Take me to the River
Join social ecologist and river restoration expert Dr. Siwan Lovett in conversations about the ideas, issues and opportunities that relate to our connections with nature and each other. This podcast offers open, honest and practical insights for us to reflect on in our daily lives.
Take me to the River
Harmonising waters: water management, innovation and choral singing with eWater Group CEO Michael Wilson
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Group CEO of eWater Group Michael Wilson has an extraordinary range of backgrounds: he’s a political scientist, classical musician, public servant, national security specialist, Australian Diplomat, and Humanitarian and International Development Advisor all rolled into one, with over 35 years’ experience across these fields. He’s run for parliament, negotiated international environmental treaties, and trained as a classical baritone opera singer.
Beyond his professional accomplishments, Michael reveals his lifelong passion for music—particularly choral singing with Canberra's adult choir The Resonants. His description of being "surrounded by sound" while singing reveals striking parallels to his approach to water management: understanding how individual contributions fit within complex, interconnected systems.
eWater Group is an organisation dedicated to improving water management across Australia and internationally and is jointly owned by all Australian governments. It’s comprised of two divisions: eWater Solutions, who provide science-based water management expertise and tools, and the Australian Water Partnership, working closely with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to support a range of water management and governance initiatives in collaboration with developing countries in South Asia, South-East Asia, and the Pacific.
Today, Michael and our host, Dr. Siwan Lovett, are members of the Resonants, one of Canberra’s foremost adult choirs, and they've been singing with the Resonants for over 25 years. Their upcoming performance in partnership with the Australian River Restoration Centre, Riversong, is a unique fundraising concert for the long-term future of our rivers, celebrating what waterways mean to us in Australia and across the globe. Riversong is a celebration of the river’s heartbeat, and together, we can ensure that the rivers which have nourished our communities, biodiversity and landscapes continue to flow strong and clean, sustaining generations to come.
Join us for a transformative night of music and meaning. Riversong is on the 17th of May 2025 at the Gandel Atrium, National Museum of Australia. Book now to secure your tickets!
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Singing as part of a choir, I think, is an experience unlike any other. Being amongst a group of people and surrounded by sound and tuning in not only to your own musical line but everything else that's going on in all of the other musical lines around you and understanding how what you're doing fits into that and contributes and adds to it, is quite a magical experience. Standing in the centre of sound, particularly when everything's working well, when the parts are all well balanced, when the music's blending well, when everybody who's singing really gets what the composer is trying to do and really gets what the director is trying to achieve that's pretty special.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:Hello and welcome to Take Me to the River, sharing stories and inspiring hope with extraordinary people who care for our rivers. I' m your host, Dr. Siwan Lovett. Today I'm speaking with my friend, michael Wilson, group CEO of the eWater Group. Ewater Group is an organisation dedicated to improving water management across Australia and internationally and is jointly owned by all Australian governments. It's comprised of two divisions eWater Solutions, who provide science-based water management expertise and tools, and the Australian Water Partnership, working closely with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to support a range of water management and governance initiatives in collaboration with developing countries in South Asia, southeast Asia and the Pacific.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:Michael has an extraordinary range of backgrounds he's a political scientist, classical musician, public servant, national security specialist, Australian diplomat and humanitarian and international development advisor all rolled into one, with over 35 years experience across all these fields. He's run for Parliament, negotiated international environmental treaties and trained as a classical baritone opera singer. The thing I love most about Michael is that he and I sing together in a choir called the Resonance. This is one of Canberra's foremost adult choirs and we've been singing for over 25 years. Our upcoming performance, river Song, is a unique fundraising concert for the long-term future of our rivers, celebrating what waterways mean to us in Australia and across the globe. We're going to talk to Michael now about his amazing background as well as his love for singing as we explore his world at the eWater Group. It's a real pleasure to be here with you, Michael. Thanks so much for coming on the program.
Michael Wilson:Thanks, Siwan, for the opportunity.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:Always a pleasure to talk to someone who loves water and who loves singing, but we'll come to that a little bit later on. You've had a really long career in policy, international aid and development. I want to start by asking you what are some of the lessons you've learnt in that really interesting background work that you've done for so long?
Michael Wilson:Well, I suppose I've learnt that I'm principally driven by values. So working on environment, working in international development and poverty reduction, working on sustainable water resource management All of these things are things that I think contribute to making the world a better place. I hope, and I also take pleasure in bringing the next generation along, so I've always paid attention to bringing on and mentoring, I hope, and coaching the next generation of leaders and managers and people who can do innovative thinking around all of these endeavours.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:So can you tell us a bit about some of the work that you've done in Southeast Asia, which many people may have just been to as a place on holiday, but you've actually lived and worked there.
