Symposium Agenda - The University of Sydney

THE MARINE AND MARITIME
RESEARCH FESTIVAL
Sydney Environment Institute &
Sydney network on Climate Change and Society
6 - 9 November, 2013
Six events over four days, exploring human interactions with marine and coastal environments
DAY 1
Wednesday 6 November
The Sea: Episodes and
Imaginings
Australian National Maritime Museum
Open to the public
This event is free. Morning and
afternoon tea will be served.
Bookings essential
Please email:
sei.info@sydney.edu.au
DAYs 2 & 3
Thursday 7 -Friday 8 November
THE CHANGING COASTLINES
SYMPOSIUM
McCallum Room, Holme Building A09
University of Sydney
--
Thursday 7: Workshop
Consider the Oyster…again
--
Friday 8: Symposium
Climate Change and the Australian
Coastline: Shifting Baselines
DAY 4
Saturday 9 November
PhD and Masters Student
Workshop Day
By invitation only
Workshop leaders:
--
Jonathan Lamb (Vanderbilt)
--
Margaret Cohen (Stanford)
--
Iain McCalman (Sydney)
--
Kirsten Wehner (National Museum of
Australia)
Partners; ARC Linkage, Andrew Mellon Australian-Pacific Observatory
and The Australian National Maritime Museum
For more information and registration head to
sydney.edu.au/snccs
Illustration With the kind permission of the artist, Kate O’Connor
ABN: 15 211 513 464. CRICOS number: 00026A.

ARC Linkage Grant
The Andrew Mellon Australian-Pacific Observatory
The Australian National Maritime Museum
The Sydney Environment Institute
THE SEA - EPISODES AND IMAGININGS
A unique one day symposium examining the construction of histories through film, literature, theatre,
museology, film, visual arts and music with a particular focus on maritime histories and cultures. It will explore
the many facets of storytelling and interpreting maritime historical events through a multitude of creative
disciplines. These historical narratives are drawn from primary and secondary source materials and can include
oral histories, naval records, scientific and ethnographic research, ships logs, official records such as births,
deaths and marriages, and passenger crew lists.
The symposium brings together eminent cultural theorists, historians, museum curators, documentary
filmmakers, writers, composers, collectors and visual artists to
interrogate and navigate through the complex terrain of public
history, to engage in debate about the transmission and
presentation of history, the role of historical fiction and specific
genres such as documentary-dramas, musical compositions,
museum master narratives and visual arts.
Episodes and Imaginings will be linked to the Sydney Climate
Change Network‟s marine environmental humanities and social
science conferences being presented by the University of Sydney
and dedicated to looking at Coastlines, the other focussing on
Oysters.
The project also links to current maritime, environmental and
underwater archaeological research through an existing Australian
Research Council initiative between the ANMM/University of
Sydney/Queensland Museum and Silentworld Foundation entitled
- Cultures of Coast and Sea: maritime environmental, cultural and
ethnographic histories of north-east Australia 1770-2010. The
symposium also aligns with the ANMM‟s broader interest in researching and mapping out revised master
narratives for the development of the museum‟s core exhibitions and future creative partnerships.
VENUE:
Australian National Maritime Museum
2 Murray Street Darling Harbour Sydney
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THE SEA - EPISODES AND IMAGININGS PROGRAM
WEDNESDAY 6 NOVEMBER 2013
The Theatre at the Australian National Maritime Museum
9.00 – 9.30 Registration, tea and coffee
9.30 – 9.45 Official Welcome & Acknowledgement of Country
Kevin Sumption, the Australian National Maritime Museum
9.45 – 10.45 Chair: Jodi Frawley
Keynote Address Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea
10.45 – 11.15 Morning tea
11.15 – 12.15 Panel Session One: Cultures of the Sea
Leah Lui- Chivizhe, Voice and Object: Torres Strait turtle shell masks
Dr onacloV & Josh Wodak, To see the sea: Reefs on the Edge
12.15 – 1.15 Lunch
1.15 – 2.15
Chair: Christopher Wright
Keynote Lecture: Jonathan Lamb, The Colours of Calenture
2.15 – 3.00
Chair: Michelle St Anne
Panel Session Two: 'Clarion Fracture Zone'
'Clarion Fracture Zone': Journeys from the bottom of the sea, and other musical adventures.
