1.3.4 Sociocultural assets

Summary

All 26 sociocultural assets were sourced from the Australian Heritage Database (Department of the Environment, 2015) and were assessed as potentially water dependent (surface water and/or groundwater). No additional sociocultural assets were nominated at the Cooper subregion asset workshops in Brisbane in October 2014, or in Charleville and Quilpie in February 2015.

Some sociocultural assets with identified heritage values are also areas with natural values. Consequently they are partly or entirely protected under national and/or state conservation legislation, and thus were also nominated as ecological assets. These sociocultural assets are water dependent. Other sociocultural assets are historical places, including several places associated with the 1860 to 1861 expedition by Robert O'Hara Burke and William John Wills. Some of the historical places can be identified as water dependent because they are located near groundwater discharge springs or on floodplains, but for other historical places, there is insufficient information to assess water dependence reliably and thus the precautionary principle was invoked to assess these assets as potentially water dependent.

Meetings have been held with Indigenous knowledge holders in the Cooper subregion to gain further understanding of Indigenous cultural water-dependent assets and possible additional nominations.