Australia’s waterways, featuring increasingly variable flows, need management that moves beyond the "metaphysical flattening" of abstract concepts like "assimilative capacity". The Where Waters Meet (WWM) project addresses this need. Analytically, positioning water-places and their more-than-human collectives as central actors in Australian collective life, WWM seeks to enable collectively enacted, institutionally stabilised understandings of Australian water-places.
Working with a commitment to empirical philosophy and a "Ground Up" relational analytic, we investigate three disparate sites: Gurambai/Rapid Creek (NT), the Maribyrnong River (VIC), and the Murrumbidgee Gininderry Conservation Corridor (ACT). At Rapid Creek, we document Larrakia-led "research-caring" practices such as community cleanups, which enact sovereignty by refusing normative knowledges while inviting small, shared alignments. Along the Maribyrnong, we trace how historical ontologies, including the 1880s construction of the Coode Canal, reinstantiate themselves within contemporary sensory experiences. On the Murrumbidgee, we consider how an indigenous ranger-led pilot fish trap restoration in the Ginninderry Corridor integrates Ngunnawal knowledge with modern ecology to address biodiversity, sediment flows, river camp life and care of deep river pools.
By documenting "practices-in-practice" and evidencing "problematic testimony", WWM engages current performative practices of management and stewardship to deliver institutionally stabilised, and dually accountable understandings benefitting policy makers and Traditional Owners. This approach fosters the making-sense-in-common essential for living and evolving with change across Australia’s water-places. We particularly focus on the "epistemic devices" that participatively engage diverse publics, ranging from hydrological platforms like the SOURCE model to experiments with signage or restored traditional river infrastructures such as fish traps.