Where's Our Water?

Hunter Water has collaborated with the University of Newcastle and the Awabakal and Worimi communities to create a new story that draws on the traditional wisdom and practices of caring for our land and waterways. The story was written by 10 Aboriginal students from Newcastle High School, with guidance from Hunter Water’s Education Coordinator Kristy Ratcliffe, Professor Ruth Deakin-Crick, local Aboriginal educator Deirdre Heitmeyer and Aboriginal artist Saretta Fielding. The illustrations and book design were produced by Creative Industries students from the University of Newcastle.

Where’s Our Water? will assist Hunter Water in educating young people in the Lower Hunter about the value of water and the role we all play in ensuring we have enough now and into the future. This project demonstrates our commitment to partnering with our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to learn from each other and improve how we educate young people across the Lower Hunter to Love Water.

We have worked closely with the Muurrbay Aboriginal Language & Culture Co-operative and the Gathang Language Resource Group to incorporate Awabakal and Gathang (Worimi) language into Where’s Our Water? Because the Awabakal and Worimi nations speak different languages there is a version of the book for each. It is hoped that Where’s Our Water? will encourage teachers to incorporate our local languages into classroom discourse and support students’ learning about our local cultures.

Where’s Our Water? has been developed under the guidance of the Awabakal and Worimi Local Aboriginal Land Councils and the Muloobinbah Aboriginal Education Consultative Group. The shared value of this resource within our community has been the highlight of this project and something Hunter Water is proud of as we work towards reconciliation.

This project has created a unique Lower Hunter story. It speaks to the resilience and creativity of the students, to the dedicated mastery of the educational team and to the design commitment of the Project Zed team of UoN students. The video is punctuated with all of their learning outcomes and how together they crafted the book.

The project began as an idea seeded within the education team at Hunter Water in collaboration with the University of Newcastle, and the Muloobinbah Local Aboriginal Education Consultative Group (AECG) and Professor John Lester as our Aboriginal guides who brought it to final fruition. From the very beginning of being invited to Newcastle High School by Nathan Towney, and subsequently by Acting Principal Rochelle Dooley, the project team and dedicated high school teacher Paul Myers along with the students have understood that the success of the project needed dedicated and committed members all willing to be ‘In This Together’ to learn together.

The learning story of the students and the team began with a very warm Welcome to Country by Auntie Belinda and from then on the energy and good will of all the contributors shone through. The video, crafted by Martin Courcier and directed by Karen Nobes, tells the emergent journey of Where’s Our Water? from its beginnings as simple ideas in the minds of the Aboriginal students and how they were guided by respected Aboriginal educator Deirdre Heitmeyer and Aboriginal artist Saretta Fielding. It captures a collaged account of how the student learning progressed to the conceptualisation as an authentic student story with the characters of Ella and Timmy surrounded by their selected learning power animals and together they find ways to communicate a story about the need to save water set in Awabakal and Worimi Lands.

Where’s Our Water? was written for Hunter Water by a group of talented and inspiring Aboriginal students from Newcastle High School. Amarni, Ashah, Austin, Bailey, Chase, Grace, Penny, Rikky, Shikiah and Zeke collaborated to write this story. Hunter Water thanks these students for giving us their time, energy and passion to create a story that will be invaluable in teaching the children of our region about how precious water is.

During the course of four full-day workshops the students learnt about how we currently use water in the Lower Hunter and the ways that Hunter Water encourages children to save it. They also learnt about the long-held value of water by our traditional custodians of the land, and that for everything else to be able to survive and flourish water needs to be cared for and used sustainably. Guided by Deirdre Heitmeyer they used their understanding of learning attributes to create characters that would use these qualities to change the attitude and behaviour of the children in the story to save our precious resource.

Local Aboriginal artist, Saretta Fielding, facilitated workshops that taught the students about traditional storytelling through art and how traditional symbols, patterns and techniques are still used in modern storytelling. The students let their artistic talent shine, using this knowledge to create the concepts of the characters that were later interpreted and used by the design team to bring the story to life.

The Virtual Exhibition is dedicated to the Aboriginal students who are the Story Tellers. This exhibition speaks to their personal learning power attributes and their own representations of how they became confident learners through the project. At the completion of the project and after the students had seen their final story fully illustrated by the Project Zed team they went back to school. Each student was given large photographic images of themselves and asked to ‘become’ their new learning power ‘super’ learner. The images in this virtual exhibition show how they chose to represent themselves as wearing their new learning attributes.

Hunter Water was fortunate to be able to engage Studio Zed to illustrate and design the the layout of Where's Our Water? The group of designers were incredibly talented and could not have done a better job in bringing the Story Tellers' words to life.

Studio Zed offers high performing students the opportunity to work in a creative studio environment, getting first-hand experience with real live clients on a wide variety of professional design jobs. Co-Directors, Simone O’Callaghan and Carl Morgan run a Pop-Up Design Studio each summer where student designers work on completing have fast turnaround design jobs to industry standards in 4 – 6 weeks. Over the three years that Studio Zed has been running, our designers have worked on, and run a number of exciting projects, including web design, exhibition design, illustration, wayfinding, branding & visual identity, print design and the creation of a number of printed books.

"The team at Studio Zed have loved working on Where’s our Water? and we are very proud our very talented illustrators and designers Courtney Birch, Abby Carragher, Daisy Smartt, Puck Van Der Laan and Jessica Van Der Lindenwho showed so much dedication in creating Where’s our Water?." - Simone O'Callaghan, Co-Director, Studio Zed.

Kristy Ratcliffe, Hunter Water’s Education Coordinator and Dr Kathryn Grushka, Faculty of Education and Arts, University of Newcastle, have worked closely in collaboration with the many contributors to this project to see the creation of Where’s our Water? realised. This book is a result of their passion for education, reconciliation and giving a voice to our region’s children to ensure a sustainable future for the Lower Hunter.

We would like to take this opportunity to sincerely thank the individuals and organisations that collaborated on the Where's Our Water? project: Awabakal LALC, Belinda Wright, Carl Morgan, Deirdre Heitmeyer, Gathang Language Resource Group, Jasmin Fielding, John Hancock, John Lester, Karen Keers, Karen Nobes, Miranda Lawry, Muloobinbah Local AECG, Muurrbay Aboriginal Language & Culture Co-operative, Nathan Towney, Newcastle High School, Paul Myers, Rochelle Dooley, Saretta Fielding, Simone O’Callaghan, Studio Zed and Worimi LALC.