Water Forces | 28 August 2025, 6 pm at Tin Sheds Gallery, explores how climate change and the biodiversity emergency can reshape understandings of the Coquun in the 21st century.
Where the river once ebbed and flowed under nature’s force, it is now controlled by an intricate dance of water, power and capital. Water Forces explores the pressures shaping the Coquun in the 21st century – climatic, political, economic, physical, temporal and deeply historical. It traces the tensions between millennia of Indigenous stewardship and recent settler-colonial water practices, where mining, agriculture, and heavy industry continue to compete for water, even as droughts, floods, and contamination intensify. These forces are compounded by legal and technocratic systems that fragment the river from its ecology, most notably through the separation of land and water titles, and the use of biodiversity ‘credits’ to offset damage in one place by promising conservation in another.
The water crisis is approached with the same colonial-capitalist logic that created it. Where earlier responses relied on dredging, damming, and diverting the river to serve extractive economies, contemporary solutions lean on abstraction: markets, offsets, and legislation that treat water as a commodity, not kin. Tracking the drastic changes in the landscape and its hydrological systems, Water Forces calls attention to the compounding stressors acting on the Coquun-Myan and asks what it means to repair a river when the tools of repair remain bound to systems of harm.
Speakers – John Drinan (author, The Sacrificial Valley), Dr John Heath (Birrpai Traditional Owner and Senior Knowledge Holder), Dr James Wilson-Miller (Wonnarrua Elder, Gringai clan of the Wonnarua Nation), Gionni di Gravio (UoN Archivist), Therese Keogh (Artist) and Bonnie Mcbain (A/Prof UoN).