Designer, artist, researcher and co-editor Jack Mitchell joins Indigenuity to discuss Aqua Nullius: First Nations Water Rights in Australia, a new publication centring First Nations relationships to water, Country, justice and sovereignty.

Jack unpacks the meaning of “aqua nullius”, building on Dr Virginia Marshall’s work to challenge the false idea that Australia’s waters, like its lands, belonged to no one before colonisation. He explains that land rights cannot be understood as only about soil or property: Country includes the waters that move through it, across it and beneath it.

Drawing on his PhD research into Indigenous relationships to water, Jack reflects on storytelling as something fluid, embodied and deeply connected to place. He speaks about water not simply as a resource, but as something that carries memory, language, law, health and spirit. He reflects on the damage caused when water is removed from its natural cycles, particularly on Noongar Country, and how such disruption affects not only ecosystems, but cultural and spiritual life.

The conversation also turns to design, with Jack explaining how the book itself was shaped to feel “wet”: layered, flowing and alive. Bringing together interviews, artwork, images and essays, Aqua Nullius asks how the built environment might better listen to Indigenous water knowledge and what it would mean to treat water not as empty territory, but as Country.