ABSTRACT
Confounding the Enlightenment categories of “Nature” and “Culture”, legal geography is a methodology used to demonstrate the vital entanglement of human and more-than-human worlds by revealing law’s agency in shaping place, and the agency of place in shaping law. A legal geographical analysis of Sydney’s drinking water catchment allows us to understand this place as neither a “natural” nor “cultural” place, but as a dynamic “lawscape” of interrelated rivers, swamp ecologies, groundwater systems, violent colonial dispossession and conflict, dams, underground coal mines, Special Areas, National Parks and the source of drinking water for 5 million people. The Sydney catchment is bonded to law – the loss of its swamp ecologies, the decreased flow and contamination of its water caused by mining subsidence evidence law’s agency in shaping this landscape. Similarly, the agency of water and coal bonds the people, economy and laws of Sydney to the catchment. However, the laws regulating the Sydney catchment do not adequately address the inextricable bonds and co-constitutivity of geohydrological cycles, coal extraction, riparian ecology and water security within it. Instead, for over two centuries, Anglo-Australian laws have transformed this place into a resource frontier by conceptually and physically fragmenting it into different categories of lands and separable component parts, principally water and coal. This chapter critiques the atomism of these laws through the lens of legal geography which emphasises the need for a more relational, holistic and congruous legal approach.