Michael Wilson:Yeah, so I've worked on Southeast Asia really since about the year 2000.
Michael Wilson:And, of course, over that time there's been a tremendous amount of change and a tremendous amount of economic growth in that region, and pretty spectacular poverty reduction has been achieved as well. One thing that's interesting about mainland Southeast Asia, where I've spent most of my working life and I lived and worked in Vietnam and covered a range of other countries from Hanoi, including Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Thailand for a number of years is that the interconnections between these countries are really important to understand. They're important to these countries' development and future, but they also, these interconnections, go back thousands and thousands of years. And one area of interconnection is around water, key river systems that really keep the economies and the peoples of these countries alive and functioning and give them their economic heft production of lots of materials and goods that are traded internationally. But also for the many people in and along these river systems who still live fairly subsistence lifestyles, it's a matter of survival in terms of how healthy these rivers are and how sensibly the shared resource is managed.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:Yeah, I think that's a really good point because you know, as you say, those countries are linked, just like our Murray-Darling Basin is or the Great Barrier Reef is, but you've got that hugely long cultural history and divide to negotiate. The other thing I'm interested in hearing from you about is that when I've been asked to provide advice to developing countries or to areas where a river's in dire straits, it's very hard for us to do so when you're dealing with so much poverty. People just want to be able to drink water. They don't necessarily care about a new species of bird being supported or reeds. How do you actually walk that sort of road of being empathic and understanding about poverty but also try to get wins for the environment?
Michael Wilson:and this is as much the case in Australia as it is in the Mekong or the Arawati systems in mainland Southeast Asia. They actually want a healthy environment as well. They understand that if you chop down the last tree for firewood, that's kind of an end-of-day story. So local people along these systems are the most aware of the changes in their environment, based on what developments have happened along the system, what changes have happened in the prevailing climate, and so they're a very, very important source of information, as well as being the key stakeholder group around decision making. So sometimes we assume that people who are living right on the edge of extreme poverty might not be worried about long-term futures. They're worried about where the next meal is coming from. Now. That's actually a false assumption. Now, that's actually a false assumption. People in their communities are really concerned about what is necessary for them to survive and their descendants to survive long term, so they're often very conscious of the slow changes that happen in terms of incremental impacts of development and of things like climate change. So you know.
Michael Wilson:It's important to involve them very closely in decision making and to engage them in discussion about what options there might be for them to take more control over management issues.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:I think that's really important. It's not something I've often heard either. Maybe we use it as a bit of a cop-out sometimes, but to daylight, the fact that we're making assumptions, I think is actually really powerful and something I'll certainly think more about. What are some of the examples that you have of work undertaken in Southeast Asia where you've actually seen really good engagement quote unquote good engagement of local community in their waterways.
Michael Wilson:So one of the things that's happening in the international development business right at the moment is a much stronger focus on locally led development, on not only engaging those for whom you are targeting your development programming, but learning from them and gathering their experience and lessons and, in many cases, bringing those back home to the Australian context as well.
Michael Wilson:So, through the Australian Water Partnership, which is supported by the Australian Aid Program, through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, as you said, we've done quite a few projects where really starting at the grassroots has been fundamental to these programs design and success.
Michael Wilson:So, for instance, in Vietnam, we worked on a program which was engaging people at village level to both learn and exercise their knowledge around groundwater use and how groundwater aquifers recharge. We've worked with local communities in places like Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand on what's called nature-based solutions to water management, and they're very useful in terms of flood control in high rainfall instances and that's happening more often as climate change advances but also have the opportunity to reinvigorate ecosystems and biodiversity and can be very, very cost effective, particularly when you compare these nature-based solutions to the old ways of doing things, engineering solutions, which involved a lot of sort of concrete and changes of water level. But if you don't do that with the engagement of local communities, you both fail to gather their knowledge of how these water systems have worked over hundreds of years. Often, but you also risk disrupting their lives and livelihoods. So when you engage local communities in a meaningful way, in the spirit of partnership, where everybody is communicating and operating in a co-design relationship, everybody should win.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:Yeah, I mean it sounds a wonderful approach. How much do these projects actually cost to resource? Because I know it's one of the big things that we like to do in our work at the Australian River Restoration Centre. But there is very rarely a box on a grant form that says form relationships, build trust. How about your area? Is that more widely accepted that? That has to be a part of it if we're going to get success.
