Watercourses and Discourses: Coalmining in the Upper Hunter Valley, New South Wales (Report‪)‬

The Hunter Region is a place of many cultural landscapes which both produce and are the product of 'the material culture through which human agency is enacted' (Strang 2004: 5). The commonly used terms 'Hunter Region' and 'Hunter Valley', denote a geographical location whose boundaries are defined by the catchment of the Hunter River, with a range of more specific functional definitions associated with various government departments and programs. The Hunter has a long history of habitation: numerous Aboriginal people (Awabakal, Wonnarua, Darkinung, Wolimi, Kamillaroi) thrived in the valley before white settlement and after ancestral beings created the sentient landscape of which humans are a part.