ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how to empower and recognize traditional water knowledge systems. It presents a narrative where the author's presents their perspectives through an on-going dialogue from different cultural and disciplinary backgrounds. There are about a hundred waterholes in the Ngarntu and each have their special names and they are all the paths that the Mundaguddah the rainbow serpent travels. In the Galilee Basin in central Queensland, Wangan and Jagalingou Traditional Owners raise concerns that a massive government-supported coal mine would destroy their ancestral homelands and waters, cultural landscape and heritage. These approaches have been identified as two of the five common principles emerging in water management in western countries. Water governance systems in the neoliberal world of globalization have rendered water as a commodity to be traded and consumed, despite the rhetoric of environmental laws, which have largely resulted in the empowerment of developers rather than the stewards of the environment.
