Water is life. Vital for the replenishment of lakes and streams. Abundant in organisms, wombs and cells. Water heals with its ‘capacity to relieve us of the weight of our bodies’, reflects author Katherine Brabon, and reminds us of origins with its ‘perfect memory... forever trying to get back to where it was’, tells writer Toni Morrison.

This workshop invites you to connect with water – in your body, in places around you, and in history. Where in water do you, your stories, begin?

We will write to the ‘water within’ – that held in our lungs, hearts, and bones; to the ‘water around’, to the riverside cities built beside and over the top of sacred Indigenous waterways; and to the ‘water beyond’, the oceans of history, displacement, and resistance. Together, we will wade into and beyond water’s powerful metaphors. You will finish the workshop with a deepened wonder for the life ways of water, feeling more connected to the place where you live, and to the power that flows and returns through your words.

Content/prompt foci

The water within: connecting with the body's subterranean life

Water is... not land? finding inter-relations between land and water, rivers, creeks and cities, flowing and writing

Oceans as bridges to history: accessing deep memories

Your facilitator

I'm a non-Indigenous historian and poet with expertise on histories of migration, colonialism and medicine in 19th Century Victoria. I'm the author of two history-themed poetry collections: boots (2020), and Second Fleet Baby (2022), where I connect with an ancestor who ‘held the ocean in one corner of her mind while dragging life from the seabed to the surface with the other’.

You will need

A computer to connect to Zoom. Materials to write with. A glass of water.