Transcript for Integrated Water Management workplace interview

[Speaker: Stephanie Brown]

My name's Stephanie Brown. I work in the Integrated Water Management program at DEECA. I started at DEECA in 2022, but I've been working in the water sector for longer, since I graduated from engineering, which was around 2015.

How can Integrated Water Management help us?

I love talking about what Integrated Water Management will help us achieve, because I think in the future we're talking about safer water supplies, we're talking about healthier waterways, healthier urban and rural landscapes.

We're talking about having Traditional Owners play a really key and important role in water management. Supporting food security, and providing water to industries and businesses as well.

Another key part of what we want out of our future with Integrated Water Management is ensuring that people's voices and the community's wants and needs are actually being represented or reflected in how we plan for and grow our cities.

Where can I see Integrated Water Management happening?

One part of Integrated Water Management is reusing or recycling water. So, you might not think about how Integrated Water Management happens at home, but you could use your laundry water to water your garden, and that'd be an example of reusing water.

At a larger scale, the MCG, that actually is irrigated or watered with an underground sewer recycling system. So, it's kind of happening all over the city, in your home on the street and in our parks and gardens.

And that's just one aspect of it. At a regional level as well, one of the projects I'm actually working on is looking at providing recycled water to agricultural districts.

So, it's another way that Integrated Water Management can support a whole range of outcomes across the state, including in those regional areas. And that's important, not just at a state level, but we have these food bowls here in Victoria that provide food for the whole nation as well. So Integrated Water Management can help with our food security and ultimately helping the farmers as well with what they do on their land.

What has helped you working in Integrated Water Management?

My study path started with a Bachelor of civil engineering, in Queensland actually. And then more recently I also completed a Masters of ecosystem science at the University of Melbourne, so that I could bridge I guess the gap between water engineering and infrastructure based work, and more of the ecology and waterway health side of things.

The skills I guess from the engineering degree that are relevant for working in the Victorian water sector and in IWM, I mean, problem solving is the number one thing that I think any engineer would agree you walk away with from that degree.

Whether you apply that to the sort of direct applications that you were taught in engineering, or any kind of creative problem where someone comes to you and they're just looking for a solution and you can break it down and, and figure out how to address that need.

What do you love about working in water?

I love working in water. It's complex, so I'm always learning something new, which means I get to discover things every day. And there's so many different disciplines and people that I get to work with as well. So, I really love the variety and the challenge and the novelty of water.

I got interested in working in water I think in my engineering degree, I loved so many different aspects of engineering and I was choosing between structural and environmental work. And I actually attended a launch for Water Sensitive Cities Australia, and I was so inspired by this vision for our future.

But ultimately, I think it's also because I've always felt really connected to waterways, like rock hopping and, you know, exploring our environment and wanting to protect our waterways into the future.

And when you think about it, there needs to be people managing and thinking about all of these different systems in water. And it's just a field that, I don't know, it never ends. There are so many parts of how we manage water that aren't seen, that you wouldn't know about until you learn a bit more nd you learn one thing and then you learn another and it just keeps going and going and going.