Michael Wilson:Yeah, I really think it is, and I think it's an area where lots of other sectors can learn.
Michael Wilson:So with our flagship international development program, the Australian Water Partnership the P stands for partnership and that's actually what matters the most we're bringing Australian skills and expertise where that's needed to the table.
Michael Wilson:But the partnership part of AWP is crucial and that's both working with Australian partners about how to apply their expertise and experience to water management and governance challenges in developing countries and in the particular context of developing countries where resources are usually by definition fairly scarce but then working with local communities in that partnership as well to develop responses to these challenges which are locally appropriate, which are affordable and which are sustainable over time. And if you don't successfully do that, I mean I'd have to say in the 50 years or 70 years of international development experience, lots of money has been probably wasted because local communities haven't really had any say. The sorts of solutions that we might think are appropriate in an Australian context just don't work in those contexts. It's about cost-effectiveness and value for money as much as it is about the right solutions in the right context which really address the need of local communities and the environment that they depend on.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:So we're hearing a lot about nature-based solutions and some of our listeners might be going oh, it's just the latest buzzword. What is a nature-based solution? Or an example Sure.
Michael Wilson:So we do a lot of work in and around nature-based solutions, both internationally, through our work with the Australian Water Partnership, but also domestically and even locally in Canberra.
Michael Wilson:So, aside from eWater Source, which is the National Hydrological Modelling Platform that eWater is the custodian and manager of, we are designers and custodians of a range of other tools, and one of those is a tool called MUSIC, which is a tool to assist water-sensitive urban design, particularly around the management of stormwater in urban environments and putting that at the centre of planning for new urban development and green spaces in and around new urban development.
Michael Wilson:And that involves things, like you know you may have, in an Australian city grown up around a big concrete lined stormwater drain where, every time it floods, water flows down at 30 kilometres an hour, disappears underground somewhere and goes out to sea and takes lots of the topsoil with it.
Michael Wilson:Now, if you look at nature-based solutions, you can do things like install and design systems for debris traps to slow down water in retention ponds and establish new wetlands, which are, of course, platforms for biodiversity and platforms for urban recreation opportunities. So that's one of the areas and in a developing country context, in a city megacity, for instance, like Bangkok, where we've done quite a lot of work on nature-based solutions with Water Sensitive Cities, australia and the Australian Water Partnership, you've got these new urban parks springing up in a city that is surrounded, in fact built upon water. You've got traffic calming opportunities in installing strips of parkland where there were previously bits of concrete jungle. So it can be quite exciting and creative. But again, compared to old engineering solutions, the old technocratic solutions of dams and dikes and those sorts of large-scale constructions can be a lot cheaper and provide many, many more benefits.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:So looking at music then, which I love, given our connection later on to our choir.
Michael Wilson:Total coincidence.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:How beautiful is that? Is a model like that able to go? So, if we use this engineering design, this is the likely outcome. If we use, say this, nature-based approach, this is the likely outcome. If we use, say, this, nature-based approach, this is the likely outcome, so that people can choose between different scenarios. Is that the power of modelling? As you see it?
Michael Wilson:Yeah, that is basically the power of modelling. So the first thing to get right with modelling as far as you can get everything completely correct and accurate is to predict the behavior of the environment within which any water system works. So, whether that's in an urban stormwater environment or whether it's in a river basin environment, once you've been able to establish that, based on the best data and science that's possible, then then the then the designers can come to the table and you can run scenarios through those software tools to see the likely behaviour of these water management systems based on different approaches and different designs for flood management, for slowing water flow, for river systems that various operators and industries and users need to draw on. That's the whole point. But it's important also for those tools and systems and the data upon which they're based to be entirely objective, fact-based, data-based, because that's the way that you're going to build community trust in the reliability of that data and therefore the reliability of the responses that are then based upon that data.
