World Water Day 2006

Water Awareness in Australia: The Watermark Australia Project

Of a maximum Level 5, our community of Castlemaine, rural Victoria is currently on Stage 4A Water Restrictions. Our inland location brings long, dry summers and low rainfall, and our local water supply has fallen to 15.4 per cent of capacity. So in 2005, out of concern for our water situation, I joined a local discussion group for the Watermark Australia project.

Launched in March 2005, Watermark Australia is a nation-wide, community-based initiative facilitated by the Victorian Women's Trust. The project was established to encourage like-minded people to meet in their communities to think about water, and talk about water-related issues. The aim is to establish community-led water reform, and encourage 'bottom-up' change in Australians' relationship with water.

While clean water is vital to our survival, it's barely discussed in Australia. Like healthy soil or air, the topic is rarely addressed in the average broadsheet newspaper or suburban conversation. But then, most urban Australians have never had to worry about clean drinking water or, until recently, water restrictions. Most of us have simply turned on the tap at our convenience and used as much of it as we like. Our sewage systems are still set up to use fresh water to flush our waste down the toilet. Some people still hose down their driveways with it.

And yet, Australia is the driest inhabited continent on Earth. Three-quarters of it is arid, and our interior receives one of the lowest rainfalls in the world. Drought is a natural occurrence, and our low rainfall along with very high evaporation rates mean low river flows.

Even more concerning, climate change will most likely bring increased annual temperatures and decreased annual rainfall: approximately 15 per cent less rainfall is predicted for southern Australia.

Despite this, Australians have among the highest water consumption rates in the world. While the estimated minimum amount of water required per person per day is 40 litres, the average Melburnian uses 350. In Melbourne homes, 10 times more water arrives in our food than our taps, but we waste $5.3 billion worth of it every year. Large regions of our country are now seriously drought affected, yet our total water use increased by 65 per cent in the few short years between 1985 and 1997. And if Melburnians continue to use water at current rates, the city may approach its supply limits in just 15 years.

While many countries routinely recycle waste water (Israel uses 70 per cent of its treated waste water in agriculture and Denmark treats around 87 per cent of its waste water), Australia allows 97 per cent of our city run-off and 86 per cent of effluent water to be unproductive. In Sydney, 450 billion litres of barely-treated sewage is pumped into the ocean annually; in Melbourne, around 289 billion litres is piped into Bass Strait and Port Phillip Bay after treatment.

These figures should make all Australians pause for reflection.
Indeed, Malcolm Turnbull MP, Federal Member for Wentworth, recently disclosed his embarrassment over Australia's pitiful water recycling efforts after a visit to Israel: "The Israelis assume that nobody in their right mind would ever dispose of raw sewage. I had to bite my tongue at that point," he said.

Yet surprisingly, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (2004), young Australians' stated level of concern for the natural environment dropped from 75 per cent in 1992 to 57 per cent today. Statistics like this rarely make the headlines. It seems the less responsible we are for collecting it, the less responsibility we take for water and its management.

While my participation with Watermark Australia was inspiring, the number crunching led me to an inevitable conclusion: Australian public awareness of water issues is dangerously limited. Taking shorter showers and using buckets to wash our car is a start: but so much more needs to be done. There's no doubt our national (and global) water supply is under unsustainable pressure, and the easy availability of water has most Australians lulled into false sense of security.

So projects like Watermark are vital to us all. The problem we're inheriting is very real. All Australians must take responsibility for changing attitudes towards water. We urgently need to open our eyes to the problem, support one another to change our own behaviour - and above all, talk about it.

The future of Australia's water supply depends it.

March 22 was World Water Day.

Tania Andrusiak is a freelance writer and editor, and the Content Producer of this Newsletter. The second stage of Watermark Australia is now nearing completion, with the Discussion Paper scheduled for release by the end of 2006. For more information, see: http://www.watermarkaustralia.org.au