Paper short abstract:

This paper interrogates water as a central element of place-making practices within mining-affected communities. It does so by exploring the experience of water as a qualitative category that is shaped and lived through everyday relations with and within place, impaired by mining.

Paper long abstract:

This paper forwards a discussion of extraction and exclusion into conversation with one about materiality and objects. In exploring the notion of ‘ruin’ – as expressed within and around the small town of Wollar in New South Wales, located at the western edge of the Hunter Valley Coal Chain and surrounded by three open-cut coal mines – I seek to interrogate displacement and mining through the empirical element of water and how everyday encounters with a river shape experiences of place, placement and displacement. This analysis draws inspiration from decolonial scholarship to look at how mining and extraction impact land and water as ontological categories. It positions water as a resource not only of pragmatic value but also of symbolic value in binding people and place together, and as a barometer for the emotional wellbeing of the community. It looks at how experiences and emotions are embodied and ‘placial’, and how scars in the landscape become ‘marks of sorrow and betrayal, of the abuse of power and latent hazards’ (Storm 2014: 1) for those whose imagined futures have been lost in the process of mining.