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Month: November 2011

Creative Commons: Water Commons

Nov 24, 2011 | artist as family, creative commons, ethical consumption, just free water, meg ulman, melbourne, natural resources, patrick jones, water bubblers, water commons, water fountains, zero carbon | 0 comments
Patrick has drawn a new map to show our findings. If Melbourne is serious about being zero-carbon then bottled water (and anything disposable) has to rapidly become an outmoded commodity.

Please feel free to distribute this map widely (copyright is just another form of privatisation).


Thanks to Designscope for scanning.

Key Audit Findings

Nov 22, 2011 | artist as family, water bubblers | 6 comments
We found our first bubbler of the day near the corner of Lonsdale and Spencer streets at 8.35am.

We found that to make sure we didn’t miss any of the bubblers in the chaos of the city we had to slow right down.

We found the entire contents of somebody’s home out in the street. What a lucky country we live in that so much waste goes unwanted.

We found our friend Brett who joined us on our audit. We found him at the lovely Kinfolk café, which is staffed by volunteers and whose profits go to a selection of different charities.

We found that although we only drink rain water at home, we loved drinking a toast to all the working bubblers we came across.

We found that after a while we even started acting like water bubblers.

We found that we started seeing bubblers even when there weren’t any.

We found a few over-zealous bubblers.

We found lots of important reasons to carry out our audit.

We found wheelchair accessible bubblers,

dog accessible bubblers

and bee accessible bubblers.

We found the wasteful remains of the winning entry in the 2011 Melbourne Urban Prize for sculpture.

We found bubblers being repaired.
We found bubblers from great heights.

We found some very brave people at the Occupy Melbourne protest; people willing to stand up to the corporate greed that is killing our planet.

We found some great examples of people growing their own food.

We found people will go to great lengths to get a drink of water.

Overall what we found was very positive compared with Patrick’s findings from four years ago.

We found 46 bubblers in the CBD region, 19 more than last time.
We found 39 working bubblers, 21 more than last time.
When we enquired at the City of Melbourne council offices we were told that on average there are 788,000 people who use the city every day, 77,400 more than last time.
We found 1 working bubbler per 20,205 people whereas last time it was 1 working bubbler per 40,000 people.
Congratulations are in order for the City of Melbourne. It’s fantastic to see that they have started to take the issue of bottled water pollution seriously. We encourage them to continue their great work by providing even more water bubblers for the people of Melbourne who are concerned about drinking just and free water.
And lastly we found that walking over 15km auditing Melbourne’s bubblers sure did make us sleepy.

Water Bubbler Audit

Nov 18, 2011 | artist as family, bottled water, direct action, map, melbourne, waste, water bubblers | 0 comments
Four years ago, Patrick spent a day walking through Melbourne auditing the drinking water fountains in the CBD. His walk revealed that there was one working bubbler per 40,000 people in the city. He charted his findings on a map which he made freely available:


This coming Monday the 21st November, Artist as Family will spend the day retracing Patrick’s walk through the CBD as we re-audit the city’s bubblers. We want to find out if the City of Melbourne is still committed to encouraging bottled water pollution or whether they’ve begun to transition to a sustainable and just free water supply by repairing all the broken bubblers and installing new ones for thirsty summer city dwellers.

Did you know that for Australians to drink bottled water, over 500,000 barrels of oil are required every year??

If you live in Melbourne, please feel free to join us for any part of our walk. We will have a mobile with us, so please call or text to lend us support or to find out our whereabouts: 0418 523 308.

Stay tuned for the findings of our audit.