Time on the Waterline
Coastal Reclamations and Seawalls in Sydney and Japan
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.33282Keywords:
Sydney, coastal reclamation, anthropocene, seawalls, sandstone, concreteAbstract
Coastal reclamations may represent humanity's overreaching lust for land, but from whereI stand in 2015 on the beach below the reclamation at Elizabeth Bay on Sydney Harbour,gazing at the sandstone seawall, what compels my attention is the way this reclamationis giving up its substance to the sea. As the geological time of the wall engages with therhythmic time of the sea, my own geosubjectivity comes momentarily into view. Recollectionof the reclamation park of the 1980s as a gay cruising site sparks a considerationof how open minds and touching bodies in that decade form a background conduciveto closer human-nonhuman relations in the present decade. Finally, moving to the SetoInland Sea, Japan, to reflect on the time of concrete, I examine the historical move fromstone to concrete as the favoured material for seawall construction.
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Barad, K. 2012. “Nature’s Queer Performativity.” Kvinder, Køn, og Forskning NR nos. 1–2 (2012): 25–53.
Berlant, L. and M. Warner. 1998. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry 24 (2): 547–566. https://doi.org/10.1086/448884
Birch, G., O. Murray, I. Johnson and A. Wilson. 2009. “Reclamation in Sydney Estuary, 1788–2002.” Australian Geographer 40 (3): 347–368. https://doi.org/10.1080/00049180903127788
Byrne, D. 2003. “Nervous Landscapes: Race and Space in Australia.” Journal of Social Archaeology 3 (2): 169–193. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469605303003002003
____. 2017. “Remembering the Elizabeth Bay Reclamation and the Holocene Sunset in Sydney Harbour.” Environmental Humanities 9 (1): 40–59. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3829127
Casey, M. and T. Lowe. n.d. Archaeological Investigation 2008–1010, Darling Quarter, Darling Harbour. Unpublished report produced by Casey & Lowe Pty Ltd, Marrickville, NSW.
Clancey, G. 2006. Earthquake Nation: The Cultural Politics of Japanese Seismicity 1868-1930. Berkeley: University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520246072.001.0001
Deleuze, G. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by T. Conley. London: Continuum.
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Dibley, B. 2012. “The Shape of Things to Come: Seven Theses on the Anthropocene and Attachment.” Australian Humanities Review 52: 139–153.
Edgeworth, M. 2016. “Grounded Objects: Archaeology and Speculative Realism.” Archaeological Dialogues 23 (1): 93–113. https://doi.org/10.1017/S138020381600012X
____., D. Richter, C. Waters, P. Haff, C. Neal and S. J. Price. 2015. “Diachronous Beginnings of the Anthropocene: The Lower Bounding Surface of Anthropogenic Deposits.” The Anthropocene Review 2 (1): 33–58. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019614565394
Ensor, S. 2017. “Queer Fallout: Samuel R. Delany and the Ecology of Cruising.” Environmental Humanities 9 (1): 149–166. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3829172
Forty, A. 2012. Concrete and Culture: A Material History. London: Reaktion.
Gandy, M. 2012. “Queer Ecology: Nature, Sexuality, and Heterotopic Alliances.” Environment and Planning D 30: 727–747. https://doi.org/10.1068/d10511
Harkness, R., C. Simonetti and J. Winter. 2015. “Liquid Rock: Gathering, Flattening, Curing.” Parallax 21 (3): 309–326. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2015.1058885
Hudson, B. J. 1996. Cities on the Shore: The Urban Littoral Frontier. New York: Pinter.
Irish, P. 2017. Hidden in Plain View: The Aboriginal People of Coastal Sydney. Sydney: New South.
Karskens, G. 2009. The Colony: A History of Early Sydney. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
Kass, T. 2008. Sails to Satellite: The Surveyors General of New South Wales. Sydney: NSW Department of Lands.
