Human settlements have long established themselves along fertile riverbanks, using natural systems for food, transport, culture, and communion. By mixing ‘language, gods, bodies, and thought with water’ (Linton, 2010), we create systems of interaction between the natural and the manufactured, the intimate and the planetary, the material and the immaterial. Water Narratives explores these relationships and the forces that unravel them, tracing the Coquun-Myan-Hunter River’s interactions with its environment and other beings and systems. By following water’s flow through social, cultural, political, and economic currents, we bear witness to a river shaped by its relations and come to understand the singular ecology within which we exist.
For Australia’s First People, water embodies ancestor, provider, and kin, eliciting a relational ontology based on interconnectedness. Within the catchment, the Awabakal, Wonnarua, and Worimi peoples’ connection with water is expressed through testimonies of marine and riverine farming, inscribed in Dreaming stories like that of the Water Serpent Biame, and reflected in the relational and dynamic toponymy of surrounding landscapes (Albrecht, G 2000). This intersection of culture and spirit gave rise to practical ecologies of care that sustained multispecies ecologies over millennia.
The arrival of British colonialists destabilised these reciprocal ecologies. Early colonial records portray a once-abundant landscape of open grassy riverbanks and towering native forests (Albrecht G, 2000), but spiritual, social, and ecological ties were severed and replaced with extractive, expansionist logics. Water landscapes were appropriated to serve as nautico-imperial infrastructure, linking the colony to global circuits of the British maritime empire. The Coquun-Myan was forcibly coerced into serving colonial expansion, its resource rich soils laying the foundations for Newcastle’s industrial ventures. With the rise of steel and coal production, the river became both accomplice and victim to heavy industry. Coal, drawn from the region’s earth and transported along its waters, came to define the Hunter’s socio-economic identity, fuelling its economy, shaping its political and community structures, and leaving scars across its landscapes and waterways.
The transformation of the Coquun into the world’s largest coal export facility embedded the river within a global ecology of extraction. In the process, Indigenous peoples were further dispossessed, not only losing spiritual and physical access to water, but also being economically excluded from the industries that reshaped their Country.
Such asymmetries are encoded into Australia’s water governance. The Water Management Act 2000 intensified manufactured scarcity by decoupling water licences from land titles, transforming water into an abstract, tradeable commodity. Under this legislation, water is distributed by priority rather than equity: in dry years, households and local agriculture face cutbacks while coal mines and heavy industry continue to receive allocations. These tensions are most acute in the Upper Hunter, where agriculture, industry, viticulture, and residents have long contended over scarce water resources (Albrecht et al, 2008)
This system reflects a broader ‘hydrocratic’ (Molle, 2009) regime shaped by colonial Riparian Rights and a legacy of control over ‘wild’ water. Where early colonial practices attempted to dominate rivers through dredging, damming, and diversion (Boelens, 2022); contemporary solutions rely on abstraction: markets, offsets, and regulation marketed as ‘green’. This logic persists in programs such as The NSW Biodiversity Offsets Scheme, which allows developers to destroy ecosystems in one place by promising conservation in another (Hemming, 2022). Water, land, and species relationships are severed, and living systems reduced to tradable units.
Such abstractions extend beyond policy. A broader cultural shift that prioritised scientific ‘progress’ transformed landscapes into parts to be measured, extracted, and commodified. Legislative and bureaucratic systems continue to privilege Western technocratic perspectives, marginalising knowledge from the world’s longest continuing culture. This logic was inscribed onto the land itself, as relational and descriptive Indigenous place names were rewritten with colonial references or reduced to the geological codes of extractive industry.
Despite this erasure, communities in the Upper Hunter with distinct emotional attachments to water have converged at a shared point of responsibility. Both Indigenous and multigenerational settler farming communities strongly advocate for the landscape but draw from distinct emotional geographies of place (Albrecht et al, 2008). While settler farmers value and care for water for its agricultural productivity, legitimising profitable rural production and extensive land clearing (ibid), both communities recognise the environmental threats of climate change.
These place-based attachments persist within a system governed by state authority and industrial influence, whose power rests on scientific abstraction and vested interests. In the case of the Bickham open-cut coal mine in Murrurrundi, the community mobilised in opposition to its opening, concerned about impacts to groundwater and local ecosystems. Environmental Assessments commissioned by the mining company relied on biased interpretations of hydrological modelling that were presented as scientific fact. Lacking technical expertise and financial resources, locals were forced to scientifically discredit the claims, exposing the uneven terrain of environmental advocacy under technocratic regimes. (Connor et al, 2008)
These entangled cultural landscapes create a unique and often contested social ecology, where deeply held relationships to Country wrestle with dominant narratives of resource development and economic growth. In the Coquun-Myan catchment, socio-economic conditions further complicate this hydrosocial terrain: many residents are employed by the very industries that degrade the water systems they rely on. The recorded health impacts of compromised drinking water and poor air quality illustrate how the same forces that shape global energy systems infiltrate the most intimate scales of life (Albrecht et al, 2010). What emerges is an inextricably linked yet contradictory ecology, where the very elements that sustain us are degraded in our pursuit of economic survival.
These pressures are compounded by the climatic forces of the Anthropocene, which echo and accelerate the legacies of colonial intervention. Rising seas, salinity, floods, and droughts move through already-weakened ecologies, reshaped floodplains, and communities structurally denied the ability to recover. In places like Maitland, where rivers were once forced into channels and constrained by levees, the illusion of control gives way to engineered vulnerability. Non-human ecologies sit closest to the edge of extinction: mine discharge, agricultural run-off, increased salinity, groundwater drawdown, and flow disruptions pose serious threats to wetlands, aquatic systems, and vital habitats across the catchment (NSW Government). At the same time, rising insurance premiums, housing devaluation, and declining disaster resilience disproportionately affect already marginalised communities, revealing how environmental degradation and social vulnerability are caught in the same currents.
Water Narratives invites us to listen to the River, and to share in its story. Like Donna Haraway’s Sympoiesis and Glenn Albrecht’s Symbiocene, this work resists the siloed frameworks of control and abstraction. It reimagines the Coquun-Myan not as a set of broken systems, but as an interdependent whole. These entanglements between species, systems, and selves remind us that we cannot repair a river using the same logics that broke it. As Prescott and Logan write, “from this perspective, lines of distinction between personal, public, and planetary health are removed.” To live with the river, rather than upon it, we see water as a relation that holds us all in common.