The wellness of settlers: Timothy Willem Jones, Nadia Rhook, ‘Returning to the sacred spring? Spa treatments, mineral springs and spirituality in settler Australia since 1852’, Journal of Beliefs & Values, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

The wellness of settlers: Timothy Willem Jones, Nadia Rhook, ‘Returning to the sacred spring? Spa treatments, mineral springs and spirituality in settler Australia since 1852’, Journal of Beliefs & Values, 2025

21Jun25

Abstract: Spas and mineral springs constitute major sectors of the global wellness economy, which now exceeds the size of the global biomedical economy. The industry, media and its critics emphasise ‘wellness’ as both holistic health care and pampering self-care. Wellness culture has been critiqued as neoliberal exploitation, particularly of middle-class, white women. Its spiritual dimensions are often figured as window dressing, gestural, or more substantively as the spirituality of neoliberalism. The history of mineral springs and spa treatments in Australia tells a different story. Spas, water cures and mineral springs in Australia have not typically been an elite enterprise. They have been accessible across class divisions, focussed on meeting neglected health needs, and instrumental in the development of environmental protections. Spa culture in Australia has been relatively free of spiritual tokenism, instead emphasising its scientific rationales. When spirituality started to be associated with the conceptualisation and marketing of aquatic wellness in the 1990s, it was preoccupied with a nonreligious settler colonial spiritual condition, addressing settlers’ experiences of spiritual alienation in the colonised environment. We suggest that recent public engagements with spirituality in aquatic wellness practices have been enabled by the public acknowledgement of Aboriginal sovereignty facilitated by the Mabo judgement.

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