Storying the river: toward a feminist ethics of care

What happens when the scientific method meets the creative process of narrative construction? This article seeks to story a section of Dyarubbin (the Hawkesbury-Nepean River)—an iconic yet degraded waterway encircling the Sydney Basin that carries with it vital cultural, recreational, economic, and agricultural values. Like many peri-urban waterways, the mounting pressures of population growth, industrial and agricultural pollution, and rapid urban development since colonization have placed intense pressure on the health of this waterway. This article seeks to extend a feminist ethics of care to the river through a form of narrative inquiry. In doing so the article’s authors seek to move away from the paternalistic, extractivist, and anthropocentric ways of knowing that perpetuate the ethical and environmental crisis of colonialism and its associated hierarchical binaries of carer and cared for. Seeking new ways of knowing, the authors attempt to foreground our relationality to the river through a series of stories that reposition their assumptions and approaches to the more than human world.