White Water: Race and Oceans Down Under

Kevin Reynolds’ post-apocalyptic, 1995 film, Waterworld, concludes with a reference to the post/colonial past: the conquest of Mount Everest by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. Though severed from a comprehension of the pastness of history, it is set in a future of melted polar ice caps, an Earth that has consequently been flooded, a present without dry land, and the evolution of a nautical society. Land and water are dislocated from their contemporary meanings. References to history, if any, become extremely abstract, and history itself becomes intemporal in this film. There is only the substantiality and expanse of water everywhere. Dryland becomes the lost object of desire, mankind’s destiny, and the map to this mythical place is written on the childish, but feminine, body. Dryland is eventually found to be at the top of Mount Everest with its commemorative plaque, citing and celebrating Norgay and Hillary’s feat. Notwithstanding the writing of the post-apocalyptic future as completely alien and Other, the yearning for land seems surprisingly familiar to scholars of voyage narratives as well as colonial studies. To select almost at random, Charles de Brosses’ Histoire des Navigations aux terres Australes, emphasises a similar search for land and the exploration of the Pacific and the establishment of carefully organised European settlements.¹ Indeed, as Edward Said’s now classic work, Orientalism, suggests, the importance of voyaging can be seen not only in Cook and Bouganville, Tournefort and Adanson, but also in “French traders in the Pacific, by Jesuit missionaries in China and the Americas, by William Dampier’s explorations and reports, by innumerable speculations on giants, Patagonians, savages, natives, and monsters supposedly residing to the far east, west, south, and north of Europe.” ²

If in Kevin Reynold’s imagined future, water and land show fluidity in meaning, located within difference and desire, I want to now take a snapshot of the present, or the almost present—in fact, the recent past— the year 2002. In a special supplement of The Guardian, August 2002, during the Earth Summit in Johannesburg, John Vidal refers to water as “Blue Gold” and states “[g]lobal consumption of freshwater is doubling every 20 years and new sources are becoming scarcer and more expensive to develop and treat… Water, rather than land shortages, are now stopping agriculture expanding in many regions, and the UN fears that water shortages could jeopardise food supplies and trigger economic stagnation.”³If in the fictional post-apocalyptic age, Dryland becomes the mythical object of desire, it is freshwater that seems to propel contemporary desire. The perspective of the present is shaped by rooted, sedentary, contemporary society unlike the fictional, nautical society of Waterworld . This disjunction in the meaning of water between the two ages also dislocates embodiment from the familiar underpinnings of race, class, gender (and sexuality). In August of 2002, however, these categories prevailed.

Here are some facts on water in 2002: the world is divided into water-rich and water-poor countries. If the human requirement per day for healthy living is 11.5 litres a day (2.5 litres for drinking water and 9 litres for hygienic purposes), then water-rich countries almost used up the daily human requirement each time a toilet was flushed (10 litres). Again, individuals in water-rich countries used up over three times the basic per capita water requirements by taking a shower (35 litres) or about 7 times when taking a bath (80 litres). Meanwhile 1.2 billion people lack access to clean water and 2.4 billion have no sanitation. Paradoxically, people in water-rich countries spent less on water per capita than their counter-parts in water-poor countries. Interestingly, the water-poor countries were located in Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, China (and most of Australia ). Indeed, can even the simple act of flushing the toilet locate you within a geographical and racial space?

This is the article on the meaning of water. Some of the questions with which I am preoccupied with in this article are: How do we read the substantiality of water? What is at stake in the ownership of...