The water keeps running even after you turn your back on it

“I imagine groundwater trickling, even though I know it is atomised, ancient, in porous rock. What’s it like down there? people ask. Is it a cave?”

This short film was produced as part of the Makeshift Publics Critical Response Series at Arts House, during which my cohort and I thought deeply about the unexamined spaces and systems that sustain us. The water keeps running even when you turn your back on it is a sharing of my work in progress around groundwater in the arid zones of this continent. The Great Artesian Basin is the largest reservoir of groundwater in the world and is essential to drinking, farming, communications and supply chains across the continent, that has been drastically changed by colonisation. This first public sharing of my research is an audiovisual bore into an imaginary: the largest reservoir of groundwater in the world. This work invites you to the well, to listen and look alongside me as I present visions (sleeping, waking) and research (primary, secondary) of this system so vital to our lives that few of us understand.