Blue Sky Thinking in water governance: Understanding the Role of the Imagination in Australian Water Policy

Abstract

To show how literature has influenced the hydrological imagination of arid settler colonial countries other than Australia requires deeper culturally and historically specific analyses than can be accommodated here. However, this type of analysis, which shows how a popular literary representation of water can become deeply ingrained in the cultural subconscious of a nation and have the power to influence major water management decisions, has important future benefits beyond Australia. In Dorothea Mackellar's 'My Country', the stark metaphorics of aridity rescued occasionally by rain bear witness to the difficult reality of water in the Australian landscape. It is no surprise then that approaches to addressing the manifold issues relating to water policy and governance in Australia are complex in hydrological, ecological, social, cultural, political and economic terms, as well as contested and conflicted. Inspired ways forward are limited by the legacies of past decisions and prevailing attitudes to policy formulation, which are themselves subject to an intersecting range of influences involving knowledge and the imagination. Einstein's (1929) much quoted statement, 'Imagination is more important than knowledge' offers a suggestive starting point for thinking about the function of imagination and knowledge in our decision making processes. If we consider the imagination as facilitating a path to knowledge through the creation of new possibilities, then we can imagine our way to a better future.