Aqua Nullius: First Nations Water Rights in Australia applies the logic of terra nullius to water, naming and challenging the fiction that Australia’s waterways existed without sovereign custodians — and lets more than twenty First Nations voices dismantle that claim directly.
About This Book
Structured around four interlocking themes — storytelling, water injustice, First Nations water management, and overturning aqua nullius — this book assembles over twenty interviews with First Nations people from across Australia whose relationships to water are as old as the land itself. It is not a policy document or an academic treatise alone; it is a record of custodianship, grief, and authority. For architects, landscape practitioners, and planners working on Country, it reframes water not as infrastructure or resource but as kin, as law, as living system. Published by OFFICE, it arrives as an urgent contribution to conversations about Indigenous water rights and sovereign knowledge in Australia.
Key Features
- 222 pages of interview-based testimony structured across four thematic frameworks
- Contributors include Alex Bond, Colleen Raven Strangways, Dave Wandin, David Collard, Erin O’Donnell, Hozaus Claire, Jack Mitchell, Jim Everett, Joseph Williams Jungarayi, Josie Douglas, Kazan Brown, Maureen O’Keefe, Melissa Kennedy, Norman Frank Jupurrurla, Oliver Costello, Sophia Pearce, Sue Jackson, Tony Birch, Troy McDonald, Noel Nannup, and Virginia Marshall
- Published by OFFICE
What You’ll Discover
- How the concept of aqua nullius extends the colonial fiction of terra nullius into the domain of water, erasing millennia of Indigenous water law and custodianship
- First Nations frameworks for water management drawn from unbroken traditions of knowledge held in relationship to kin, community, and Country
- Accounts of water injustice told in the speakers’ own words, across diverse Nations and geographies throughout Australia
- The potential for storytelling itself to function as a legal and political act — a form of testimony that reasserts sovereign relationships to water
About the Author
[Details available upon request]
Specifications
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 222
- Dimensions: 23 x 30 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9780648770275
- Publisher: OFFICE
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Architects and landscape practitioners working on Country, urban planners, policy researchers, and anyone engaged with Indigenous sovereignty, environmental justice, and the politics of water in Australia.