Water Ecologies – 4 September 2025, 6 pm at Tin Sheds Gallery, engages with ecological and hydrosocial narratives in the Coquun/Myan.
Ecology describes the entangled relationships between living organisms and their environments, dynamic systems shaped through interaction, adaptation, and exchange. Water Ecologies traces the ecologies at play in the Hunter, attending to the interrelationships that shape and are shaped by the Coquun-Myan. The River finds confluence in a dense tangle of cultural, linguistic, legal, environmental, economic, and political influences. These overlapping ecologies – artificially fragmented through colonial and scientific paradigms – cannot be understood in isolation. Together, they form a shifting nexus of conditions that governs who has access to water, and who does not.
Taking cues from Donna Haraway’s sympoiesis and Glenn Albrecht’s Symbiocene, Water Ecologies reimagines the Coquun and its catchment not as a set of broken, competing systems, but as one interdependent ecology. It traces the river as it moves through bodies, infrastructures, memories, and futures—asking how we might live with the river, rather than upon it. In doing so, it challenges us to consider water not as resource or backdrop, but as a living relation that holds us all in common.
Speakers – Prof. John Maynard (Historian, Worimi man), Prof. Glenn Albrecht (Environmental philosopher, Murdoch University), Dr James Wilson-Miller (Wonnarrua Elder, Gringai clan of the Wonnarua Nation), Emily O’Gorman (Environmental historian, Ass Prof Macquarie University), Jo Lynch (Artist and activist) and Dr Alex Callen (Lecturer UoN, vegetation and restoration ecologies)