Tony Gorman, Clarinettist & Composer
Alister Spence, Pianist & Composer
3.00 – 3.30 Afternoon Tea
3.30 – 4.30
Panel Session 2: Artists and Collectors in conversation with Iain McCalman
Mike Bluett, Film Maker
Nigel Erskine, Curator
John Mullen, Collector, Diver, Philanthropist
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4.30 – 5.00
Wrap Up
Iain McCalman
5.00pm
CLOSE
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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.
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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.'
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Tony Gorman & Alister Spence: 'Clarion Fracture Zone': Journeys from the bottom of the sea, and other
musical adventures.
Tony and Alister first met and played together in the internationally acclaimed, ARIA Award winning “Clarion
Fracture Zone”, a band that Tony and Sandy Evans started in 1988. Clarion‟s first major concert was called
“Music For The Southern Seas” and was staged at The Bondi Pavilion. The concert‟s title came from a concern
about the way the sea was being overfished and polluted.
Song titles for this concert included „Dolabrifera‟ (a fairly unattractive sea slug), Feather Star (a crinoid), La
Mar Esta Enferma (The Sea is Ill) and Spice Island.
Alister Spence is regarded as one of the most experienced, creative and original contemporary
improvising pianist/composers in Australia.
With a performing and composing career spanning close to 30 years, his genre-defying talents have led
him to compose and perform for some of the world‟s most respected artists, in the areas of jazz, film,
theatre and rock music.
His performance career has always been strongly linked to his work as a composer. The groups he is
and has been part of, such as Clarion Fracture Zone, The Australian Art Orchestra and his own Alister
Spence Trio are internationally recognized as much for their originality of composition as they are for
their performance.
Alister grew up in Turramurra. His family took summer holidays on the South Coast of N.S.W where
his love of the sea developed. He became a keen board surfer in his teenage years and still continues
surfing today at Maroubra where he is a member of the Maroubra Surfers Association. The sea offers
to him a place of renewal (and exercise). Many of his compositions had their genesis during times
spent by the sea.
Tony Gorman’s 35 year professional career as a saxophonist, clarinettist, composer and producer has
made him one of the most respected musicians in Australia where he emigrated from Scotland in 1988.
Tony is a gifted, skilled and experienced composer. He has written music for radio, film, theatre and
dance productions. His career as a performer has encompassed contemporary jazz and improvised
music, rhythm and blues, rock and classical music.
In 1997 Tony‟s performance career changed dramatically when he was diagnosed with Multiple
Sclerosis. Since then he has been concentrating on composition and solo clarinet performances.
More recently, Tony has been enjoying performing on Alto Clarinet with his improvisatory ensemble
Tony Gorman‟s Monday Club.
Tony Gorman grew up in the ship building town of Greenock on the River Clyde in Scotland. He
established a successful career as musician and producer in Glasgow where he met Australian
saxophone player/composer Sandy Evans. In the 1980s they moved out to Australia and live by the sea
in Curl Curl on Sydney‟s Northern Beaches.
PANEL: Artists and Collectors — in conversation with Iain McCalman
University of Sydney Professor and sometimes maritime historian Iain McCalman will convene a conversation
with three distinguished individuals whose passions and skills have connected them powerfully with the sea. He
will explore with these three diverse and fascinating panellists the challenges and opportunities, dangers and
delights, that engaging with the sea has brought them.
Mike Bluett, filmmaker and digital producer, will discuss his work on a variety of sea-based film and digital
projects, including having directed and produced several recent documentaries and digital productions on Great
Barrier Reef histories.
