Towards an Indigenous Hydropoetics: Human-River Interdependencies in Aboriginal Australian Poetry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article delineates the idea of an Indigenous hydropoetics as an ancestral outlook on rivers grounded in Aboriginal cultural traditions of, and everyday interactions with, rivers. In particular, two features—embodiment and relationality—prove integral to conceptualising Indigenous hydropoetics in response to the hydrological precarities of the present. Recognising rivers' capacity for agency, the idea is developed in relation to contemporary Aboriginal Australian poetry narrating long-standing human interdependencies with rivers. The hydropoetic verse of Jack Davis, Samuel Wagan Watson, and Jeanine Leane reveals embodied relations to—and relational epistemologies of—rivers and their habitats through a focus on Derbal Yerrigan (the Swan River) of Western Australia, Marrambidya Bila (the Murrumbidgee River) of New South Wales, and Maiwar (the Brisbane River) of Queensland, respectively. Their writing integrates Dreaming narratives and elicits river poiesis, while also confronting aquatic conservation urgencies in Australia. Evoking sacred rivers whose origins lie in the Dreaming, their work also presents a medium for reverent listening to the fluvial world. While Leane’s hydropoetics centres on the mediating role of memory—hers and the river’s—Watson’s poetry calls attention to fractured river ecologies in Brisbane's urban environment. For Davis, bodily relationality between humans, plants, and rivers presents a potent means of ecopolitical resistance through multispecies solidarity. Immersed in Aboriginal creation narratives, an Indigenous hydropoetics foregrounds the multidimensional intersections between humans, rivers, and all life, thus energising new imaginings of rivers and encouraging receptivity to their biocultural complexities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".