In pre-occupation Australia, the boundaries between land and water are dynamic. Rivers appear above ground and then disappear. They vary greatly in their widths. Anabranches, billabongs, are left as evidence of this changing pattern. Chains of ponds, a typical pre-occupation creek system, disrupts the European concept of a continuing watercourse. Wetlands make an indistinct border. A floodout is one way a river moves from being water to being land. Banker, invented very early in the occupation, is an Australian English term used to describe an event uncommon in English rivers but very common in Australian rivers – a river flooded to its bank. In pre-occupation Australia, the edges of ‘land’ as opposed to ‘water’ or ‘water’ to ‘land’, are ambiguous.

This ambiguity is removed in the non-indigenous landscape. Here there is a clear distinction between land and water. Water is controlled, regulated, so that the amount remains more constant and the movement of water is as even as possible. Chains of waterholes become a continuous creek. Water is also visible – not underground, or blurred by swamp. If it is underground, it is contained in a pipe. Water is dammed and piped – held in a trough, tank, reservoir. It is civilised.

Water in its pre- and post-occupation forms is described, ironically, with many of the same kinds of terms that were used until the last 50 years of Aboriginal people and their culture by the occupying culture. Unregulated water is either irrational and ‘half-formed’ or primeval and magnificent – in either case not part of the occupying world. Regulated water is tamed, domesticated, fruitful, predictable, rational – or debased and polluted.^[5]

The flight over the landscape south of Canberra displays a civilised hydrography. Hundreds of thousands of small dams, like water-paddocks, clearly show where the water is. The swamps and chains of ponds are few. This is the occupied landscape, where the world has settled into the new culture. In the view from Geary’s Gap, the new and old cultures are simultaneously present – which may be why settlers have found the place so troubling.

In the child’s drawing, the change from one landscape to the other is taking place in front of your eyes. Its power lies in its (implicit) violence. All life in this picture is dependent on the introduced water. At the same time, the pre-occupation landscape is still evidenced, in the dead tree and the bare earth. The bodies are still there. Occupation is still recent; this is a frontier picture.