Symposium Agenda - The University of Sydney

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THE SEA – EPISODES & IMAGININGS SPEAKER ABSTRACTS AND BIOGRAPHIES IN PRESENTATION ORDER Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea Adventures at sea have inspired wildly popular modern novels from Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe to the works of Patrick O'Brien. This talk will survey masterpieces of sea adventure fiction across its history, and explain how writer like Defoe, Melville and Conrad were stimulated by writings from the global age of sail describing exploration and work at sea. Returning to texts by world-famous navigators like William Dampier and James Cook, I suggest that mariners, like their fictional avatars, have historically been icons of a kind of practical intelligence eludes easy explanation. This faculty includes discipline, dexterity, patience, tradition, opportunity seized and impassible dangers overcome. Sea adventure novelists celebrated the mariner's practical intelligence and created a literary expression of it in adventure fiction. From the poetics of the sea novel, we inherit our best detective novels, spy and science fictions. Margaret Cohen holds the Andrew B. Hammond Chair of French Language, Literature and Civilization, and teaches in the department of Comparative Literature and Stanford University. Over the past ten years, her research has rethought the literature and culture of modernity from the vantage point of the oceans. Her most recent book is The Novel and the Sea (UP Princeton, 2010), which received awards from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the International Society for the Study of Narrative, and the American Comparative Literature Association. Her previous publications include Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution, the prize-winning The Sentimental Education of the Novel, and a critical edition for W.W. Norton of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Her newest research examines the impact on literature and the arts of underwater technologies from the invention of aquariums and helmet-diving in the middle of the nineteenth century until the present day. PANEL: Cultures of the Sea Leah Lui- Chivizhe, Voice and Object: Torres Strait turtle shell masks. Europeans first sighted turtle shell masks of the Torres Strait in 1606, on the island of Zegey. But it wasn‟t until the mid to late 19th century, when commerce and then Christianity became entrenched in the region, that many of the masks were traded or taken. The materials are now held in museums around the world. Ethnographic and museum documentation indicate their use in funeral and initiation ceremonies, for celebrating good harvests or to induce crop fertility, as appeals for productive hunting expeditions and also to celebrate marriage. While these practices continued for Islanders, they did so in the absence of the turtle shell materials. As museums opened their doors to the descendants of source communities, Islanders' interest and engagement with the materials have steadily increased. Given the period the masks have been separated from cultural practice, questions arise about whether they can mean anything more to Islanders now, than they do to exhibition goers who have no cultural association with them. An important aim of my research on these masks is to unpack their meaning to Islanders today and my presentation will give an overview of the human, animal and environmental network that informed their manufacture and inspires contemporary Islander engagements. Leah is a doctoral student in history at the University of Sydney where her research focuses on Torres Strait Islander relationships and engagements with the marine environment and the Islanderturtle relationship. Leah also holds graduate qualifications in material anthropology and human geography. She has undertaken research on material culture and eastern Torres Strait tombstone ceremonies, Islander identity in Sydney and the history of Islanders in the northern Australia railways. From 2001-2012 she taught Indigenous Australian Studies at the University of Sydney and now works part-time for the Nura Gili Centre for Indigenous Programs at the University of New South Wales. 11
Dr onacloV and Dr Josh Wodak To see the sea: Reefs on the Edge Weather and climate relate to one another as the short-term here and now that is derived from, but also cumulatively drives, the long-term then and there. Weather, seemingly tangible through our parochial immersion in our immediate surroundings, versus climate, seemingly intangible as a vast entity of intractable complexity lying beyond our reach. Or so it may have seemed in pre-anthropocene eons… The sea plays a fundamental role in our imaginings of weather and climate, as it acts as a global carbon sink which absorbs around a third of all carbon dioxide emitted by human activity. To see the sea in the age of the anthropocene means to see it anew: as a life support system that is becoming more acidic at the fastest rate in 300 million years. This presentation will discuss how current art about oceanic climate change may go beneath these surface impressions, to facilitate imaginings of the sea beyond the plane where sky and sea surface meet one another. The projects discussed include Reefs on the Edge (2013), by Dr onacloV, and Turalulu Tuvalu (2012), Jubilee Venn Diagrams? (2012) and Facing Futures Free From Fear (2013) by Dr Josh Wodak. Dr onacloV and Dr Josh Wodak are both based at the Design Lab, Faculty of Architecture, Design & Planning, University of Sydney, where they are collaborating on practice based research about art & climate change. onacloV is an artist and researcher in the Design Lab, University of Sydney. She led an interdisciplinary research project exploring climate change, entitled Reefs on the Edge. Reefs on the Edge is the artwork that experiments with scientific data, underwater video and sound, collected at One Tree Island Reef, located on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) in tropical Australia. Reefs on the Edge, fuses environmental science and multiple art forms to explore coral reef habitats and ecosystems threatened by the effects of climate change. The work was exhibited in Berlin at the Werkstat in 2012, and will go to San Francisco at the Exploratorium in 2014. Dr Wodak is an interdisciplinary artist & researcher whose participatory projects and interactive installations explore ecological sustainability and environmentalism. Formally trained in Visual Anthropology (University of Sydney) and Interdisciplinary Cross-Cultural Research (Australian National University), his work has been presented as performances, screenings, installations and exhibitions in art galleries, museums, theatres, performative spaces, cinemas, and festivals across Australia. His ongoing body of work, Good [Barrier] Grief (2011-present), uses participatory practice in photomedia, video art, sound art and interactive installations to explore the development of postfossil fuel futures in relation to energy production and climate change. He is currently an Honorary Research Fellow at the Faculty of Architecture, Design & Planning, University of Sydney. Jonathan Lamb, The Colours of Calenture Calenture or sea fever was a malady affecting the brains of mariners which caused them to mistake the sea for something else, generally a garden or a landscape, and one so attractive they often threw themselves into the ocean expecting to enjoy the pleasures of the countryside. There were different versions of the disease: sometimes the hallucination took place on the surface of the ocean, sometimes in its depths; mostly it was coloured green, but occasionally it was represented in a variety of colours--blue, white, red, and velvet black. In some examples of calenture it was accompanied by song, in others by fury and violence. I want to ask first of all what medical explanations exist for these delusions and then try to answer the question why the world beneath the waves should exert such a powerful influence on the imagination. Jonathan Lamb has taught English Literature at Auckland, Princeton and (most recently) Vanderbilt, where he holds the Andrew W. Mellon Chair of the Humanities. His most recent books are The Evolution of Sympathy (2009), Settler and Creole Re-enactment (2009, co-edited with Vanessa Agnew) and The Things Things Say (2011). He is currently on a Guggenheim Fellowship finishing a book for Princeton University Press called Scurvy: The Disease of Discovery. It deals with the unevenness both of the epidemiological history of the disease and of its effects on what Thomas Trotter called `the nervous temperament.' 12
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Page 7: Dr Nigel Erskine, sailor, maritime

Symposium Agenda - The University of Sydney

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