In Kaïka’s (2005) reading of urban environments, the networks of water supply are hidden from or ignored by domestic consumers until something goes wrong. Yet both on the coast and in Alice Springs there is often quite detailed knowledge of these networks, whether for the drainage of excess or conservation of scarce water. A number of people explicitly visualised the pipes that brought the water to different parts of the house and garden, and recognised the implications for conservation.
Because our ensuite is right at the front of the house, you can use two-and-a-half litres of cold water before you get your hot water through. So we trap that water as well. The same at the sink here at the back. It’s just the set up of the tap. You turn it on. You hear the water coming through. You do what you have to do, you turn it off and it keeps on running. So again we’ve got a bucket in that sink and we trap all that water. For quick rinsing and stuff like that I just rinse my hands in that. So you get four litres of water in no time. (Robert)
I would take a big bucket up and put it in the shower and when you turn that tap on, I mean your hot water has got to come from the hot water service which in our case is sitting there in the corner of the garage. So you’ve got a couple of gallons that comes off before the water is hot and then I would carry it down and water the garden or water something in the garden. (Mrs Heywood)
An important reason that people have detailed knowledge of the networks is that they are active agents within them. Participants recounted both creative and banal strategies to conserve and reuse water: the jug beside the sink, the bucket in the shower, the basin of vegetable-washing water, letting the lawn go, not planting annuals, water-saving shower heads, rain-soaker crystals, mulch and water tanks. ‘Water-gathering’ is the term we use for a loosely defined set of practices that were informal, irregular or unstructured in nature and differed from participant to participant.
Even from … the washing machine I tend to collect the water with buckets, you know, for the garden, water the trees and the lawn … At the moment because of the drought we haven’t had much rain for many months so even when I have a shower I have a bucket underneath it to collect the water and water the garden. The other thing is even when I wash the vegetables in the house or I wash my hands I tend to have a bowl or a basin underneath it to collect all the water. (Emily)
For Emily and a number of people, responses to the drought built on longstanding practices based on an ethic of not wasting. Several elderly Macedonian women in Wollongong shared a generational practice of collecting water in buckets for use on their extensive vegetable gardens.
In Alice Springs, over 80 per cent of participants discussed the supply of water from the borefields, and the fact that it has a limited lifespan, although they had a range of views on how long it would last. In these conversations participants reveal a depth of knowledge of the technological networks of provision, discussing pumping, depths, capacity, as well as capital costs, rates of consumption, and comparisons to other parts of Australia. Implicit in this detail is a concern for the amount of water used by themselves and Alice Springs residents generally, focusing on change and extending to discussions on current and future direction regarding the government’s water strategies. As one participant said of the community as a whole, ‘consciousness has definitely shifted’. An example of someone with a good understanding of the network is Tom, whose quote opened the paper. A long-term resident of Alice Springs, he is conscious of the challenges of living in an arid environment, while maintaining a level of comfort through the provision of shade and water in his backyard:
But currently, Alice Springs, we’re not short of water here. The aquifer that Alice Springs uses to supply domestic water isn’t small. I guess it’s just a cost factor. So the government and authorities here encouraged people to have water-efficient gardens. You can do that with drip irrigation and the right selection of plants and still have a nice green garden like we have without having a huge water bill. It’s the cost of managing the demand for water in Alice Springs that’s the issue. If people consume excessive amounts of water here, it’s going to cost the government more to expand the borefield that they’re using and put new bores down and harvest the water there. So they’re trying to manage water use for conservation reasons and also for economic reasons. But there is no actual shortage of water. (Tom)
On the other hand, Keith’s observations of rainfall outlined above do not necessarily translate into reduced water consumption when combined with a busy lifestyle: ‘So who has time to garden? ... I like the no-maintenance garden, you know, press the button on the American-style sprinklers and that’s about all you have to do, leave it on the set timer.’
Those participants who discuss the socioecological networks reflect on long-term changes, particularly towards increasing demand. An important part of any water network is ‘government’, who were frequently constructed discursively as poor managers of the precious resource of water. This enabled some to distance themselves from any responsibility to ‘fix the problem’. For others, the relevant policy-makers were considered to be a long way behind community consciousness and preparedness to change. For example:
[T]he government at its policy level has decided that it doesn’t want to put water restrictions on or actually charge people what the cost of the water is, because they are trying to encourage people to come, and it’s part of the frontier mentality that we still have in the Territory. (Peter, Alice Springs)
If there is little incentive beyond a moral one for Alice Springs residents to conserve water, and more costs are incurred than elsewhere to establish water-storage infrastructure, the water consciousness is even more striking. It indicates that both nature-thinking and network-thinking are strong, in different combinations. Indifference was rare. On the other hand, the diversity of understandings about exactly how sustainable the Alice Springs water supply is reflects a particular requirement of good network thinking; that its multiple connections and pathways be well understood.