Michael Wilson:It's all about decision-making upon that data. It's all about decision making. So as a political scientist talking to non-water experts and I'm no water expert I put this in the language of these are decision support systems, in the same way as you would establish a decision support system in putting a curriculum together for high schools, or a decision support system in setting up a community health service in a regional area. It's just the same. You need data and you need science and you need people with the relevant expertise, and then you bring the designers and the people with options to the table. So that's another aspect of working in partnership in water resource management.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:That's a great overview. Last year I collaborated on a paper. I went to an Australian Freshwater Science Society conference and as a social scientist, you know some sessions are more interesting than others. I don't necessarily want to look at a microscopic larvae and get excited, but hey, other people do and that's fine. I decided that I would go to the modelling session because that is one that I would never normally go to. It's always been something that I've had community say to me I just don't trust it. It's a black box. You're just putting stuff in and it spits out the other end. I learned so much in that session and we had a really great conversation and I was then invited to work with them on a paper, collaborative paper.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:The premise was I had modeling people saying I need to be a better communicator and I actually said, no, you don't, you are a modeler, you just have to be open to working with people who can interpret what you're doing. I think we often expect people to be everything. It's like saying, shu-an, you know all about water. You go and run Michael's music model. I don't think so, so we're placing a lot of expectations on people to do that. Have you got some examples in your work, where you have people who do that synthesis, who who do that interpretation, or does that come through? Is that the nature of the partnerships that you've been talking about?
Michael Wilson:So we do. On staff, we have a range of practitioners with different skill sets. So our software developers and architects are very, very clever people with a level of knowledge and, frankly, a vocabulary that I don't think I'll ever be able to match. But because they've worked in this organisation, most of them for quite a while and we are a small outfit they, in their direct communications with our clients and customers, know that they need to be using language that resonates and is comprehended by not only the users in our customer organisations but those who then receive the information and are invested with the decision-making responsibilities information and are invested with the decision making responsibilities and they are not necessarily experts, particularly when you get to ministers.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:What you mean. They're not experts, michael, on everything.
Michael Wilson:Some of them aren't experts on absolutely everything Good to know.
Michael Wilson:And it's really one of the things that drives the way we engage with our client and customer base and our owners, who are all Australian governments. So our products and services are used across the country by water management agencies, so the policy departments, but also the utilities and the regulators, and both our software developers and our hydrologists. Our water scientists are pretty skilled at speaking to different audiences. Obviously, they can speak well and convincingly to their fellow PhD hydrologists, but they're now pretty good at talking to broader audiences.
Michael Wilson:But it's one of the important things that is at the centre of a very exciting project that we're embarking on for the modernisation of the National Hydrological Modelling Platform, which is, as I said before, ewater Source, developed over 35 years by hundreds and hundreds of Australian water experts.
Michael Wilson:But what Source probably needs to do better in the future is to communicate convincingly, with a line of sight, between the modelling products that it produces and the data that sits behind it, and communicate more directly to less expert people, and that goes to what the technology people will call the user interface, but also to visualisations of how different scenarios will affect the management of river systems and give you instant feedback at a visual level on a computer screen based on different potential options and decisions that might be taken. And this is where software is going Anyone who owns and develops software. The days of only communicating to specialists are over. The number of hydrologists coming out of Australian universities at master's and PhD levels, unfortunately, is shrinking every year, so we're very focused on making our tools and services much more accessible and much more usable and trusted by a larger community of those in the water management and decision making space.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:So we've talked about eWaterSource, which is really so you're saying 35 years it's built on. That is so rare that we actually get continuity building on our research, so that, for one thing, is a huge tick for me. How's it being used in some of our basins, like the Murray-Darling Basin, which so many of us hear about and listeners? I am aware there are many other basins in Australia as well, but the Murray-Darling Basin with its environmental flows and it's a very contested water space. How is a model like Source assisting the decision makers in a contested area like the Murray-Darling Well?
Michael Wilson:first of all, shuan, I'd say that eWater Source being the national hydrological modelling assisting the decision makers in a contested area like the Murray-Darling Well, first of all, shuan, I'd say that eWaterSource, being the national hydrological modelling platform, is used Australia-wide. So it's used in river basin management in Tasmania, in Western Australia, in a couple of cases in the Northern Territory and, of course, right down the Murray-Darling system, from Queensland at the top to South Australia at the bottom and everything in between. So just about every river basin and component of every river basin, every catchment in that system now has a source model and each of those models and those models connected to each other, where there is communication between catchments and the broader system, carries its own set of data which decision makers, you know, from local government level to national government level, to the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, have access to and work with and base their decision making on, and the negotiations between both different levels of government and between state governments and between state governments and the federal government use as the basis of those conversations. So it doesn't mean controversy doesn't arise because, as I said earlier, water management is inherently political. So most water management quandaries that you might face in Australia or anywhere around the globe aren't principally technical or, if they are, the technical solutions or options are reasonably straightforward. You can bring those to the table with the right expertise.
