Sea Time: Tales, Temporalities, and Anthropocene Oceans - The University of Sydney
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Sea Time: Tales, Temporalities, and
Anthropocene Oceans
Image by Le gray, 'Brig on the Water'
from the MET
DAY ONE: Public Talk
Tuesday 12 June 2018 | 5.00 – 6.30PM
Venue New Law School LT 104
Eastern Ave | University of Sydney
DAY TWO: Workshop
Wednesday 13 June 2018 | 9.00 – 5.00PM
Cullen Room, Holme Building
Science Road | University of SydneyCONVENORS:
CHAIR Professor Iain Duncan McCalman AO, FRHistS, FASSA, FAHA, FRNSW,
was born in Nyasaland (Malawi), Africa, was schooled in Zimbabwe, and earned his
BA,
MA and PhD in Canberra and Melbourne, Australia. He was awarded the Inaugural
Vice Chancellor’s Prize for Teaching Excellence at the Australian National University
in 1994, and was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2007 for services to
history and the humanities. He is a Fellow of four Learned Academies and is a former
President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He was Director of the
Humanities Research Centre, ANU, from 1995-2002.
Iain has written numerous books, including The Last Alchemist: Count Cagliostro,
Master of Magic in the Age of Reason (Harper Collins, New York, 2003), which was
translated into twelve languages and Darwin’s Armada: how four voyagers to
Australasia won the battle for evolution and changed the world, which was published
in separate editions in the USA, UK and Australia, won three book prizes, and was
the basis of a TV Series (ABC, Canada, Germany, NZ ) and an exhibition at the
Australian National Maritime Museum.
Iain, a former Federation Fellow, is currently a Research Professor in history at the
University of Sydney and co-Director of the Sydney Environment Institute. His award-
winning book, The Reef – A Passionate History, from Captain Cook to Climate
Change (2014, 2016), was published by Penguin in Australia and by Farrar, Strauss
and Giroux/Scientific American in the USA.
Dr Killian Quigley’s dissertation research, which he conducted at Vanderbilt
University’s Department of English and completed in 2016, attended to relations
among literature, aesthetic theory, and natural history in eighteenth-century Britain,
Ireland, and France. At SEI, he is elaborating part of that work into a book called
Seascape and the Submarine: Aesthetics and the Eighteenth-Century Ocean. This
project observes the ocean’s complex and indeterminate relationships to lastingly
influential conventions in Western European poetics and aesthetics, such as the
pastoral, the Rococo, the picturesque, and the sublime. The sea repeatedly functions
as a limit case, or testing ground, for these conventions, and the resulting
experiments and debates are consequential not only for the history of literature and
art, but for cultural understandings of the ocean.
Quigley is also in the process of co-editing (with Margaret Cohen) a volume of essays
entitled Senses of the Submarine. His writings are available in Eighteenth-Century
Life, on SEI’s blog, in the 2017 newsletter of the Australia Coral Reef Society, and in
the reviews section of MAKE magazine. His work is forthcoming in Eighteenth
Century: Theory and Interpretation (Winter 2017), MAKE’s print issue #17 (Winter
2017), A Cultural History of the Sea in the Age of Enlightenment (Bloomsbury
Academic), and Ireland’s Imperial Connections, 1775-1947 (Palgrave Macmillan).
----------------------------
1DAY ONE: Stories and Seaways
Tuesday 12 June 2018 | 5.00 – 6.30PM
Venue New Law School LT 104
Eastern Ave | University of Sydney
How do oceans remember? What times do they record? Whose histories – and whose futures
– are visible by sea-light? The Sydney Environment Institute welcomes Alice Te Punga
Somerville and David Farrier, two internationally-renowned scholars, and authors, of ocean
stories. Discussion will flow through hemispheric boundaries, to incorporate southern and
northern seas and to interrogate and enliven compositions of oceanic place, language,
knowledge, and tradition. From deep times – and deep futures – seas speak and move
momentously, and uncannily. Against narrative, temporal, and geographical homogeneity,
rich and varied seascapes resist intellectual, ecological, spiritual, and political
impoverishment. A vital and vexing oceanic present requires inquiries and interventions like
these.