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Dr Nigel Erskine, sailor, maritime archaeologist, historian and curator, will discuss projects that have led him to
explore key maritime archives, places and underwater sites of the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
John Mullen, business leader, philanthropist and diver will talk about the pleasures and perils of diving in search
of shipwrecks associated with Australia‟s early colonial period.
Iain McCalman- Historian
Iain McCalman was born in Nyasaland in 1947, schooled in Zimbabwe and did his higher education
in Australia. His last book, Darwin‟s Armada (Penguin, 2009) won three prizes and was the basis of
the TV series, Darwin‟s Brave New World. He is a Fellow of three 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 and won the inaugural Vice-Chancellor‟s Prize at ANU for
Teaching Excellence. He is a former Federation Fellow and currently a Research Professor in
history at the University of Sydney and co-Director of the Sydney Environment Institute. His new
book, The Reef – A Passionate History, from Captain Cook to Climate Change, will be published by
Penguin in Australia in November and by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux in the USA in May 2014. He
was made Officer of the Order of Australia in 2007 for services to history and the humanities.
Mike Bluett – Film maker
Mike Bluett has been producing television for 25 years in Europe, Australia and the US. He has
worked in both factual and drama, long and short forms and a number of genres.
He started his career as a factual producer making shows for ITV‟s arts strand, „The South Bank
Show‟ and then followed with primetime factual shows for Channel 4, BBC1, BBC2 and BBC3,
Channel 5, Discovery and History Channel amongst others. He has produced a number of coproductions
with European and US broadcasters.
Since arriving in Australia in 2005, Mike has produced shows for Discovery, the ABC and the SBS.
Nigel Erskine – Curator
Dr Nigel Erskine was recently appointed Research Manager at the Australian National Maritime
Museum (ANMM) where he has been employed since 2004. During this time he has served
periodically as Senior Curator and Assistant Director, and has curated a number of exhibitions,
published two books and been a Partner Investigator in two ARC projects. Prior to joining ANMM,
he was Director of the Norfolk Island Museum (2000-2003). While working on his PhD at James
Cook University, he was employed as an Associate Lecturer in Maritime Archaeology, and appointed
Research Fellow with the Queensland Museum. In 1998-99 he led the Pitcairn Project, undertaking
archaeological work in the eastern Pacific. Nigel is a strong advocate for collaborative projects
which link tertiary institutions with museums. He is a council member of the Australian Register of
Historic Vessels and a member of the Australasian Institute for Maritime Archaeology, Australian
Association of Maritime History and NSW Writers‟ Centre.
John Mullen – Collector, Diver, Philanthropist
John Mullen is an international businessman who has lived in some 11 countries and has held a
number of senior positions including Chief Executive Officer of TNT Express Worldwide and Chief
Executive Officer of DHL Express globally. John is currently Chief Executive Officer of Asciano Ltd,
a $5 billion public company in Australia which operates critical infrastructure including ports,
railways and container terminals. John was Chairman of the National Foreign Trade Council in
Washington, is a director of Telstra and has held a variety of other board positions including the
Advisory Council of the Australian Graduate School of Management and the NSW State Library
Foundation. For most of his life, John‟s great passion, however, has been the sea and maritime
history. Through their Silentworld Foundation John and his wife Jacqui plan and finance annual
expeditions to search for shipwrecks of historical significance to Australia. In conjunction with the
National Maritime Museum and Sydney University, the Foundation has helped locate notable
shipwrecks such as Phillip Parker King‟s “Mermaid” and Matthew Flinders‟ “Cato Porpoise”. The
Foundation‟s private museum has also built one of Australia‟s leading collections of maritime history
items from early European exploration in the Pacific through to colonial days in Australia. The
Foundation is also an active supporter of humanitarian projects in remote communities in the Pacific
Islands.
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