Water resources student Daniel Hanisch has gone from being a jack of all trades in Australia to finding his life and career focus in China.

He's married his Chinese translator, has a young child and is now planning to straddle both continents as he develops his expertise in sustainable water management.

Daniel and Xin standing above one of the rivers of the Erguna wetland

Daniel is using Access Grid technology to draw on CQUniversity's postgraduate water program, as part of the International Centre of Excellence in Water Resources Management (ICEWaRM) network of universities. His home base is UniSA.

LINK HERE for Water students can whet appetite for study in Europe

From China to Cyprus, Aussie water course bouyant with help from CQUni

After growing up in the wheat farming town of Freeling (where they filmed the McLeod's Daughters TV series), he moved to Adelaide for high school and then studied Marine, Freshwater and Antarctic Biology (with honours) in Hobart. An initially bewildering career path was about to begin.

"For the next four years, life was a mish-mash of short-term jobs and travelling overseas," he said.

"Jobs included tour-guiding on Kangaroo Island, working on South Australia's fruit fly and plague locust control programs, assembly-line work in a car components factory, helping put up the tent for Cirque du Soleil, gardening in London, working at a book-binders, road-working, etc.

"Eventually I landed a full-time job in 2002 with the Federal Environment Department in Canberra, initially through their graduate program. Over the next seven years I worked in several areas of the Department, including stints at Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, Jervis Bay and Darwin.

"The two main areas that I worked in were Indigenous environmental and cultural management and environmental impact assessment. Being able to work with traditional owners in Arnhem Land through my work as a Project Officer for the Working on Country program was a highlight. It was also an eye-opener as far as realising the extent of the tangled bureaucratic web that Indigenous communities and organisations often find themselves caught up in, paralysing community progress. Some politicians and high-level bureaucrats need to get over themselves, stop their petty political point-scoring and start helping rather then hindering these people. They've been consulted to death but are still waiting to be listened to."

In 2006-07, Daniel took a year of leave without pay to volunteer for AusAid's Australian Youth Ambassador for Development Program.

"My assignment was a wetland management assignment in Inner Mongolia, China. The town I lived in was called Erguna, where the local government had recently declared a local wetland as a nature reserve.

"Located in the sub-Arctic about 50km from the Russian border, it was an interesting place to be. Temperatures get down to -40C in winter but between May and September there is an explosion of life as the snow and ice melts and the rivers and floodplain wetlands come alive.

"It is an extremely important breeding and stop-over site for migratory water birds moving to and from Siberia. Birds fly from as far away as Australia to feed on the swarms of insect life which included, for about a month, intolerable quantities of vicious mozzies. They actually followed our car like a grey cloud and, when we stopped, would hover around it waiting for us to venture out!

"I was fortunate enough to stay with several of the local farming families while doing my fieldwork, most of whom graze dairy cows or sheep and goats on the lush green summer pastures, which are generously sprinkled with a variety of wildlfowers.

"The area is probably overstocked and has some deforestation problems but nothing compared to the devastation that is likely to be in store for it, thanks to a recent upstream water-diversion project*. The first that the local government heard about this project (towards the end of my assignment) was when the prefecture government announced that the project had been approved - transparency of process was apparently not a major concern. This development brought water management as a social justice issue into sharp relief for me and was a motivating factor for pursuing my current studies in water management with ICEWaRM."

Daniel was drawn back to China in 2008 thanks to Xin, the translator who worked with him on his AusAid assignment and who, subsequently, became his wife.

"Xin is from the town of Jing Gang Shan in Jiangxi Province from where Mao lead his struggling army on The Long March, which is generally regarded as the rallying point for the Communist Party of China. We got married in September 2008 and while she has been waiting for the result of her Australian residency application, we have lived in Shanghai where I have been teaching English to Grade 3 and 4 students for the past one and half years. It's been a different experience and one that I have quite enjoyed, even though the Chinese kids are not nearly as perfectly behaved students as we are lead to believe!

"Last year, my wife and I had our first child. He's 11 months old and really becoming a lot of fun now. He looks like he'll start walking any day now and he has already said his first word: "Baba" which means dad in Chinese. I still sometimes find time to squeeze in some photography and listening/watching the AFL (thank God for the internet!). I'm also persisting with a 10-year plan to become fluent in Mandarin...hard yards!"

Daniel believes water is the world's number-one environmental challenge, although they are all inter-related.

"The more I read, the more discouraged I am by the statistics and the more daunted I am by the size of the challenge. I can't imagine that there won't be a growing demand for water management professionals, particularly in China and Australia which are the countries I expect my career to move between from now on.

"I am anticipating that the ICEWaRM course will, in particular, provide the practical and technical knowledge and skills to contibute meaningfully to the field. I am specifically interested in getting into a capacity-building position where I can help empower communities to take ownership of their water resources and manage them for the sustainable development of their local area.

"The online distance option that ICEWaRM offers, despite sometimes throwing up problems that wouldn't arise through on-campus delivery, has fitted in well with my lifestyle so far and is welcome development for those wishing to study water resource management."

* You can find out more about the water-diversion project via http://www.dauriarivers.org/ .