What’s Lost, What’s Left: The Deep Future of the North Sea
David Farrier, University of Edinburgh
Beginning on an island off western Sweden and ending on the Scottish coast near Edinburgh
where I live, in this talk I will reflect on the North Sea’s deep future. Whereas it was once
perhaps the archetypal Holocene sea, formed by the inundation of the area known as
Doggerland at the end of the last ice age, today it is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the
world, its coastlines dotted with petroleum refineries and hypoxic dead zones, its beaches
speckled by plastic litter. All this flow of materials and industry has carried the North Sea out
of the Holocene, and into the Anthropocene. This talk will present a series of personal,
material, and literary reflections on the North Sea as a place where we can find many different
kinds of future fossils—the future evidence of how we live now that will haunt the deep future
of this Anthropocene seascape—from the entanglement of seabirds with plastic waste in the
Forth estuary and the zombie afterlives of decommissioned oil platforms off the coast of
Shetland, to the question of what human traces will remain in the strata for millennia.
Dr David Farrier is a senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, where he
convenes the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network
(www.environmentalhumanities.ed.ac.uk). In 2017 he was a Leverhulme Research
Fellow at the University of New South Wales. Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time,
Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction will be published by the University of Minnesota Press
in 2019. Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, for which he won the Royal Society
of Literature’s Giles St Aubyn award for non-fiction in 2017, will be published by 4th
Estate and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, also in 2019. His work has appeared in Aeon
Magazine and The Atlantic.
Salt fresh salt: Pacific cycles, Pacific gyres
Alice Te Punga Somerville, University of Waikato
In her poem “What the destination has to offer,” Māori writer Hinemoana Baker describes a
cousin talking about the constant migration of eels between Aotearoa and Sāmoa: “salt fresh
salt/ the opposite of salmon.” This slippery route, framed here as a Pacific cycle, echoes a Māori
conceptualization of ancestral arrival to Aotearoa from the ocean to which one returns upon
death, problematizes the idea that a “destination” is a singular point at which one arrives after
travelling from ‘there’ to ‘here,’ and suggests a relation between freshwater and ocean that is
particular to the Indigenous Pacific. After this exchange about eels, the speaker of the poem
abruptly responds: “I threw out the clock/ the rubbish is ticking,” evocatively linking spatial
mobility with the limitations of particular formations of time and, of course, with “rubbish.”
Indeed, the the past few decades have created the conditions for another constant cycle in the
Pacific region: the movement of plastic debris around ocean gyres. This presentation will focus
on a close engagement with Baker’s poem, alongside a considerations of creative works by
other Pacific writers, in order to think about the many kinds of circulation in this ocean.
2Alice Te Punga Somerville (Te Atiawa, Taranaki) is an associate professor at the
Faculty of Maori and Indigenous Studies at the University of Waikato, where her
research and teaching sits at the intersections of literary, cultural, Indigenous and
Pacific studies. She has taught in Indigenous Studies and English in New Zealand,
Hawai‘i, Canada and Australia. Her first book was Once Were Pacific: Maori
connections to Oceania (2012). She is currently working on a multi-stranded research
project titled ‘Writing the new world: Indigenous texts 1900-1975.’ She also writes the
occasional poem.