Michael Wilson:The quandaries arise along the Murray-Darling Basin system, as along the Mekong system, because there is competition for the resource and different users have different needs and different users have different access to power. And that's where these conversations get really interesting. But one thing Australia, for instance, has worked on for now over 25 years in the Mekong Basin in Southeast Asia, so involving the southern provinces of China, laos, cambodia, vietnam is around transparent decision-making, decision support systems, as I talked about before, and that has meant that the conversation has changed within the Mekong River Commission, which is a regional multilateral body established by a treaty involving those riparian states. It establishes norms and processes for making decisions about new developments or new major water allocations along that system.
Michael Wilson:While the decisions made at the end of those processes may ultimately be political, there is now very little hiding from the science about how that system works, the volume of water flowing through that system at every point, the impact of climate change, both looking backwards but also looking forwards. And that has meant even governments that may not be you know, may not be democratic in their base. They have needed to explain their decision making to their populations and to the regional population, particularly those downstream of wherever the decision affects. They've had to be more transparent about the basis on which they're making those decisions, and that's just a good thing. And the same happens in Australia. There was, you'll recall, 30 years ago a lot of prevarication about scientific uncertainty about how some of these rivers behaved. As we gather more data, as we stand up more hydrological models for river systems and understand the connections better, there's less opportunity to prevaricate.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:That is quote-unquote music to my ears, but mainly because for so long I've been advocating that our role as knowledge brokers, if you like, knowledge generators is to share that knowledge widely, and I think it's so important that it goes out into the public domain. You know we were talking about assumptions before we've been. I think there's been this assumption from some of our scientific community or technical community to say, oh, there's no way they'd understand that we need to explain it for them, whereas I think nowadays, with so much knowledge out there, it is important to share the knowledge that we're generating, say, this is what we think, this is what we interpret, but you now have the agency to do that as well, and it's behoven on us then to provide opportunities for them to say I would like to access and understand, can you help me? So it's much more of a dialogue rather than just pushing that. This is the way it goes.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:One thing that does occur to me, though, when you were talking about modelling has the rise of fake news and artificial intelligence presented any like? Has it hindered efforts to grow people's confidence? Or, um, the partnerships that you're working in like that mekong example was so good are able to distinguish and say, well, actually, no, that's not right. This is the, this is the knowledge that we're going to use to make this decision. How's that playing out?
Michael Wilson:So I mean, they're two different sides of the same coin. I think there's nothing new about fake news, particularly when it comes to the intersection between the roles of governments and how natural resources are managed and how the landscape and the climate behaves in a country like Australia. There have been myths and legends going back many, many years, but they're also, I mean, turning to the great potential of Indigenous knowledge around how our river systems and our watersheds work. Back before European settlement is also something that we are trying to draw upon more centrally as we modernise source. The antidote, I think, to fake news in many cases is the ability to draw a line clearly and transparently and in ways that people can understand for themselves rather than have explained only by a group of PhD hydrologists. You know about what's what's in the system and what the choices are. Artificial intelligence adds another layer to that, but uh, we we actually like to see that the potential of artificial intelligence to assist our work is actually greater than the danger at this stage. So, just to give you a bit of an example, lots of hydrological modelling platforms because Source isn't the only one there is have suffered for some time from something called technical debt, and technical debt arises when there is not a reinvestment in keeping the technology up to date. A platform suffering technical debt might not be incorporating the most recent information and research, or it might simply be built upon or have components of old platform technology which just doesn't work particularly well. As time goes by, slows, slows, everything down, becomes less reliable. So any software that you might use, you know if you're using a Microsoft suite, it's upgraded very regularly to address that common problem. What's happened with a lot of hydrological modelling platforms across the world is that there has been insufficient resources to address technical debt, and Source has been in that situation until recently. So we have a plan to enhance and upgrade source but also address the technical debt build up over the past 10 or 12 years since it last got a big capital injection, but also make it resilient to accrual of technical debt in the future.
Michael Wilson:And artificial intelligence can really help with that.
