ABSTRACT
Indigenous Australian relationships to freshwater sources are replete with significance and symbolism. In Australia’s vast arid and semi-arid landscapes, freshwater sources are known for their life-saving qualities, but they are much more than that—they act as powerful symbolic frames of reference in structuring and ordering the landscape and reaffirming Indigenous identity and cosmologies. This essay explores some of the key themes in the study of Australian freshwater sources in past and present contexts—their significance in deep-time settings, their relationships to ritual and ceremonial practices, their relational and affectual (e.g. fear) nature, and their memorialisation through visual art as a means to identifying the cultural complexity of such places. By focusing on relational contexts and how Indigenous people characterize their connections to freshwater sources, this chapter also demonstrates how these places rarely exist in isolation, but rather form part of a broader interconnected world based on Indigenous ontology and epistemology.