----------------------------
3Sea Time: Tales, Temporalities, and
Anthropocene Oceans
DAY TWO: Workshop
Wednesday 13 June 2018 | 9.00 – 5.00
Venue: Cullen Room | Science Rd | University of Sydney
9.00 – 9.15 Welcome
9.15 – 10.30 Session 1: Cultures and Countries of Submergence
Provocateur: Iain McCalman
‘Aqua Incognita: Exploring Submerged Records of our Early
Arid Coastlines’ Ingrid Ward, Flinders University
The Birthday Mine Shaft: Sydney’s submerged history
Ann Elias, University of Sydney
10.30 – 11.00 MORNING TEA
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
11.00 – 12.15 Session 2: Registering Oceanic Pasts, Predicting Oceanic
Futures
Provocateur: David Farrier
‘Lessons from the Geologic Past: The Response of the Great
Barrier Reef to Major Environmental Changes over the Past
600,000 Years’
Jody Webster, University of Sydney
‘Subtropical Reefs: An Ecosystem in Transition’
Brigitte Sommer, University of Sydney
12.15 – 1.15 LUNCH
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1.15 – 2.30 Session 3: Marine Time Beyond Humans
Provocateur: Killian Quigley
‘The Working Day: Aquaculture, Time and Fish Labour’
Dinesh Wadiwel, University of Sydney
‘The ocean returns: mapping a mercurial Anthropocean’
Elspeth Probyn, University of Sydney
4CON’T
DAY TWO: Workshop
Wednesday 13 June 2018 | 9.00 – 5.00
Venue: Cullen Room | Science Rd | University of Sydney
2.30 – 3.00 AFTERNOON TEA
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3.00 – 4.15 Session 4: Timing Chemical, Military, and Poetic Seas
Provocateur: Sue Reid
‘Deep Time in the Damaged Sea’
Christine Hansen, University of Gottenburg
‘‘The Chemists’ War’ in Sydney’s Seas: Technologies and
Temporalities of Concealment’
Astrida Neimanis, University of Sydney
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4.15 – 5.00 Closing Discussion
Iain McCalman
5ABSTRACTS AND BIOGRAPHIES (in order of appearance)
PROVOCATEUR
Over his long academic career Iain McCalman, currently Research Professor of
History at the University of Sydney, and Co-Director of the Sydney Environment
Institute, has established a national and international reputation as an historian of
science, culture and the environment whose work has influenced university scholars
and students, government policy makers and broad general publics around the world.
In addition to his considerable achievements as an undergraduate, graduate and
postgraduate teacher he has published fourteen scholarly books with leading
academic and trade presses, and dozens of peer-reviewed articles and book
chapters. In 2007 Iain was awarded the Officer of the Order of Australia for Services
to History and the Humanities. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the
Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and the Australian Academy of the
Humanities.
Aqua Incognita: Exploring Submerged Records of our Early Arid Coastlines
Ingrid Ward, Flinders University
For most of the 65,000 years or so of human occupation in Australia, sea level has been
lower than present. Nearly one-third of Australia’s landmass, hence a significant part of the
archaeological record, was drowned by the post-glacial transgression, yet these cultural
landscapes remain effectively aqua incognita. This knowledge gap stands in contrast to the
3000 or more submerged prehistoric sites preserved and documented in Europe, Asia and
the Americas. Our ARC-funded project on the Deep History of Sea Country is aimed at
investigating how now-submerged early coastlines can contribute a unique Southern
Hemisphere insight into world prehistory. Focused around the archaeologically-rich and
ancient Pilbara coastline, this project employs high-resolution remote sensing data, coastal
(land-based) and marine survey, and analogy of known archaeological sites on land (as well
as under water in Europe) as a means to identify submerged cultural sites. These drowned
contexts will help us better understand the continuum between archaeological landscapes
(onshore) and seascapes (offshore) in this region, and hopefully help reshape attitudes
toward maritime and Indigenous archaeology in Australia.
Ingrid Ward is a globally recognised geoarchaeologist on both terrestrial and marine
archaeological landscapes. She took her undergraduate training at Newcastle
University (Australia) and postgraduate training on wreck site archaeology at James
Cook University. Her PhD at the University of Wollongong was based on the
geoarchaeology of the Keep River region in the Kimberley, NW Australia. In 2004
Ingrid moved to the UK, where she worked with English Heritage and later as a
consultant geoarchaeologist. In 2011 Ingrid returned to Australia, working on a range
of collaborative projects throughout WA. Here she has continued to author a number
of concept papers arguing for a multidisciplinary, geoarchaeological approach to
investigating submerged landscapes in both Europe and NW Australia. Her research
is recognised as making significant contributions in marine geology, marine
archaeology, landscape archaeology, cultural resource management, geochronology
and sedimentary analysis. In 2014, she joined the ARC-funded Barrow Island
Archaeology Project, leading geoarchaeological and micromorphological research on
this continental shelf edge site. Now she is applying her geoarchaeological skills to
the Deep History of Sea Country project, the first ARC-funded project on submerged
prehistoric landscapes in Australia.
