AustLit

'"Water Wars" is a timely and darkly funny exploration of what happens between neighbours as our country gallops between climatic extremes and we must adapt to both flood and drought. How do we sustain our communities under this pressure? What new ways of understanding our environment and ourselves do we need to develop to live in this changing landscape?

Set in a time of water scarcity, but referencing a past time of flood, Water Wars charts the bumpy road of neighbourliness as people decide that their way is the only water way, and tempers fray, then explode. It plots the descent into madness of the occupants of a regular street, in any suburb or small town - the very people who saved each other in the floods years before. In the middle of all this is a young boy, Cal, and his dog, Freddo. Cal is trying to understand his world - the nightly news of drought refugees, the ever-present dust, the attack on his friend, Janey, by water thieves. And now Cal's nightmares are coming alive.

"Water Wars" looks at the ever-present tension between two competing human instincts - the instinct to survive, to save yourself and bugger the rest of them. And the instinct to protect a stranger - the instinct that brought out the mud Army, the instinct to save the herd, the community - to self-sacrifice. How do we balance the two? And what happens to an imaginative 7 year old as we do?' Source: www.laboite.com.au/ (Sighted 20/07/2011).