Water is threaded through Alice Springs participants’ responses with greater frequency than in the coastal interviews in Sydney and Wollongong, relating not only to the supply of water but also to detailed observations of weather and rain events. Comments about how much or how little rain has fallen were made in over 80 per cent of Alice Springs interviews, compared to 35 per cent for Sydney and 45 per cent for Wollongong. For example, Keith’s teenage son Matt commented: ‘This year we’ve had three millimetres since January 1st, nearly six months. In six months we’ve had three millimetres.’
A number of the coastal participants also referred to the aridity of the continent as an influence on their water-consumption patterns. These references tend to be spatially removed from the person’s current location, and lack the detailed rainfall references of the Alice Springs participants. They are perceptions of a more generic, continental awareness of aridity.
I think a major, major, major issue with the Australian environment is water. I think most of us don’t really accept the fact that this is a really, really dry country and we use water as if it’s really abundant and that’s going to be a big issue for the next ten, hundred years, who knows. (Sue)
‘The biggest problem this country has is the lack of water’, said one woman, who went on to connect her present water-saving practices to a childhood on the land and the normality of scarcity. The connection to rural or agricultural childhoods and living with tank water was common.
For many of the Alice Springs participants, particularly those who have moved from elsewhere, it is the rarity or lack of rainfall events that acts to disrupt customary patterns, leading them to re-evaluate their consumption and consider alternative strategies:
We first noticed when we moved here, people don’t have gutters and when it rains there’s all this water going everywhere, big sheets of it. It was amazing that people didn’t have bigger tanks and collect the water. But water’s cheap here and it’s from an aquifer. It’s non-renewable. It’s about 20 000 years old. (Brad)
I think I calculated that about three centimetres of rain will fill up the tank … which is a typical summer downpour here … And also if we can harvest some of the water that is falling in our backyard and use it, that’s just saving what is actually a non-renewable resource out here essentially, which is the Mereenie bores which have only got 20 years left of water in them at the current consumption rates. (Michael)
Several coastal people related awareness of the harshness of the Australian environment to a more specific experience in their lives.
Dave and I went travelling around western Victoria and NSW on a motorbike before we had kids and there were a lot of areas out there that were badly affected by drought … I was totally shocked and just seeing animals that were dying in paddocks, and I can still recall the smell, it was just so bad. And I think we came back here and I think we were just like “that’s amazing”, we just take it for granted so much and we are living in the driest continent so we’re looking at water tanks for the front and the back and for recycling as much water as we can. Yeah, and I think even when the drought breaks, I think we’ll continue doing it. (Maureen)
We travelled across the Tanami [Desert] last year and I gained a sense of the real fragility; it gave me such a deep sense of kind of touching almost the womb of the land and realising how fragile it is, how precious things like water is and we’re looking at a way to put water tanks in. (Maggie)
These stories demonstrate direct links between a specific life experience and a willingness to change consumption patterns. Both Maureen and Maggie seem to have used that experience to ‘come to terms’ with a dry Australia, but the connections are totally symbolic. The connection between the Tanami and Sydney in terms of water is, in a material sense, far-fetched. Using water tanks in Sydney will not save water for the Tanami. There is no strong relationship between water availability in the two places, either in terms of where the rain falls or where the storage and distribution infrastructure moves it to. A similar symbolic power is in operation when Barb tells her teenage daughter in the shower to ‘save some water for the farmers, Jess’. She is expressing a broad consciousness of the arid continent rather than a belief that if Jess showers for less than 20 minutes in Sydney, the farmers in western New South Wales will actually get the water.
A further dimension of considering water as nature, or a purely natural resource, is in descriptions of changed behaviour in response to drought. There were many examples of this among the coastal participants:
Well I don’t believe in watering the garden in the summer months when there’s a particularly bad drought and quite a bit of the front lawn died this year completely. The buffalo died out completely there so I thought ‘well, why maintain it?’, because being light sandy soil there, the moisture drains out of it very quickly. (Ted)
But once the building work was finished I was going to put the lawn in but that was in the middle of the drought last year; it was last July so I just thought it was really silly to try and put a lawn in with the dry weather so it looked pretty horrible for months and months. (Trudy)
This is not to deny the power of the symbolic connections or of the practices altered to adapt to an observed scarcity of water. However, it is appropriate to question how deeply such practices are likely to be embedded. Will Jess lengthen her showers when the farmers are in flood? Will Ted and Trudy return to watering their lawns once it rains? The idea of water as pure nature is expressed in broader community debates that focus on the abundance of ‘wasted’ or ‘unutilised’ water in Australia’s north, with naïve and simplistic suggestions to transport it southward (or transport agriculture northward).