Rain falls on a suburb. It hits roofs, driveways and roads, and within minutes it is in the local creek, running high enough to flood the burrows where baby platypus are sheltering. They can swim, but they still need to breathe. A few dry weeks later the same creek is too shallow for an adult to move through safely. Tim Fletcher has spent his career in the space between those two extremes.

Tim is Professor of Urban Ecohydrology at the University of Melbourne and heads the Waterway Ecosystem Research Group. He was part of the team that built MUSIC, the model now used across Australia to demonstrate stormwater compliance, and he is lead author of the most-cited paper in urban water, the one that sorted out SUDS, LID, BMPs, WSUD and the rest of the alphabet soup. Its conclusion still surprises people. There is no correct term, and there should not be one.

We trace three eras. The Monash years, where six people, a dunce's hat and a very good mentor turned a research idea into software the industry now runs on. Little Stringybark Creek, a world-first attempt to retrofit an entire catchment to save the stream running through it, funded partly by asking residents to bid for tanks and rain gardens in a reverse auction. And Tanks for Platypus, where networked smart tanks release water seven days ahead of a storm and top the creek up when it runs low, working the way a solar battery works for the grid.

Along the way: why he calls himself a permeable engineer, why he cried in the bathroom on his first day in stormwater, and the meeting called to decide who to make redundant that instead lasted ten minutes.

Recorded in person in Lausanne, eighteen years after we met on a dark bike path with a puncture and no repair kit.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:59 Guest Intro & Remembering our first encounter
6:42 Reminiscing about undergraduate times and education
10:39 How would Tim describe himself?
13:10 The WSUD Terminology Debate
21:28 The key barrier to scaling up WSUD
27:09 Tim's Monash Era
31:33 The MUSIC Model
40:40 A 101 on Ecohydrology & the Urban Stream Syndrome
43:32 The Little Stringybark Ck Living Lab
1:03:57 Tim's Tanks for Platypus Project & Real-time Control
1:22:21 What is Tim's biggest lessons learnt so far?
1:25:04 Q&A Start
1:25:12 What does innovation mean to you?
1:28:02 Key moment, book, person, event
1:31:52 If you had a magic wand?
1:33:34 Time Management
1:36:10 Favourite childhood memory
1:38:13 Biggest challenge to date?
1:43:04 Advice for young professionals
1:46:34 What is something you'll regret not doing?
1:47:50 What would you most like to be remembered for?
1:49:57 Where can people find you?
1:52:48 Final Message
1:53:23 Outro

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