The Australian practice OFFICE recently published the book Aqua Nullius: First Nations Water Rights in Australia. The book presents a rich cross-section of Aboriginal culture and struggle for land and water rights through chapters on Storytelling, Water Injustice, First Nations Water Management and Overturning Aqua Nullius. Title, inspired by Virginia Marshall’s Overturning aqua nullius: securing Aboriginal water rights, who is also presented in the book, pushes through the difficult framings of the colonised country. A number of interviews with Aboriginal peoples across the country are presented in the book, underlining the need to incorporate the knowledge of caring for land.
Jack Mitchel, artist and researcher of Whadjuk and Ballardong of the Noongar Nations, writes the introductions to each chapter. Poetic openings are connecting water to bodily fluids, from blood to tears, inviting us into storytelling and cosmology: “Any attempts at healing waterways must also come with healing the injustice which has also happened to the people and their relationships to the water, to songlines and to hearts.”
Before proceeding, we point to the OFFICE crowdfunding campaign for the project Rain Makers: Forensic Cartography and First Nations Water Rights in Ali Curung, in which contemporary technology will merge with traditional storytelling, revealing injustice on the water licence granted for free to multinational corporation Fortune Agribusiness.
Besides, OFFICE is registered as a charity, unique in Australia, meaning all their work needs to be done in service for the public good. We speak with Steve Mintern, Managing Director and landscape architect, about their practice and the book.
How do you survive working as a charity?
It’s very tight. We work for community organisations who get grant funding and pay us like typical services — but a lot of the time we work with those groups to help them get those grants in the first place. We’ll do work pro bono upfront to build out a brief and shape a project. Often, that takes years, and then it might kick into a more typical landscape architectural project. There’s usually a year or two of advocacy work in the background. Our work is really varied.
Your practice is much more than a “project house”. You run a gallery space, too. Tell us more about 3553.
We work out of a big old warehouse in Collingwood, formerly working class, now very gentrified — the standard thing that happens everywhere. We’re one of the last remaining warehouses in the area. 3553 is a small, design-focused gallery that opens onto the street, pretty DIY. The space is free to use for anyone whose work serves the public good. We put out an open call, run workshops and film screenings. The idea is a productive space, not just a gallery.
The practice extends into publishing, too. You’ve published The Politics of Public Space series.
The first book of Public Space was going to launch the day we went into lockdown. Every time we went to publish a new volume, we went back into lockdown. Melbourne was the most locked-down city in the world for basically two years. So we happened to be putting out books about public space at a time when no one could go outside. Good timing. We put out three books in 2020, the final one the year after, then compiled them into a bigger compendium with another nine interviews. Those were particularly focused on landscape and ecology, because there was a gap. What we’d done previously was very urban, very built-form focused. We wanted more Aboriginal voices, Traditional Owners talking about caring for Country and land management.
The gap you identified led to the Reimagining Birrarung exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. What was your proposal?
The NGV commissioned eight landscape architecture firms to develop a vision of what the main river, Birrarung, commonly called Yarra, could look like in 2070. Some were super tech-futuristic. Ours was probably the other end: what would happen if we simply returned water rights to the Wurundjeri, the Traditional Owners of this part of the city? We worked closely with the Elders to develop that proposal and made a film.
How did the research done for Birrarung extend to Aqua Nullius: First Nations Water Rights in Australia, your most recent book?
We got grant funding to extend the research and interview twenty Aboriginal people from all over Australia, working closely with Jack Mitchell, a Whadjuk/Ballardong Noongar fella from Western Australia. Some we already knew — Uncle Dave Wandin, Sophia Pierce, Norman Frank Jupurrurla, a Warumungu Elder we recently designed a house for with Wilya Janta. A lot we didn’t know at all. It’s been a privilege to hear these stories and experience the generosity with which people shared their cultural knowledge. We feel very lucky to be able to do it.
The title is a provocation. How did Aqua Nullius come about?
No treaty was ever made between First Nations and Australian governments. Terra Nullius is foundational to this country — overturned in the courts some time ago, but very much still part of the public consciousness. Aqua Nullius isn’t a commonly used term. Virginia Marshall popularised it with her book Overturning Aqua Nullius: Securing Aboriginal Water Rights, and we found it such a powerfully clear way of articulating what was going on.
It captures the way water is being commodified in Australia. Maureen O’Keefe speaks about what’s happening in Ali Curung, where water has been given away for free — the biggest water licence in Australia’s history handed to an international corporation. There are stories throughout of injustice, but also of people fighting back, reclaiming sovereignty over Country. Country encompasses everything: land, water, sky, and people.
Noel Nannup writes that large portions of Aboriginal spirituality are based on common sense. What role do storytelling and traditional knowledge play today?
We’ve got a long way to go as non-Aboriginal people. I’m a settler here on this Country, and there’s a long way to go to incorporate that knowledge. Most of our projects are with Aboriginal organisations — there’s an invitation there to work with this knowledge and understand this continent more deeply.
Storytelling is central. Aboriginal people have an oral tradition, no written language, and those stories have been told for tens of thousands of years. Aboriginal people represent the longest living culture in the world. That’s a remarkable asset — an opportunity being continually offered, and maybe not accepted with the generosity it deserves by white Australia. Story is what helps us relate to the places in which we live and work.
The Northern Territory features a lot in the book. Can you describe its significance?
