Guest Editors’ Introduction: Water Crisis? Socio‐Cultural and Environmental Dimensions of Water and Rivers

[Extract] The Australian drought of the first years of the twenty-first century has thrown tensions, conflicts, and some long-standing chasms between use and the realities of supply into stark relief. Australian cities faced record lows in water storages, urban water restrictions have now been inforce for years, and irrigators faced radically decreased allocations. In short, Australians were confronted with water scarcity tha thas always existed, but which, as a nation, we have managed to ignore, either by our willful imaginations and desires, or by the apparent security of our water storages and the endless on-tap supply that they seemed to provide