Ecofeminist drought and slow ecological grief in Fabienne Bayet-Charlton’s Watershed

This article analyses temporalities of drought and grief in an understudied millennial Australian novel: Fabienne Bayet-Charlton’s Watershed. Watershed depicts a young white farming couple in rural Victoria battling a fierce drought while coping with prolonged grief over the death of their ten-year-old son. I contend that the layering of drought and grief in the text–both figured as slow forms of crisis–proffer slow temporalities that deal with both the small and large scales of space and time which constitute anthropogenic climate change. Using hydrocritical, postcolonial, and ecofeminist approaches, I show how the text articulates a politicised multiscalar yet embodied perspective which demonstrates the insights that a specifically freshwater approach to the blue humanities can bring to theorisations of environmental time and narrative strategy during planetary crisis.