The percentage of Aboriginal people in Australia might be 3%, but in the Northern Territory it’s much higher. When the English invaded, it took them a long time to get there — the land is very hot, very dry, harder to grow crops. The impacts of colonisation arrived later, so a lot of the storytelling and cultural practices are still intact. People still speak language as their first, second, or third tongue, English their fourth.
Someone like Norman Frank Jupurrurla grew up in the bush and didn’t see a white person until he was about fifteen. He’s very culturally connected, speaks many First Nations languages. In such a dry place, you need to know where the water is. Norm speaks about the different words they have for clouds — six or seven words for different types of clouds, rain, and water. It shows the importance placed on understanding Country. We really wanted to speak to people from all over the continent — different climate conditions, types of Country, types of experience.
Given that context — floods in some places, water scarcity in others — is there a unified view of water among First Nations, or are the stories different?
There’s such diversity. But the unifying thing is respect, care, and an understanding that they are part of Country and need to live with the environment. There are connections that cross huge distances — the Rainbow Serpent stories that Sophia Pierce talks about, the two Ngatji who created her Country. Other people thousands of kilometres away tell Rainbow Serpent stories too. Underneath all of it, the Dreaming stories have a purpose. They’re not fairy tales. They allow people to understand how to live with Country and care for this place.
Tell us about songlines and their connection to water.
Songlines can be waterways, or simply pathways through which people move — trade routes where you exchange a form of stone that others don’t have. Uncle Noel speaks beautifully about their importance. There’s an artwork in his chapter by Josephine Mick, painted in the nineties, that maps songlines across the continent. The songs are an oral map of spatial relationships — deeply complex, slightly different for every community, but linking across the various Aboriginal Nations within Australia. There’s a great book called First Knowledges Songlines that unpacks the way they work as a memory device and a way of moving through Country.
Can you point to more successful fights for water rights? How far is Australia in granting personhood to water bodies?
The Birrarung, a few hundred metres from where I’m sitting, is now classified as a living entity. This meant establishing the Birrarung Council, authorised to speak with and for the river — a way to think about it as a singular living entity, not as a barrier between local government areas, water authorities, and private owners. That changes the way we manage, work with, and care for it. The Martuwarra in north-western Australia is classified as a living entity as well.
More recently, water rights have been granted back to some Aboriginal communities. The Gunaikurnai people in south-eastern Victoria had a very large water right returned. They now control how that water is used and released, with complete autonomy over it. Whether they use it to make money or put environmental flows down is completely up to them, not forced through the colonial government. There’s a range of Aboriginal organisations fighting to get water back so they can self-determine the right thing to do for Country.
How does this knowledge feed back into your work?
One example is the housing work we’ve been doing in Tennant Creek, right in the dead centre of Australia, designing a home for Norm. The cultural way in which they want to live is so connected to how people would have lived pre-invasion. The building is oriented to catch certain breezes that allow them to smoke the house of spirits: you light a fire on one side, and the breeze brings it through. People sleep with their heads to the east, otherwise you wake up warungka, or confused. You always immediately know which direction you’re facing. The landscape fits that too: windbreaks that block certain winds at certain times of year, different plants that provide shade according to the orientation. There’s so much culture embedded in that very small plan.
It all comes from spending time with people and understanding how they culturally want to live, how those cultural practices are so embedded and second nature. As designers, our job is to facilitate that. Culture has to come first, and everything else comes after.
From the outside, as a European looking at Indigenous-inspired design, a lot of it can seem like it’s just been added on, shapes, pattern, surface. How do you recognise what is a genuine cultural engagement?
And that’s often how we feel it has happened. The question is: how do you ensure the engagement is done in a respectful way, that it is Indigenous-led where it can be? That term gets used a lot in Australia right now, in architecture, in landscape architecture, in a lot of industries, but very rarely is it actually Indigenous-led. It might mean some consultation with Aboriginal people, but that doesn’t make it an Indigenous-led project. I wouldn’t call Aqua Nullius an Indigenous-led project — it has a lot of Aboriginal people in it, but ultimately the publisher and editor are a non-Indigenous organisation. That’s absolutely fine. It’s about being honest about that.
Sometimes the use of pattern, artwork, and colour is genuinely what the community wanted. But far too often, it lets people feel they’ve done the right thing while structurally doing nothing. The version of that I dislike most is: we’ve got some space for a mural, we’ll get an Aboriginal artist to do one. If no Aboriginal person will ever be able to afford to live in your building, your mural is pretty pointless. If the input isn’t foundational to what the project is and does, it’s lip service. Aboriginal people call it “blak washing” — like greenwashing.
The best projects we get to do are the ones where the engagement is deep. They’re the most exciting, the most fun, and they end up so much more interesting. There’s so much richness available if you’re willing to do things properly.
How does the fight for water connect to the broader climate fight?
In landscape, particularly, because we deal with Country, which is basically our medium. We’re getting there, which is good. Not fast enough for my liking, though.
People are coming to realise that traditional knowledge is about how to live on this continent. Aboriginal cultures have co-evolved with this place and there’s enormous value in that. Some of what we’re seeing — rivers given back to communities, recognised as living entities — reflects that realisation. Uncle Dave Wandin speaks in the book about the Narrap, a Wurundjeri land management team working in contemporary ways with traditional knowledge. It’s not going backwards. It’s combining the traditional with the contemporary, which is happening more and more. The environmental movement is definitely understanding that. The rest of Australia, maybe not quite.
