Sea Time: Tales, Temporalities, And

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 Sydney

CONVENORS:

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).

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DAY 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.

Alice 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.

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Sea 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

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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

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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

CON’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

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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

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4.15 – 5.00 Closing Discussion Iain McCalman

ABSTRACTS 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

sustained 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).

Jody 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

working 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

Studies 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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