An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Vic McEwan (Postdoctoral Fellow, 2025-26)
River Stories
As part of the Resonant Earth program at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music at the University of Sydney, and as the Artistic Director of Arts organisation The Cad Factory, I am part of developing an interdisciplinary project called River Stories. River Stories extends work undertaken taken after the 2019 and 2023 Mass Fish Kill events which saw 1 million (2019) and 30 million dead fish (2023) appear on the Barka/Darling River in Menindee, NSW, Australia.
River Stories is an ambitious, multi-sector, initiative responding to one of Australia’s most urgent and persistent challenges: how to better care for the Murray–Darling River system, and the peoples, plants, and animals whose lives are entangled with its waterways. Moving through the oppositional politics that so often define debates around water, River Stories brings together artists, scientists, community members, Indigenous leaders, and local and national water managers, to reconfigure sites of conflict as places of exchange, connection and shared purpose. It enacts this orientation through slow, emergent, relational processes that navigate Australia’s political, cultural, and ecological water complexities. Within these contested terrains, River Stories does not attempt to resolve conflict per se; instead, it opens relational possibilities otherwise constrained by policy, economics, and ongoing colonial legacies. This work explores what role the arts can play in bringing together people and multispecies worlds to work through conflict around the cultural, economic, political, historical and future impacts of river management.
Please join in-person, or click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81113670095
Passcode: 38bakW8E