Kobayashi, I., S. Okada, K. Nagamura and T. Yamanaka. 2011. Survey Report on the Port Construction Techniques for Masonry Quay. Unpublished report at Graduate School of Science and Technology, Kumamtoto University, Japan.
Latour, B. 2007. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lewis, M. n.d. “Australian Building: A Cultural Investigation.” Available online: http://mileslewis.net/australian-building/pdf/07-cement-concrete/7.01-lime-and-cement.pdf
Lewis, S. E., C. R. Sloss, C. V. Murray-Wallace, C. D. Woodroffe and S. G. Smithers. 2013. “Post-Glacial Sea-Level Changes Around the Australian Margin: A Review.” Quaternary Science Reviews 74: 115–138. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2012.09.006
McLoughlin, L. 2000. “Shaping Sydney Harbour: Sedimentation, Dredging and Reclamation 1788-1990s.” Australian Geographer 31 (2) :183–208. https://doi.org/10.1080/713612246
Medina, S. 2015. “How Louis Kahn Unlocked Concrete’s Expressive Potential.” Metropolis. Available online: http://www.metropolismag.com/architecture/kahns-concrete/
Merleau-Ponty, M. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Morris-Suzuki, T. 1998. “Environmental Problems and Perceptions in Early Industrial Japan.” In Sediments of Time: Environment and Society in Chinese History, edited by M. Elvin and T. Liu, 756–780. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
O’Connor, S. (2002) “Topologies: Michel Serres and the Shapes of Thought.” Paper presented at Literature and Science Conference, Ascoli Piceno, Italy 20–22 May. Available online: http://www.stevenconnor.com/topologies/
Palsson, G. and H. E. Swanson. 2016. “Down to Earth: Geosocialities and Geopolitics.” Environmental Humanities 8 (2): 149–171. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3664202
Portland Cement Association. 2016. “Global Cement Consumption on the Rise.” 3 June. Available online: http://www.cement.org/newsroom/2015/06/03/global-cement-consumption-on-the-rise
Rogers, D. 2017. The Geopolitics of Real Estate: Reconfiguring Property, Capital and Rights. London: Rowman and Littlefield.
Rubenstein, M. 2012. “Emissions from the Cement Industry.” State of the Planet (Columbia University Earth Institute blog), 9 May. Available online: http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/05/09/emissions-from-the-cement-industry/
Serres, M. 1997. Genesis. Translated by G. James and J. Nielson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Shanks, M. 1998. “The Life of an Artifact in an Interpretive Archaeology.” Fennoscandia Archaeologica 15: 15–30.
Swan, J. 2011. “Modes of Decay.” Discovering Stone 10 (20): 24–29.
Waters, C. N., J. Zalasiewicz, C. Summerhayes, A. D. Barnosky, C. Poirier, A. Ga?uszka, A. Cearreta, M. Edgeworth, E. C. Ellis, M. Ellis, C. Jeandel, R. Leinfelder, J. R. McNeill, D. de B. Richter, W. Steffen, J. Syvitski, D. Vidas, M. Wagreich, M. Williams, A. Zhisheng, J. Grinevald, E. Odada, N. Oreskes and A. P. Wolfe 2016. “The Anthropocene is Functionally and Stratigraphically Distinct from the Holocene.” Science 351 (6269) aad2622: 1–10.
Witmore, C. 2014. “Archaeology and the New Materialisms.” Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 1 (2): 203–246. https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.v1i2.16661
Yusoff, K. 2015. “Queer Coal: Genealogies in/of the Blood.” PhiloSOPHIA 5 (2): 203–229.
____. 2016. “Anthropogenesis: Origins and Endings in the Anthropocene.” Theory, Culture and Society 33 (2): 3–28. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276415581021
Published
2018-06-04
Issue
Section
Research Article
How to Cite
Byrne, D. (2018). Time on the Waterline: Coastal Reclamations and Seawalls in Sydney and Japan. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 5(1), 53-65. https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.33282