Michael Wilson:So, for instance, we'd made some calculations some years ago on how many software developers it would take to strip out redundant code in the source platform, and we'd assessed that as being three developers full-time over two years. There's pretty good evidence now that with the strategic use of artificial intelligence we can do that in a day. Now that doesn't do the whole job. That doesn't in itself upgrade source, but the power of having access to supercomputing heft and artificial intelligence which can do some of the jobs that we relied on humans to do in the past, could be absolutely transformative. And it's likely to be transformative in the international development business as well, because if you look at applying artificial intelligence capability to how you manage healthcare delivery to remote communities in a country like Myanmar, having just been affected by a large earthquake but you know subject very regularly to very serious climatic events as well then you know that could be an absolute game changer in places where there's very little money per head of population to spend on what we would regard in Australia as essential services.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:Yeah, I'm not scared of artificial intelligence, I must say. A couple of members of our team gave a presentation at the Stream Management Conference last year and were just demonstrating how artificial intelligence has changed and how we can actually use it to free us up to be the creative humans we are. That a lot of that, because it's drawing on information and knowledge we've already generated. You know it is quality in, of course, but a lot can be done by AI that frees us to be more creative. Just thinking back to that, the beginning of your talk, when you said how many software developers? I was sure it was going to be how many software developers does it take to change a light bulb? So I was just wondering what's your thinking on that?
Michael Wilson:Oh look, every one of our software developers could change hundreds of light bulbs in a day, they're magnificent. No, I don't have a gag, I'm afraid I'm afraid about.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:I should have looked that up all right, that seems to be a good segue for me to ask you about, like this role that you're in now. You're leading an organization which has this very strong technical grunt on one side and then on the other side it's all about partnerships. So you must have found in your time here now bringing those two together must be a really good match because it keeps each side aware of what else is going on, whether it be technical, whether it be you know, quote unquote human.
Michael Wilson:Have you noticed that in the time that you've been here, yeah, I certainly have, and I think we've, you know, we've provided more clarity and focus to how we talk about and build and regard partnerships in terms of activating our mission in the Australian water ecosystem or in the international water resource management story. Part of that is that because we are owned by the Commonwealth and all the state and territory governments, we have a moral obligation, I think, to properly steward the tools and the services that we are entrusted to provide. But that brings with it responsibilities to not displace others in the marketplace who are part of that picture. So we work very, very closely with consulting companies who, like us, provide services and and technical expertise to, to government agencies, to water utilities, to local government, to the universities, universities and vice versa, without being in competition with them. The Australian Water Partnership, in the way it operates it, has 250 Australian partners covering every imaginable skill and need that might be required in international water for development projects and initiatives that we design and manage overseas. And those partners come together willingly, not just working with awp but but working in consortium with each other, companies that are often commercial competitors in an australian environment, working um shoulder to shoulder with each other to cover the spectrum of the skills that we will typically need in an international development initiative.
Michael Wilson:And we're not talking about huge amounts of resources either. You know, half a million dollar multi-year program in a country like Vietnam or India or Thailand or Cambodia is a big project for AWP. Most of our initiatives don't exceed that sort of commitment. Our partners, whether they be universities, whether they be private companies, sometimes government agencies themselves, we involve in this work overseas. We involve in this work overseas. They're more than willing to contribute knowledge, expertise, understanding, data and materials to these activities because, you know, part of it is.
Michael Wilson:It's good for their own staff development. For someone who might come out of Sydney Water or the department in the Water Department in Victoria to work in an AWP project in a country where resources are constrained in a way that they haven't experienced in Australia. They bring back a really, really useful and valuable understanding of how to be adaptable and how to be innovative, even a bias towards reaching for the lower cost solution rather than the higher, higher cost solution. So it's one of those things where where the, where the partnership model delivers benefits for everyone, both the the clients who you hope you're assisting with their, with their problems and challenges, but also everybody involved takes some tremendous amount away from that experience so, thinking about partnerships, I was thinking about the choir that we sing in together.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:Let's go right back to when we first met, when you were also doing opera singing and training as an opera singer and, by the way, has a beautiful voice. What is it about music and song that attracted you to looking at opera as an option for you?
Michael Wilson:Part of it was my upbringing. I had a family background where my mother and father had very few areas where they were really compatible. Both had a strong interest in music, but my father's interest was in jazz. He was really an aficionado and an expert on pre-1929 jazz, which he picked up when he was studying in the United States in the 1950s. And my mother had a classical music background. She'd learnt piano as a girl but fallen in love with opera in her young adulthood.
Michael Wilson:I was a girl, but fallen in love with opera in her young adulthood. She took me along to lots of classical music of all different sorts. So she had a very broad range of interests. But she was conscious of exposing me to as broad a range as possible too and very strongly encouraged, if not insisted, that I learned a musical instrument. So I started off playing the violin. I played cello for a while. Then, to try and delight my father, I moved on to clarinet and tried some jazz work, but I'd sung from when I was a young boy.
Michael Wilson:Sung from when I was a young boy and for any musician, singing provides a level of oral training and comprehension of how music works that I don't think anything else really does hey presto.
