policies of the Australian government; how the movements of water birds affected farmers; and how mosquitoes have defied efforts to fully understand, let alone control, them. Situating the region’s history within global environmental humanities conversations, O’Gorman argues that we need to understand wetlands as socioecological landscapes in order to create new kinds of relationships with and futures for these places.
