Southern Waters Symposium

Water describes and sounds the South in resonant and manifold ways. 

This symposium attends to the tones and contours of Southern Waters as they flow across the ‘unique world’ of the ‘blue southern hemisphere’, connecting and infusing the landmasses and islands of the South while circulating through the hydrosphere that distinguishes our planet. It considers the pressure that water – or its absence – places on creative form and on critical thought, and how water gives shape to understandings and performances of place in the world. Located in South Australia and focused particularly on the regions of Australasia and southern/eastern Africa, along with South/Asia, it is interested also in how water offers a medium for thinking between the global South and the geographic South and in what it means to inhabit the driest state of the driest continent on earth.

Featuring readings, performances and screenings of work by acclaimed and emerging writers, choreographers and musicians, the symposium brings creative practitioners and critical thinkers together in a series of conversation panels that reflect on the waters that flood into and infuse Australian literatures, as well as on writing the absence of water in arid states; thinking through wet and dry forms and theories, and across the Indian Ocean; writing rivers in southern lands; immersive and fluid choreographies; and the bejeweling undersea and inland seas of Australia and the ‘oceanic south’.