Before the advent of bores and the access to artesian and sub-artesian water, the occupiers’ relation to the landscape was similar to that of the indigenous population, but without their cultural knowledge. They were dependent on knowledge borrowed from the indigenous people, but still subject to wandering storms and intermittent rivers. But with the development of bores, water could take them and their cattle and sheep into country they could never settle before, and allow them to remain. The new status of this relation is evidenced in the invention of the word piosphere, to describe the environment created around a watering point.

It is this space, a piosphere, which is rendered so acutely in the child’s drawing of the windmill and the water tank; a frontier post in an occupied country, where the water holds the frontier against the shifting, ambiguous and troubling indigenous space.