Michael Wilson:Eventually I landed on voice as my chief instrument, having sung all the way through school from when I was about five through to my late teens.
Michael Wilson:So I was encouraged to start singing lessons with Helen Swan, who is still the director of the Resonance, and then went on to study at the ANU School of Music. But, as Helen actually tells the story, coming out of a school environment where there was a very, very strong choral tradition and tradition of choral excellence where I went to school I was musical training who were interested in singing at a high level and interested in singing a broad but challenging repertoire and doing that well, and originally it started out as a young adult choir. We we notionally put an age limit of 25, I think, on um on the choir at the beginning, but as we've continued to enjoy the experience we've, we've pushed the ceiling ever higher. I like to think both in terms of of age and and actually and actually musical ability and sophistication. I think we are the best choir now that we've ever been and we do some seriously challenging stuff and we've commissioned music from Australian composers which I'm particularly proud of. I think we sing at a level now that exceeds whatever we've done before.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:And listeners. Just to point out here that I am a member of the Resonance Choir and Helen was also my singing teacher. But I kind of feel like I got in because my husband agreed to come along as well and they always need basses.
Michael Wilson:So I think it's okay, and I sit next to him at rehearsal.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:Yes, definitely not a young adult choir anymore, although Helen says that we are still young adults to her, and so you know, let's go with that. I'm very happy with that.
Michael Wilson:I'm very happy with that too.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:Tell listeners what it's like to sing as part of a choir.
Michael Wilson:Singing as part of a choir, I think, is an experience unlike any other.
Michael Wilson:There are some similarities to playing an instrument in an orchestra, but being amongst a group of people and surrounded by sound, and tuning in not only to your own musical line but everything else that's going on in all of the other musical lines around you, and understanding how what you're doing fits into that and and contributes and and adds to it is is quite a quite a magical experience, and every day is different and every place that you stand in relation to the other choir members gives you a different experience and and every piece of piece of repertoire and style of music is different.
Michael Wilson:And it's also useful to be exposed to different styles of musical direction, which we've been able to do over the life. Of the resonance too, it's very different to being an audience member for a choir, which is a great pleasure in itself. But standing in the center of sound, particularly when everything's working well, when the parts are all well balanced, when the music's blending well, when everybody who's singing really gets what the composer is trying to do and really gets what the director is trying to achieve, that's, um, that's pretty special it is really special and it kind of brings me to an initiative that we've undertaken, and Michael and I will be singing together in something called River Song, which has brought together our love for rivers and also the choir and our singing.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:Can you tell listeners a bit about River Song?
Michael Wilson:well, I probably can't tell listeners as much about River Song as as you, sh, as you, because it's your brainchild. But the idea of Riversong was both to lift the profile of the Australian River Restoration Centre, which Shu-An is CEO of and is, incidentally, a giving back partner for the E-Water Group group, where we take our staff out, supervised by Shuan's staff, to do tree planting, to restore the banks of degraded rivers as often as we can manage, but to lift the profile of the centre, to give it a needed injection of resources, which hopefully, if this works well, will mean it's got access to flexible funding. It can do some things that its normal sources of resourcing might not enable it to do, particularly around ignored parts of our river systems, and bring, I guess, the water management community, those who in different ways care about our rivers, together in a more spiritual conversation about what rivers mean to us, not just economically and environmentally, but spiritually and culturally as well.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:Oh, that's a lovely, lovely way of phrasing it, because you're right. You know, a lot of the idea for me behind this was to share my love of singing and being up on stage with my friends singing about rivers. And you know, in the rehearsals I often feel close to tears because I think these people all trust and believe in the work that we do on rivers. And that's been really special because we generally actually don't talk about work at choir, which is also really nice, like we just we're just there because we enjoy singing. But in this case, every song is about a river in some way. A lot of them are love songs. The indigenous songs are really, really hard. We still need to do some more practising on some of that language. But yeah, it is that bringing together of song and love and also rivers themselves.
Michael Wilson:And I think, shu-anne, you might have been a little bit reticent to suggest the idea to the choir, but immediately, I think, everyone sort of fell in love with the concept. And then we worried about being able to come up with a full concert repertoire, but immediately, I think, everyone sort of fell in love with the concept, and then we worried about being able to come up with a full concert repertoire along a river theme and actually that wasn't difficult at all.
