ICS Seminar Series - Denis Byrne
Date: Thursday 28 July 2016
Time: 11.30am–1pm
Venue: EE.G.36, Western Sydney University, Parramatta South campus
Denis Byrne
(Institute for Culture and Society)
Coastal Reclamation as an Anthropocene Marker? An Elizabeth Bay Case Study
Abstract
Projects of coastal reclamation have allowed humanity to expand its terrestrial foothold, often quite dramatically, though we may quickly naturalise these new lands as timeless terra firma. Against this, my investigation of the 1880s reclamation of the Elizabeth Bay foreshore, on Sydney Harbour, is a work of recall or recovery. The introduction by British colonists in the late 1700s of the notion of "capital in land" both underwrote the dispossession of the bay's indigenous inhabitants and stimulated a thirst for land that led the new white inhabitants to want to push the shoreline out into the sea. As my enquiry deepens, other temporalities emerge alongside this colonial narrative. Formed around 300 million years ago in the Sydney area, the sandstone used to construct the seawall is found to be eroding at a surprising rate, allowed the sea to advance inland a millimetre at a time back towards where it was prior to the reclamation. In doing so, the sandstone appears to be at least as amenable to the sea's intentions as to our positioning of it as a sea defence. Meanwhile, earthworms active in the "artificial earth" of the reclamation undermine objects such as lost coins and cigarette butts, causing them to sink into the earth at a rate of a few millimetres a year. Haunting the essay are the spectres of sea level rise, the Anthropocene more generally, and my personal history with this reclamation in the year 1980. It is motivated by the belief that archaeology has a role to play in bringing the "things" of the Anthropocene into view.
Biography
Denis Byrne is a Senior Research Fellow at ICS. He is an archaeologist who has worked in both the government and academic spheres of heritage conservation and has been a long time contributor to critical debates on the practices of archaeology and heritage in Southeast Asia and Australia. His current work focuses on the 'contemporary archaeology' of coastal reclamations and the record of transnational material flows in the China-Australia heritage corridor. He is author of Surface Collection: Archaeological Travels in Southeast Asia (AltaMira 2007) and Counterheritage: Critical Perspectives on Heritage Conservation in Asia (Routledge 2014).