The Birthday Mine Shaft: Sydney’s submerged history
Ann Elias, University of Sydney
With rising sea levels from climate change, the terrestrial zones around port cities, including
Sydney Harbour, are destined to become invisible, submerged zones. Yet we still know very
little about the present underwater of Sydney Harbour. The Harbour’s underwater has
6sustained the growth and development of a great modern city. But out of sight, beneath the
surface is an invisible ecosystem, traditional Country, industrial history, and a realm of myth,
fantasy and broken dreams.
Through the lens of visual culture, this paper addresses one submerged relic of Sydney
Harbour’s industrial past: the deepest coal mine ever sunk in Australia, tunneled under the
crowded, working class district of Balmain to extract coal from beneath the Harbour floor. This
little-known history of a submarine coal mine, in the heart of the city, stands as a failed
symbol of modernity’s obsession with depth, mobility and extraction.
Assoc Prof Ann Elias completed a PhD in art history at the University of Auckland
with a thesis that investigates the history of NZ still life and flower painting. She has
published on New Zealand’s leading historical and contemporary artists including
Rata Lovell-Smith, Michael Parekowhai, Peter Peryer and Paul Hartigan. In 1990 she
was appointed to Sydney College of the Arts as head of the study area of art history
and theory. Since then her research has focused on Australian subjects and her work
published internationally in books and journals.
PROVOCATEUR
Dr David Farrier is a senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, where he
convenes the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network
(www.environmentalhumanities.ed.ac.uk). In 2017 he was a Leverhulme Research
Fellow at the University of New South Wales. Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time,
Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction will be published by the University of Minnesota Press
in 2019. Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, for which he won the Royal Society
of Literature’s Giles St Aubyn award for non-fiction in 2017, will be published by 4th
Estate and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, also in 2019. His work has appeared in Aeon
Magazine and The Atlantic.
Lessons from the Geologic Past: The Response of the Great Barrier Reef to Major
Environmental Changes over the Past 600,000 Years
Jody Webster, University of Sydney
Predicting how the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) will respond in the face of future global climate
changes is both poorly constrained and controversial. This relates to our incomplete
understanding of how reef systems respond to environmental changes but also the lack of
baseline data — particularly on centennial to millennial time scales. The recent declines in
coral coverage across much of the GBR, combined with the potential from year-on-year mass
coral bleaching, has brought these issues around reef resilience into sharp focus. The study
of the fossil GBR provides important information about how the ecosystem responded to
abrupt and major environmental changes. Working with the International Ocean Discovery
Program (IODP), we collected fossil coral reef cores on Expedition 325 from the edge of
continental shelf of the GBR, in water depths between 50 to 130 m. Analysis of these and
other cores collected from through the modern GBR is now revealing exciting information
about past sea level and climate changes but also crucial new insights into how the reef
responded to these perturbations over the past 500,000-600,000 years. In this seminar, I will
present a synthesis of available geomorphic, sedimentologic, biologic, geochemical, and
dating information and discuss the nature and timing of the reef initiation and demise events,
while documenting the corresponding changes in reef communities, growth rates and
paleoenvironmental conditions at each stage of the GBR’s development. In doing so my goal
is to provide a fresh perspective or lens with which to view the dynamic evolution of our reef
while placing it’s near, albeit bleak, future into wider context.
Jody Webster's research in sedimentology and stratigraphy focuses on carbonate
sedimentology, climate change, and tectonics and it tends to take him to all the
beautiful places in the world (e.g. the Great Barrier Reef, Tahiti, Hawaii, Papua New
Guinea, Seychelles, Brazil).
7Jody is particularly interested in coral reef and carbonate platform systems, both
modern and ancient, and their associated sedimentary systems; as tools to address
fundamental questions in paleoclimate variability and tectonics, and in turn the
influence of these factors on the geometry, composition and evolution of these
sedimentary systems.
