Professor Heather Goodall
University of Technology, Sydney
Women, Race and Rivers in Western NSW
Rivers have been crucial places for economic and cultural life for both indigenous and non-indigenous Australians. Indigenous women’s relations with rivers and water through their work as mothers, land users and political activists has been significantly different from those of men in each society. After the invasion, women’s roles continued to reflect traditional purposes, but the conditions of colonization overlaid them with other dimensions. It has often been Indigenous women who have sustained the use of rivers for both fishing as nutritional resource and for teaching children about traditional cosmology and laws around water. This long history has allowed a significant accumulation among Indigenous women of knowledge about rivers on many levels, which might offer a resource for river planning, but women are often impeded from participation in environmental planning forums because of the highly adversarial and culturally unfamiliar settings of the current water negotiation arrangements.
Non-indigenous women were more constrained in their contact with rivers and their water, as the colonisers’ technologies separated people from natural sources of water via wells and bores, pipes, storage tanks, pumps and [in a few areas] filtration systems. Yet their roles as mothers and family managers have often shaped their perception of rivers, as the dangers of drowning and later of chemical pollution have led some white women to become articulate advocates of river water reform. Their participation in river health forums has again been constrained, although to a lesser extent than that of indigenous women. But the overwhelmingly commercial dominance on river management forums in the northwestern areas of NSW, along with the adversarial nature of the forums and the continuing patriarchal culture of rural society has meant that white women have more often contributed to river health debates in oppositional, and marginal roles than as fully accepted participants in formal negotiations.
Email: heather.goodall@uts.edu.au