In this article, the authors set the scene for this research volume. They sought to emphasize and broaden their interest and concern about their "Learning to be drier" theme in this edition to the 77 per cent of Australians who live within 50 km of the Australian coast, the majority of whom also live in major cities and urban complexes. On 24 September 2009, a massive dust storm swept across New South Wales, dumping millions of tonnes of red dust on capital city areas of Australia unaccustomed to dust: (1) Canberra; (2) Sydney; and (3) Brisbane. Snow, laced with the same red dust fell the same day in the Australian Alps, as attempts at breaking the historic and prolonged deadlock between the Australian federal government and states about water trading rules, as part of achieving a national "plan" for the Murray Darling-Basin, again broke down. On 1 October 2009 the New South Wales Office of Water circulated a news release, making "an initial allocation (in the Murray Valley) to general security users of 1 per cent" of their entitlements, and asking all water users "to be as conservative as possible with their use in what continues to be the worst drought ever experienced". Eight researchers contributed team papers to this special edition from the four sites in the southern Murray-Darling Basin. Collectively, they bring wide and deep academic backgrounds, theoretical perspectives and experiences from a wide range of work, research and life contexts, in mainly rural and regional Australia. While the research plan detailed in this article was essentially common, each two-person team grappled with and selected its own preferred combination of theoretical perspectives for their paper. The method and the qualitative (mainly interview) data were therefore treated somewhat differently across different sites. While the four site papers were researched, developed and written relatively independently by two-person teams, their joint, sixth paper attempts to "stand back". In sum, they collaboratively seek to critically analyse and draw some conclusions about what might be common or different about the diverse approaches to learning about being drier, drawn from four very different land use contexts, in the same Basin, across three different Australian states. (Contains 1 table, 1 figure and 1 footnote.)