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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]

While acknowledging advances in legal recognition of Indigenous rights, much of the research literature positions negotiated agreements between Indigenous peoples and corporations simply as 'neoliberal technology' that gives the appearance of Indigenous consent while allowing exploitation to continue. This analysis is flawed in considering agreements as discrete, stand‐alone phenomena. It ignores the possibility that Indigenous peoples may use agreements as part of broader strategies to achieve control over extractive industry activity and to secure a share of 'development' benefits — strategies that involve selective engagement with the state. This article supports its argument by locating an agreement between the Chilean lithium mining company, Albemarle, and the Council of Atacameño Peoples within a broad and sustained strategy by Atacameño people to address the negative impacts of mining in the Salar de Atacama, Chile, while securing its economic benefits. This strategy includes using the agreement to voice Atacameño territorial claims and environmental concerns to the state, and to insist that the state lives up to its responsibilities. The analysis leads to a fuller appreciation of the agency exercised by Indigenous peoples in dealing with the sustained expansion of extractive activity on their territories, and a more nuanced understanding of negotiated agreements between Indigenous peoples and mining corporations and between Indigenous people and the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thinking with Marind and the "plant turn", Chao casts plants as full agents, possessing the capacity to enact their own trajectories. While some Marind may pity oil palm as a capitalist actor and tool, others like Chao's friend Darius deny its moral personhood; it is a being with "no kin". Uncomfortably for some, in the epilogue, Chao provides an account of her own dream of being mutilated by an Indonesian plantation field manager as he mutilated a sago tree. [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 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 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]

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]

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