Subtropical Reefs: An Ecosystem in Transition
Brigitte Sommer, University of Sydney
Biogeographic transition zones, where tropical and temperate species overlap, are being
transformed by changes in species distributions and interactions and provide a unique
‘window’ into how climate change might influence complex biological systems. Brigitte
examines these dynamics in the subtropical-to-temperate transition zone in eastern Australia,
where corals occur in cooler, darker and more variable environmental conditions than their
tropical counterparts. She outlines how these marginal reefs differ from tropical coral reefs,
how they function and how they may be altered by climate change.
Dr. Brigitte Sommer is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Life and
Environmental Sciences and the Sydney Environment Institute at The University of
Sydney. Her research combines field ecology and statistical modelling to understand
the ecology of marine species living at biogeographic transition zones and how they
will be affected by climate change. Brigitte’s PhD research, which she completed at
the University of Queensland and the Australian Research Council Centre of
Excellence for Coral Reef Studies in 2015, investigated the ecology of corals at their
high-latitude range limits south of the Great Barrier Reef.
PROVOCATEUR
Dr Killian Quigley’s dissertation research, which he conducted at Vanderbilt
University’s Department of English and completed in 2016, attended to relations
among literature, aesthetic theory, and natural history in eighteenth-century Britain,
Ireland, and France. At SEI, he is elaborating part of that work into a book called
Seascape and the Submarine: Aesthetics and the Eighteenth-Century Ocean. This
project observes the ocean’s complex and indeterminate relationships to lastingly
influential conventions in Western European poetics and aesthetics, such as the
pastoral, the Rococo, the picturesque, and the sublime. The sea repeatedly functions
as a limit case, or testing ground, for these conventions, and the resulting
experiments and debates are consequential not only for the history of literature and
art, but for cultural understandings of the ocean.
The Working Day: Aquaculture, Time and Fish Labour
Dinesh Wadiwel, University of Sydney
In Chapter 10 of Capital – “The Working Day” – Karl Marx describes the contestation between
capital and labour over the length and characteristics of human labour time. The chapter
reveals at least one central concern within Marx’s project: namely the relationship between
labour time and free time as a site of antagonism under capitalism. In this paper I offer a
perspective on the politics of animal labour that takes the working day as a main site of
problematisation and contestation. Using the expansion of aquaculture as my example, I will
argue that the subsumption of fish within intensive production systems might be thought of as
the process of transforming fish into labourers. From this vantage I will argue that time is a
crucial modality of domination: what characterises the intensive animal production system is
bending temporalities to encompass life within that system. In this respect, as I will argue,
animal agriculture realises a persistent fantasy of capital: namely the transformation of all time
into labour time.
Dinesh Wadiwel is a senior lecturer in human rights and socio-legal studies, with a
background in social and political theory. He has had over 15 years experience
8working within civil society organisations, including in anti-poverty and disability rights
roles.
The ocean returns: mapping a mercurial Anthropocean
Elspeth Probyn, University of Sydney
Waves returning and returning and returning to the land ad infinitum is elementally powerful.
The sound of tranquillity but increasingly it is the ocean returning to the land our detritus.
As a small and early entry into a new project on the “ocean multiple”, here I will focus on a
case study of the mercurial ocean, and follow the return of mercury in its complex flows
through water and air, across organisms: the Anthropocean throws up human waste that will
be felt through generations - it enacts and is enacted by the ocean. It refigures the geography
of the world, mapped through ocean and atmospheric currents. To add another dimension,
water masses have histories, and are temporally marked by anthropogenic events. Across
these different dimension, I gesture to how practices such of those of extraction and pollution
enact the ocean as a multiplicity of multiplicities.
Elspeth Probyn (FAHA, FASSA) is founding chair and a professor in the Department
of Gender & Cultural studies at the University of Sydney. She is the author of several
ground-breaking monographs: on subjectivity and gender in cultural studies (Sexing
the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies), on queer desire and belonging
(Outside Belonging), on eating and identity (FoodSexIdentity), on affect and emotion
(Blush: Faces on Shame). She has also published roughly 200 articles and chapters
across the fields of gender, media, and cultural studies, sociology, philosophy,
cultural geography, anthropology and critical psychology. Her most recent monograph
is Eating the Ocean (Duke University Press, 2016).
