ABSTRACT
This chapter examines my journey as an artist with Stuart Flanagan, as The Orbweavers, generating creative responses to waterways of Narrm/Melbourne, focussing on industrial history and environmental change through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in our project Newer Volcanics. These waterways hold layers of history and meaning that inform and affect my understanding of the present. Four waterways are discussed: Birrarung/Yarra River, Maribyrnong River, Stony and Merri Creeks. Specific waterway locations are recounted, along with the personal contexts which connect and enmesh me in these places. The approaches Stuart and I use to deeply engage with place are described: psychogeography and the walking practice of the dérive, contemplation of archival material, and the work of local writers and historians. This is followed by examples of our creative responses to each waterway in the form of songs and song maps, and a description of how the works are performed.
