Rescope Radio

Water policy often gets framed as engineering, compliance, and competing demands. Then Sheryl Hedges steps up at the Australian Water Association conference and resets the baseline: for First Nations people, water is not a resource, it’s a living being that carries memory, knowledge, and songlines. That single shift turns “allocation” into responsibility, and it turns river health into a measure of cultural, ecological, and economic life across generations. Sheryl is a Walbanga woman leading the First Nations Water Branch within Australia’s Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, and her keynote lands right in the hard numbers. First Nations people hold rights to around 40% of Australian land, yet control less than 0.2% of surface water entitlements in the Murray-Darling Basin. She names the structural roots of that gap, including the fiction of aqua nullius and the way water entitlements have been tied to land ownership and capital inside a multibillion-dollar water market. We walk t