The premiers and the prime minister are at present scoring political points whilst pondering the problem of the Murray-Darling basin. The problem is so severe that more is now needed than the unlikely prospect of a metre of annual rain to bring the basin back to good health. It is questionable whether the money that will apparently be spent will achieve that affect.
It is curious that we are grappling as a nation with water, as the qualities of water are at odds with all this battling and debating. The aqueous substance which covers 70% of the earth, and which makes up the same approximate percentage of our human bodies, is a giver of life. By quantity, it is a substance which dominates the globe upon which we live and the bodies we inhabit, yet it functions in quite a different way. Rather than dominance, water acts to absorb, reflect and purify. As it falls and flows, it collects impurities and pollution; as it filters through the earth, water rids itself of unhealthy elements, before evaporating in order to cycle harmoniously to earth again.
Water acts with 'sensitive chaos' as Swiss researcher, Theodor Schwenk, describes it. When left to its own devices, it prefers meandering to linear behaviour, tracing loose coils across a continent. It resents angles, corners and positions and flows to the lowest point rather than occupying a position of status. St Francis of Assisi characterised its sisterly qualities in the Canticle of the Sun, translated for children as "so humble, precious, pure and good, it works for us so well".
Bernd Kröplin and a team of researchers at the University of Stuttgart have investigated water and explored the absorptive qualities of the substance. Analysis of droplets of human saliva reflect human health, emotional status, even the effects of technological implements like the mobile phone on the human being, through the relative order or disorder of the resulting patterns evident in the saliva. Masaru Emoto crystallised water and showed the effects of music on the emergent patterns.
If such sensitivity and fluidity is becoming rarer on the globe, or transforming from useful sources of freshwater to increasing levels of salt water, what is it that water is asking of us?
It seems to be demanding our stewardship - although demand is too harsh a verb for such a gentle substance. Perhaps it requests our care. We need to develop