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This special issue is part of a shift in social science and humanities thinking and in public awareness towards planetary water concerns. As societal and scholarly attention to the wet element – and its political import and its cultural constitution – is growing, we ask, how can we rethink our relationships with water in Australia now and into the future? The collection of papers in this issue shows that water responds to human practices which in turn are grounded in cultural imaginaries. Water is thus real in diverse ways, and makes possible diverse material, political and cultural relationships. Taking our lead from the ideas that contributors have developed from this and other questions posed for the issue, our introductory discussion considers three themes that are key to the understanding of water futures in Australia: materialities, temporalities and imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2021, the Oceania editorial committee reluctantly accepted the retirement of long serving managing editor, Tigger Wise. It is beyond the capacity of a short note such as this to [...]

To the editor, Peter Bellwood's review of Sutton and Walshe's book (this volume) makes a number of important observations about an Australian anthropology that has demonstrated the complexity and diversity [...]

This article reflects on ten years of ethnographic work investigating concerns about mining industry-produced environmental and social change in hyperarid territories experiencing long-term drought. The ecological and social effects of groundwater extraction by the copper and lithium mining industry in the southern Salar de Atacama are not immediately detectable, since water, the saltpan, and the desert provide few clues, and the political and economic conditions of water in Chile render it fractured between surface and subsurface, fresh and salt. In public accounts, water belongs to a radical present: there are few environmental reports of water's past before groundwater was profoundly subject to mining, and ecological impacts from aquifer extraction are apparent only after exhaustion has occurred. This article takes a narrative approach that reflects on what may be achieved by "slow resistance" and discerned from accumulated ethnographic witnessing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The March edition of Oceania features two articles that provide valuable insights into Australian culture. The first article, written by Samuel Curkpatrick and co-authored by Wilfred Daniel, explores the connection between singing, conversation, and teaching, drawing on the Yolŋu concept of 'wata' (wind) as a unifying force. This article also offers a critical examination of anthropological representation. The second article, by Alana Brekelmans and Richard Martin, delves into the narratives of 'the frontier' in Outback Queensland, as told by pastoralists and settler-descendant farmers, and analyzes how these stories shape their presence in Outback Australia. These articles can be read alongside other contributions from Oceania's previous issue on 'Water Futures in Australia'. Additionally, the editorial committee of Oceania has recently welcomed two new members, Dr. Sophie Chao and Dr. Jenny Munro. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses a book titled "Water Lore: Practice, Place, Poetics" which explores the symbolic and narrative aspects of fresh and sea water and their potential for generating new imaginaries. The book includes diverse contributions that examine water categories, emplacement, and sounds in Australia and beyond. The chapters cover a range of topics, including the containerization of the seas in capitalist imagination, the reenchantment of Western imaginations through popular culture, the crisis of imagination in the Anthropocene, and the destruction of waters in different countries. The book also includes reflections on water's capacity to participate in human practice and emphasizes the importance of local thinking. Overall, the book offers a variety of perspectives on water and its significance in different contexts. [Extracted from the article]

The extraction of groundwater and the regulation of its use in many parts of the world have been found to present a particular kind of problem. A contest involving mining companies, an 'impacted' community, and the state arising from groundwater and its extraction in the Salar de Atacama, northern Chile, provides a stark example. What marks the case are the many uncertainties about underground water and the quantities extracted. This article argues that uncertainty characterizes conditions of 'late industrialism' and that corporate practice that sustains ignorance is a form of powerful agency that in turn maintains the conditions for potentially harmful extractive activity. Critically engaging with the proposition that water may act in the relational process of unknowing contributes to the analysis of how corporate practice may sustain ignorance. This also suggests that alternative political responses to uncertainty are possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mineral extraction landscapes are infamous for their histories of spectacular ecological destruction and corporate-Indigenous community conflict. In contrast, until recently mining company activity and Indigenous community responses in the Salar de Atacama, northern Chile, have been marked by a somewhat mundane political and environmental dynamic characterised by invisible, shifting and short-term benefits for locals and unspectacular contests. However, the effects of extractive industries are cumulative and complex. In this paper, I examine the operation of relatively new Chilean regulation relating to environmental and social impact of mining that includes obligatory consultation between proponents and Indigenous peoples. Relying on new regulation, Indigenous people have expanded their repertoire of response to mining, refusing extractive development's proffered benefits and entering negotiation with powerful outsiders on better terms, but there are also social costs. Using the critical terms of community leaders who protested about the "overburden" of new projects mounting up in consultation with proponents, I examine the structural and temporal problems generated by new regulatory process. Through ethnographic material derived from engaged anthropology, I show how community administrative and political labour to respond to the technical processes of consultation is at once mundane and exhausting. I argue that community work to consider and respond to proposed extractivist projects "exceeds" the progressive politics of recognition and new Chilean regulatory frameworks of consultation and left unaddressed, generates additional negative effects. I suggest that regulatory processes regarding the social impact of extractive industry should take seriously the implications of overburden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of value is fundamental to contexts of resource scarcity given that contest over use and distribution of scarce resources centres on judgments about rights, interests and access. In mining processes, the use and extraction of water in great volumes commodifies and threatens supplies of what others understand to be a substance essential to all forms of life. In the Atacama, while industrial extraction and commodification by the mining industry are the basis for indigenous people's contestations over water resources, an analysis of everyday water practice and performance (as 'ordinary ethics') demonstrates that an indigenous ethics of resources includes commodity values under certain conditions. This paper examines a field of competing actors engaging in extraction and use of scarce waters in order to make an argument for the importance of considering the complexities and dynamics of ethical practice and water value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subterranean waters in the mineral-rich and water-poor Atacama desert, northern Chile, are subject to contest between resource-extracting companies and mostly indigenous residents. In complying with global Corporate Social Responsibility standards and local agreements, and in an effort to reduce opposition from indigenous groups, some mining companies have begun to undertake 'transparency' reporting regarding the impact of their subterranean water extraction activities. These engagements present a moral interface between two streams of global discourse: the CSR principle of 'transparency' on impacts of water extraction and the rights of indigenous peoples to 'native waters.' An ethnographic study of a set of such engagements shows indigenous community rejection of the truths that transparency purports to reveal. However, the apparent intractability of moral contest in such globally comparative and locally specific contexts in terms of distrust of the mining companies is tempered by a proposition for the ethics of engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]