Michael Wilson:There is so much music that is directly applicable to what we're trying to evoke before this audience on the 17th of May. That's right, there is indeed, and it's a bit like that whole thing of you know the name of this podcast on the 17th of May.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:That's right, there is indeed, and it's a bit like that whole thing of you know, the name of this podcast is Take Me to the River, because we know that being near a river, being near water, just does something for you. So yeah, for anyone in the Canberra area, you'd be very welcome to come along, we'd love to see you there. For those that aren't in Canberra, we will record bits of it for you and look, who knows, if this goes as well. You know we might be the next Hamilton. Let's see how we go.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:One can only hope one can only hope so. Look, as we come to the end of what's been a really fascinating conversation, we have three questions that we ask every guest, so the first one is around, do you have a favourite river or waterway or body of water?
Michael Wilson:I probably have a few, but I spent much of my childhood growing up on a property south of Captain's Flat and we had the luck of having two permanent rivers running through our property and one was called the Sherlock Creek and I spent many happy hours playing around, fishing in, spotting platypus in the Sherlock and even though my family left that land when I was 13, I think I could still recognise every foot of that riverbank, so that's an important one to me.
Michael Wilson:The Thredbo River is another one. My family and I have spent many, mostly summer, holidays in and around Thredbo and walking up and down that watercourse, and I'm going to pick the Tilba Lake as a body of water which again has a family connection a lake between the village of central Tilba and the beach, sometimes open to the ocean and sometimes closed, so it behaves very differently depending on the season and depending on whether there's a flow through of water to the sea, but spent many, many hours boating and wading and looking at the wildlife in that body of water under the shadow of Gooligga Mountain, which is, you know, magical and very important to the local First Nations people of that part of New South Wales.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:I know that part well and I think for anyone who's ever been on the show and I've asked that question there's always been a connection for them to a memory or a family story. And I think that's why I know you were saying earlier oh gosh, are we going to have enough repertoire? Oh, my goodness. You know, rivers become metaphors for life, for love, for so many things, as this connecting piece. So it's not surprising, but it's always lovely to hear the stories that go along with that. So where do you feel most connected to country and to nature?
Michael Wilson:probably out in the bush, where you know I can't see or hear or feel any sign of civilization or human presence. Thinking of the landscape, particularly this Australian landscape which for any of us who've grown up in and around it has that special affinity, just the way the bush speaks to you, the way the trees sound in the wind, the way the wind sounds blowing through valleys, the way different light plays upon rocks and trees, that's where I feel most connected.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:Yeah, I really do. Yeah, I relate very much to that. It's also about all your senses being able to be engaged, because so much of modern life. You know, as you were talking that, I was thinking, yeah, no phone that's buzzing in your pocket, no someone telling you you have to do this or you have to do that. You just stand and yeah, I totally relate to that. It's just a sensory experience. So our final question and I'm sure people have already got a bit of a sense of what motivates you to do what you do but at this point in your career, which has been many and varied and you've still got so much more to give, including your beautiful voice what drives you to do what you do?
Michael Wilson:I think, need and the ability to give something back. I mean, mean it sounds a bit hokey, but the ambition that, whatever one does you leave the world a slightly better place. That's really principally what drives me, and it's driven me in all sorts of areas of endeavour too. So it's possible to find that meaning, I think, almost everywhere you look.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:But I have a good deal of pride about most of the choices I've made through my skill set or my level of passion has a good chance of hitting home and creating impact. Thank you so much, Michael. It's been a really wonderful conversation and listeners. If you're interested in finding out more, we'll have some show notes along with this episode so you can look up the organisations that Michael has talked about and some of the projects, and I look forward to being with you again at our next podcast and if you are around Canberra on the 17th of May, please come and join us. There will be an opportunity for you to also raise your voice at Riverside. Hey, Well done, Michael, Well done.
Michael Wilson:Shalane.
Dr. Siwan Lovett:So good. Thanks so much, michael, for being with us today. It's been a really fascinating conversation. For any listeners wanting to know more, we'll have some show notes linking to the organisations Michael's talked about, as well as, of course, to our upcoming Rivers Song concert. We'd love to have you join us. Bye for now. You can subscribe to Take Me to the River. Wherever you get your podcasts, visit arrcau forward slash podcast to learn more. That's ARRCau forward slash podcast. We acknowledge and respect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the traditional and continuing custodians of the country and the rivers on which we live, learn, love and play. We respect and learn from elders past, present and emerging, valuing their knowledge, insights, cultures and connections to the waterways we all love and care for and learn from elders past, present and emerging, valuing their knowledge, insights, cultures and connections to the waterways we all love and care for.