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This thesis offers a new understanding of everyday life for households living off-grid from municipal water and sewerage systems. The thesis argues for household sustainability policy informed by existing adaptive capacities and experiments with alternatives to mains water infrastructure and governance systems in the Minority World. It does so through a research design that combined questionnaire surveys with semi-structured interviews and ‘home-insight tours’ conducted with participants who live off-grid for water in the Eurobodalla Shire, a non-metropolitan local government area situated on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia. Building on relational ontologies of everyday life, this thesis brings into conversation concepts from social practice theory and embodied feminist scholarship, to conceptualise the more-than-human, discursive, embodied and affective dimensions that shape everyday water practices. Across the empirical chapters attention turns specifically to developing understanding of human-water relations in the non-mains water home through three inter-related everyday water practices: provision, (re)use and disposal. Attention is drawn to the embodied qualities of skills and competencies in managing the material infrastructures of domestic water supply, and the discourses, sensuous bodies and emotions invested in practices of water capture, (re)use and disposal—elements that are often ignored in water policy debates. The thesis illustrates the importance of geographical relational thinking to conceive of domestic water self-sufficiency. Practices of provisioning, (re)using and disposing of water are always contingent upon the situated socio-material arrangements through which people make sense of themselves and home.

This article examines the gendered dynamics of wildland firefighting through analysis of employment statistics and in-depth interviews with employees of the National Parks and Wildlife Service in New South Wales, Australia. The statistics suggest increased gender equality for women following the affirmative gender politics of the 1990s in a previously male-dominated workplace. However, we argue these statistics mask how some patterns of practice surrounding fire management continue to reproduce a gendered workplace. Turning to the concept of hegemonic masculinity, we explore the ongoing gendered assumptions of this workplace and identify those that prove most resistant to change around bodies, masculinity, leadership, and parenting. This focuses the spotlight on gender equity. The article considers respect of gender difference in relation to wider questions of mentoring, training and leadership.

This paper examines how the availability or scarcity of water influenced the survival related decisions of households during the October 2013 State Mine Fire in the Blue Mountains, New South Wales, Australia. Narrative analysis of semi-structured interviews with 18 households impacted by the bushfire revealed that drought conditions in the months preceding the bushfire left many households dependent on non-reticulated water supplies vulnerable at the time the fire threat became apparent. Despite considerable preparations for water storage and usage during the fire, "weak links" in planning (e.g., top-ups, failure of pumps, generators and hoses) meant water was not accessible when needed most. This paper discusses a gap in bushfire safety scholarship on water usage and everyday trade-offs amongst residents in areas independent of reticulated (mains) water supplies. Findings suggest a need for more detailed and consistent information in official bushfire safety advice on storing water prior to a bushfire and effective water distribution systems for household defence and fire fighting.

The number of houses at risk of wildfire continues to increase around the world and researchers continue to search for ways to minimise loss. Many people inhabit fire‐prone areas across south eastern Australia and, despite the inherent risk of fire, choose to live in these areas for the amenity and lifestyle opportunities that these areas provide. This project was developed in order to identify and understand the features which residents' value most on their property and surrounds and if the same features contribute most to their bushfire hazard. Risk reduction measures pose dilemmas for many residents on urban margins. Such people place a high value on living close to bushland, for a host of reasons (e.g. visual, recreational and cultural amenity). Conflicts may arise between risk reduction policies and activities in and around bushland margins and the amenity that people derive from living in these places. For example, the clearance of or permanent structural alteration of vegetation may diminish visual amenity for local residents. Risk management at the urban interface may involve inherent trade‐offs between tangible (e.g. houses) and less tangible (e.g. human amenity, biodiversity) values. Such trade‐offs may be difficult to evaluate objectively, though some promising initiatives exist (e.g. Morehouse et al.2010). A major constraint on management of the interface is the disparity between policies targeted at preemptive hazard (fuel) reduction, typically promulgated by public fire management authorities, and the adoption and acceptance of such measures by the community. Such a disparity has been highlighted in recent research on peri‐urban communities (Eriksen 2010, Eriksen and Gill 2010). This project was aimed at addressing some of the questions arising from these potentially competing views. It employed a cutting edge combination of spatial and statistical analytical methods, resident interviews and elicitation. These confirmed and extended established approac

Bird-watching is an increasingly popular leisure activity. Previous research has taken for granted the identity of people who watch birds, often categorised by their level of skilled practice as 'dude', 'birder' or 'twitcher'. Feminist geographers encourage us to explore identity work as an outcome of the reciprocal relationships between practices and place. Our feminist approach illustrates that the practices of bird-watching are always much more than categorising birds as species. This paper illustrates how the practices of bird-watching are integral to the making and remaking of sense of place as 'home' and 'away', to sustain identities beyond accepted categories of 'dude', 'birder' and 'twitcher'. The creation and application of different types of 'bird-lists' helps to explain the ways in which practices of bird-watching facilitate making sense of place as simultaneously 'home', 'away' and habitat, as well as the identity work of home-maker, citizen-scientist and tourist. Our insights into these leisure practices of bird-watching are drawn from analysis of data gathered from 21 people who actively bird-watch and reside on the South Coast, New South Wales, Australia by combining research methods of talking, walking, drawing and photography.

Outside of positivist approaches little is known about the experiences, expectations and practices of people who watch birds in Australia. Given the centrality of bird-watching to the tourism industry, as leisure practice and as citizen science, the lack of critical geographical scholarship in this context is surprising. For this reason the post-structuralist feminist approach offered in this thesis enables possibilities to reconceptualise bird-watching as an inherently embodied and situated experience. This conceptual approach is central to understanding how people "become" "bird-watchers" at the intersections of discourse, technology, human bodies, non-human bodies and space. Empirical data was sourced through semi-structured interviews, participant observation and photo-elicitation interviews with people who watch birds on the South Coast of New South Wales. The combination of these methods sought to capture the richness and complexity of participants’ lived bird-watching experiences. Results presented over three chapters offer new insight into the embodied and situated experiences of bird-watching. The first examines how bird-watching is reliant upon embodied geographical knowledge and technologies that facilitate proximity between humans and birds. The second explores the contradictory embodied geographical knowledge of people who watch birds as environmental citizens. The final results chapter investigates how people negotiate "becoming" "bird-watcher" in their everyday lives, and how embodied geographical knowledge may transform over a life-course as parents, through ageing and as homemakers. The conclusion sets a research agenda drawing on the geographical perspective in this thesis to rethink the relationship between birds, people, technologies and space.