Luckily, my good friend Jo Stirling, Visual Communications Designer and academic, has turned her smart and curious eye to studying the Shoalhaven River and its 34 tributaries, of which our beautiful river is one. Over the months since she dived into her PhD (through Sydney’s University of Technology), I’ve been fascinated by the watercolour ‘maps’ and random facts that flow around our time together. I asked her for an interview, visiting Stirling at her Fitzroy Falls home and hoping to get a sense of what it’s like to start to know a river deeply.
In her workspace are her aerial-view river watercolours pinned to the wall, which show the graceful winding of the river, and maps and line drawings strewn on the lightbox next to a small table with jars of brushes and palettes of earthy browns and watery greys, greens and blues. As the parrots and other birds flit about in mature greenery beyond the window, Stirling brings out scans of archival colonial maps from the 1820s, and historical photographs. I’m surprised to see a photo of a trading boat, the Coomanderry, carrying timber and dairy down Broughton Creek on its way to the Shoalhaven River then to Sydney.
Stirling didn’t always live in Fitzroy Falls; until 2019, she lived in the Valley, and before that the UK, and first in the Hawkesbury area of outer Sydney where she grew up on acres and was often in nature. ‘I’m a freshwater person,’ she says, recalling how the school would close and kids and all would come out to see the awe-inspiring power of the Hawkesbury in flood.
‘The Kangaroo River came into my life when I moved to Kangaroo Valley in 2001. My kids were little and I lived directly opposite Broughton Street, which has got the riverside park. So that’s how I met the river.’
Stirling talks about a ‘community of kids’ growing up around hers at that time.
‘We spent a lot of time on the river, with the river, whether it be kayaking trips or just swimming [and hanging out], especially when it’s really hot … lots of swimming under the bridge,’ and ‘a place of mums and kids, always.’
As the kids got older, they’d go off on their own. ‘We always knew where they were but that was their river time. They’d build huts down the river and make up worlds. They knew the safety rules.’
Stirling talks about the special feeling of the casuarina trees along the riverbanks, where she’d go with the kids in the early years. Many of us here have our own special spots along the river, to connect with the natural world and with ourselves. It’s nurturing this connection that’s at the heart of Stirling’s current project, ‘Up-river, Down-river: Visualising connection, conservation and climate on the Shoalhaven River’.
A creative down to her hiking boots, Stirling is drawn to visual arts materials such as watercolour, coloured markers, paint, line drawing, photography and cyanotypes, as well as the satellite images and historical archive, to explore and understand, and tell the stories of, the Lower Shoalhaven River in particular. Stirling walks and kayaks the river often, recording evidence in the field. All this is supported by semi-structured walking interviews with those who are in close connection with the river, and by joining bank restoration projects such as the recent planting of 3500 trees by Landcare and Riverwatch at Bundanon. Begun by the late Charlie Weir, decades-old Riverwatch (with their mangrove restoration and tree-planting projects) is just one example of local human interaction with the Shoalhaven that Stirling hopes to understand and communicate to a wider audience.
‘In a way my research on the rivers is about how we connect to things too. How do our daily lives connect to water? I mean, in Australia we have a water problem, we really do.’
‘It’s about drawing attention. To attitudes of care, attitudes of connection. And to be able to open up conversations about that […and present] learning from people who do beautiful and amazing work with rivers. As a designer, we collaborate.’
As doctorates go, it sounds like a pleasurable one but it occurs to me, too, that some of what she’s finding could be pretty sobering. She admits to some moments of heartbreak but says also that there are so many inspiring people doing great work for our local rivers.
The ‘product’ of the research will be a thesis, supported by visual creative process as a research tool, although I suspect it might later form the basis of a book, artwork or exhibition like the multi-disciplinary book 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder, a response to climate panic, and Ways to Water co-curated with Dr Agnieszka Golda for Wollongong City Gallery.
Stirling’s focus is the land and water edges. ‘I’m very interested in the riparian condition and edges of the Shoalhaven River and the role they play in the health of the whole river ecosystem. There are competing pressures on the Shoalhaven River system. […] It’s the last dam that’s in the Greater Sydney Water Catchment and that occurred in 1976 when Tallowa Dam became operational.’ Water is pumped from Tallowa Dam to the Wingecarribee and then into the Nepean to top up Sydney’s water supply: a major modification in the catchment which makes for interesting study.
Stirling also shows me Berry’s Canal, a modification that was cut by Alexander Berry in 1822, which joins the Shoalhaven to the Crookhaven River, providing a more reliable channel for transporting goods than the shallow waters at Shoalhaven Heads.
‘It was five metres wide in 1822. Now it’s 400 metres wide. It’s eroding at two metres a year. It’s a modification that has had, and will continue to have, ongoing effects in the estuary as it widens. Big pieces of land have completely disappeared now. So I’ve been mapping that change over time,’ Stirling says.
Looking at her drawings overlaid on scans of archival maps, I can see the change over time too. Stirling’s thin, curved line of black art-marker moves further to the left with each more recent drawing. She explains how she finds the lower Shoalhaven River fascinating partly because it is ‘so messed up’: The evidence of human intervention is so clear but also the evidence of human management of water and restoration – huge rocks have been moved into place by crane in revetment efforts to protect the bank from further erosion.
Even where no human or built intervention has occurred, the river’s edges are always changing, but once you add climate change and extreme weather events, and engineering intervention, that mutability is stark.
Just after the fires, I read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Knowledge, Scientific Wisdom and the Teachings of Plants. The Potawatomi poet and botanist writes about ‘river’ being not a noun in her traditional language but a verb: a river is ‘water being a river’. When we think of a river like this – as alive and having agency – it invites us into deeper connection with it, and ongoing engagement with that connection, for what constantly changes must be constantly re-known. To really know the river must take time and regular proximity. It might be almost like a spiritual practice, or a mindful one at least. Stirling does indeed spend a lot of time being with the river, sometimes just listening.
‘It’s very sensory, I think, with rivers. You’ve got the sound, the sensation [of moving in the water] and cooling down, the effect on you. With humans there’s something about the source: rivers and water systems are sacred places. They’re considered spiritual entities in their own right. In New Zealand, the Whanganui for instance has the same rights as a human. The traditional people fought to protect it.’
So to know a river might be very like knowing a person: spend time, give respect, give back with care.
Why not join the Valley folk already in Landcare and Riverwatch? Visit their websites for more info.