PROVOCATEUR
Susan Reid is a PhD candidate in the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry,
Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, where she is
researching ocean justice, relationalities and juridical imaginaries. Susan is an artist,
curator, arts developer and lawyer, and is active with a number of national
environmental and climate action advocacy groups.
Deep Time in the Damaged Sea
Christine Hansen, University of Gottenburg
The Icelandic sagas allude to the goddess Rán, who raises storms at sea and collects the
drowned in her net. Her nine daughters – whose names are a taxonomy of moods of the
North Sea waters – live on the ocean floor and churn the mill that grinds salt into the water,
the abiotic condition for the beginning of life. The present day region of Ranrike named for this
capricious goddess stretches between the Oslo fjord of Norway and Bohuslän on Sweden’s
west coast, and catches the prevailing currents that circulate anti-clockwise around the North
Sea. These currents were historically used as travel routes dating back to the early Bronze
Age and beyond. Today they bring a deluge of buoyant (primarily plastic) pollution from
continental northern Europe.
This presentation will explore the deep time context of these North Sea creation stories in
light of the endocrine-disrupting chemical that threatens the biotic chains of life. At play in this
conjunction is the mytho-poetic world that describes what happens when we ignore the laws
of consequence, and the logic of the petro-chemical industrial complex driving the production
and consumption of plastics from which these chemicals are leaching.
Christine Hansen is an historian with cross-disciplinary interests in critical heritage
studies and the environmental humanities. She has an Honours degree in Aboriginal
9Studies from UWS and completed her PhD in History at the Australian National
University in 2010.
She has been a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Centre for Environmental History at
the Australian National University and a Post-Doctoral Researcher in Critical Heritage
Studies at Gothenburg University. Her current research project in Gothenburg, funded
by Formas - the Swedish Research Council, focuses on Aboriginal knowledge
systems in relation to fire in south-eastern Australia. She also has an active research
interest in Australian Aboriginal collections held by European ethnographic museums.
‘The Chemists’ War’ in Sydney’s Seas: Technologies and Temporalities of
Concealment
Astrida Neimanis, University of Sydney
Is there a war at the bottom of the sea? Militarism’s connection to environmental degradation
may be getting increasing attention of late, but the impacts of war on ocean ecologies still
remains mostly below the surface of these discussions. This paper takes up this question,
first, by tracing the lineaments that connect the rise of industrial chemistry in the late 19th
century, the development and widespread deployment of chemical weapons during World
War I (or what came to be known as the ‘chemists’ war’), and the subsequent dumping of
hundreds of thousands of these weapons at sea following World War II. The second objective
of the paper, though, is to examine how time and technologies of concealment inaugurate
these weapons caches into queer kinds of presences and absences, moving in and out of
unstable urgencies and unknowabilities. On the one hand, I seek to counter the secrecy
around the arrival, storage, and dumping of these weapons in Australia – you may not know,
for instance, that tens of thousands of tons of them lie just 14 kilometres off of South Sydney
Heads – as well as their effects of the bodies, lands and waters that were called upon to
archive these military leftovers. But I am also interested in what this revelation might
counterintuitively work to conceal. As the ‘spectacular violence’ of chemical weapons at the
bottom of the sea may ignite concern, care, and even outrage for the aquatic ecologies that
harbour those agents almost a century after their disposal, what happens to the slow smother
of sea violences that are less explosive, but no less worrying in their effects?
Astrida Neimanis joined the Gender and Cultural Studies program in 2015 after
holding various teaching and research positions at universities in Canada, the UK,
and Sweden. She is Associate Editor of the journal Environmental Humanities (Duke
University Press), a Key Researcher with the Sydney Environment Institute and co-
convenor of the Composting: Feminisms and the Environmental Humanities reading
group hosted at the University of Sydney. She is also a founding member and
University of Sydney contact faculty for The Seed Box: A MISTRA-FORMAS
Environmental Humanities Collaboratory (a transnational research consortium based
at Linkoping University, Sweden).
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