Visions of Water: Swimming in a drying Australian waterscape

Abstract

Since the 1820s, the Murray Mouth (South Australia) has been subjected to such disfiguring abuse at the hands of colonists that it now faces an unprecedented health crisis. My research consists of implementing a liquid methodology to explore and illuminate this mouth’s d(r)ying waterscapes. To borrow Celan’s phrase, my words represent “attempts to swim on dry land”: they speak of the harsh dialectics of drought and desertification, and yet, water shapes them as they crisscross pages and landscapes. In this essay, I discuss some of those “attempts to swim on dry land”. I illustrate how I articulate and play with the vulnerable interface between (wet) theories and the (dry) realities of the Mouth’s acoustic textures – or, more precisely, how I recorporealise the conceptual in the sensory. We need this recorporealisation because we need to keep trying to swim on dry land. Only through those attempts can we learn how to listen to the wet ontologies hidden behind the colonial veil of blue-green algae blooms, salt and the staccato pounding of the dredgers working hard to keep the Mouth open.