Roman can’t explain how he finds water with a bit of bent steel, but his services are heavily in demand

Roman Dubinchak still gets excited when he finds water.

“Every day when you strike water it’s a great feeling because you know you’re changing someone’s life to a degree, giving them a resource that they can fall back on for the rest of their life,” he said.

Mr Dubinchak owns a drilling company in Townsville, north Queensland, and offers water divining, a practice dating to the 1500s, as a service to his rural clients.

“I find divining and picking locations prior to drilling is critical to minimise the chances of drilling dry holes,” he said.

What is water divining?

Using metal rods, sticks, or a forked branch, water diviners will walk around waiting for their chosen tool to give a signal.

For metal rods, the place at which they begin to move apart or over each other signals to a diviner that an underground water source is below them.

There’s no scientific evidence that water divining, also known as water dowsing, works.

Even Mr Dubinchak struggles to find an answer.

“I think divining has something to do with energies in our bodies,” he said.

“Similar to how birds know which way to fly to migrate, there is something that’s hard to explain within us that you can visually display with a wire.”

Hobby farmer Steve McAndrew also practises water divining.

“I walk around with these rods and they start doing funny things,” Mr McAndrew said.

“They will either cross or part and I mark the ground and see if I am looking at a stream or a basin of water,” he said.

Divining on his property at Rollingstone, north of Townsville, Mr McAndrew has found water, but cannot explain how.

“The science behind it, I’ve got no idea, it’s intriguing,” he said.

“I’ve never really trusted myself, but I’ve always found water.

“[When] I was 12 or 13 and I marked every spot and dad trusted me.

“Every spot I marked all over the 2,500-acre [1,011-hectare] property, we drilled and got water on every single one of them.

“I’m not convinced but how many times have I got to prove myself before I’m reassured?”

Demand growing but diviners dwindling

Mr McAndrew said fewer people were practising divining at a time when more people were seeking practitioners.

Putting a bore down can cost a landholder millions of dollars, a cost many aren’t willing to risk, so they turn to water divining as a cheap, “almost free” alternative. 

“It [water divining] would have to be [growing in popularity],” Mr McAndrew said.

“Whether they are desperate or inquisitive or both, I would say it [divining] would have to increase in demand.”

The practice was taught to Mr McAndrew “a long time ago” by his grandfather.

“I think it’s sort of lost with my generation, it wasn’t really taught,” Mr Dubinchak said.

“The diviners that I come across tend to be older, and younger people that I speak to, if they can’t prove it with hard science, they are big sceptics about it.”

Other methods

Smart sensors are used by water utility companies to monitor water flows, but such technological advances don’t faze Mr McAndrew.

“I think there are a lot of electronic gadgets out now that can send signals down and they get a reading,” he said.

“I’ve never looked into that, I’ve always trusted a bent bit of steel.”

But there are other ways to find water on rural properties.

Centre for Water in the Minerals Industry senior research fellow Louisa Rochford said government websites had information on aquifer types, depth of groundwater and potential yields.

Dr Rochford, a hydrogeologist, said it had “never crossed her mind” to water divine, instead opting for “desktop information and geophysics”.

“I guess as a scientist, you deal more with the physical world whereas my understanding of divining is it’s more about intuition, and energy and those types of things,” she said.

“Science really looks at physical aspects and physical things that provide evidence of something.”

But Mr Dubinchak was quite comfortable not having an answer for now.

“Everybody wants a scientific answer for everything,” he said.

“Everybody wants to prove or disprove and it’s so easy to discredit and it’s so easy to be negative about.

“But at the end of the day, having drilled countless bores, it’s hard to not believe in it and those in the industry that do a lot of drilling, will not drill without divining.”