Text originally submitted to the ASTC Public Art Advisory Committee to accompany the proposed mural for ASALC:
My proposed mural aims to prompt considerations of how common resources are managed, particularly in the Northern Territory. The large painted collage at the centre of the artwork depicts a variety of water’s applications in Central Australia. These include hydration, leisure, industry (agriculture & livestock), hygiene, maintenance etc. The central collage also includes abstractions of scientific imagining of underground water sources Alice Springs relies on, e.g The Mereenie Aquifer. This collage is framed by a text that wraps around the entire outer edge of the painting. It reads: Who moves for what water moves for, who moves water for what. This text came about after reading from section 18 of the Racial Discrimination Act (RDA). The link between water access and the RDA was first brought to my attention by Liam Grealy in his essay Coloured Water: Why Uranium is Allowed in the Water of NT Indigenous Communities. Grealy speculates on section 18 of the RDA’s capacity to be used as legal grounds to gain water safety guarantees and attendant infrastructure in remote communities. He considers this specifically in relation to Laramba where the Uranium levels in the water, as of 2020, were 3 times higher than the maximum safety level. Grealy describes current NT water policy this way:
‘In the NT, the Water Supply and Sewerage Services Act 2001 (NT) regulates drinking water. […] the Water Supply and Sewerage Services Act only applies where water supply licenses exist, namely in the 18 major towns where the vast majority of the NT’s non-Indigenous population lives. […] In 72 remote Indigenous communities and 79 outstations, Indigenous Essential Services (IES), a not-for-profit arm of PowerWater, provides water services. In those contexts, drinking water supply is neither licensed or regulated.’(1)
The link between section 18 of the RDA and NT water use presents an interesting tension: Does the application of the laws with the potential to amend the mechanisms governing distribution of our common resources ultimately work to consolidate the continued legislating of access rather than to guarantee equitability?
In recent months the NT Water Controller granted the single biggest water licence (40,000 megalitres per year) in the NT to Singleton Station. Fracking in the Betaloo Basin requires huge quantities of water and threatens to permanently damage groundwater in that area, much of which supplies nearby communities, towns, homesteads and agricultural projects. Meanwhile, all four land councils have called for a Safe Drinking Water Act to be introduced. Relevant also, is Mal Brough’s donation of $4 million from the Aboriginal Benefit Account to build ASALC, where this proposed mural will be installed. These examples are all constituents of a broader narrative that tells of NT water use. I feel it isn’t possible to address the theme Living Water: water continues to shape Alice Springs and its people without addressing the policy that shapes NT resident’s water quality and access. While my mural can point to current inequities within water policy, it ultimately proposes a set of questions, seeking to refer the viewer to the tangled conditions that allow or obstruct our communion over and with water.
(1) Liam Grealy, “Coloured Water: Why Uranium is Allowed in the Water of NT Indigenous Communities,” Right Now, published October 30, 2020, https://rightnow.org.au/news/coloured-water-why-uranium-is-allowed-in-the-water-of-nt-indigenous-communities/.