Paper short abstract:

We ask about managing the incommensurable/commensurable tensions in voicing watery people-places in contemporary Australia. On the one hand this involves modern algorithmic models and on the other Indigenous story, song, image and dance.

Paper long abstract:

Are you flood ready? The question was asked by Melbourne Water in inviting us to a webinar. Constituted under the Victorian State Water Act (1989) Melbourne Water has the power to make by-laws. In 2018 the corporation gave itself the power to prevent damage to the water catchments and supply system of Melbourne, and to police access to certain areas and facilities. Making models is the core epistemic device the corporation uses to make decisions associated with the exercise of these powers. We read this model as 'voicing a people-place'... the Maribyrnong catchment.

Descendants of settlers, freed convicts and economic migrants, we are inheritors of a politico-epistemic tradition that regards the lands we walk upon and the water we drink and bathe in, as essentially inert. Our compatriots who descend from members of the many Australian sovereign Indigenous polities despite the best murderous efforts of early settlers to eradicate their forebears, tell other stories of the land and its many Beings. The epistemic devices mobilised within the metaphysical commitments of Indigenous traditions are at first blush incommensurable with those derived from Settler traditions.

We ask about managing the incommensurable/commensurable tensions in voicing watery people-places in contemporary Australia