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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). ---------------------------- 1 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. 2 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. ---------------------------- 3 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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 4 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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