The visiting WOTI (Waterways of the Illawarra) team from NSW will be hosted by creek enthusiast Karina Quinn for a meander up her local waterway. You are  invited to join us on this exploration of a slender riparian corridor, as we wend our way through diverse land-uses including residential suburbs, recreational amenities and industrial facilities. Wandering Edgars Creek is also a way of inaugurating the International Creek Walking Network (ICWaN), which promotes perambulation as a practice of inhabiting these oft-contested waterways.

Walking Upstream is a collaboration between Brogan Bunt, Kim Williams and Lucas Ihlein, all artists and walkers living near Wollongong NSW. Our current project is Waterways of the Illawarra (WOTI) – an ongoing series of creek walks in the region surrounding Wollongong between the Tasman Sea and the Illawarra Escarpment.

Walking Upstream: Waterways of the Illawarra has roots in the avant-garde practices of the past century: conceptual art, socially-engaged art practice, land art, and happenings, for example. It is at this site, between land and sea, that these three intrepid artists actively adopt Donald Brook’s definition of art as ‘unspecific experimental modelling’. Through embodied acts of walking as a trio, and in consort with fellow walkers, they seek to be in these places as they traverse the diversity of landscapes.

The walkers begin at the sea, at an identifiable ‘mouth’. They walk their way upstream along named and unnamed creeks, hacking through weeds and undergrowth, skirting along property boundaries, talking their way into people’s yards. They continue for as long as geography, topography, and social boundaries allow.

Through this simple methodology, their trajectories intersect with various cultures of land use – mining, bush regeneration, weed infestation and suburbanisation. These walks are a form of ‘ground truthing’ – a means of comparing official maps and aerial photographs with the lived experience of tramping along actual creeks. Walking Upstream: Waterways of the Illawarra is a resolutely local project – born from the desire of the key walkers to engage more deeply with the topographical, ecological, and social fabric of where they live.