OCEAN MEMORY PROJECT
University of California
Oecologies Network
University of California
Oecologies Network
When we use the currents,
we are in touch with the great forces of the planet—it’s rotation in space, the
prevailing winds, the slow, curling drift of ocean water transporting heat,
maintaining the earth’s atmospheric equilibrium.
Connecting continent to continent, pole to pole, the
currents are like a living web, moving and winding and mixing, wrapping itself
perpetually around the world
David Suzuki, (1997)
This interdisciplinary collaborative project was developed in partnership with Early Modern scholar Dr. Louise Noble from the University of New England and composer Dr. Paul Ballam-Cross from the University of Queensland. Presented to the University of California Oecologies Network, the project explored how historical and contemporary relationships with ocean currents might help us, in a time of extreme ecological precarity, to reorient our perceptions of ecological pasts, presents, and futures.
The project focused on the history of human relationships with the complex system of ocean currents and prevailing weather systems that move between the Indonesian Archipelago and Australia. It looked at currents as agents of memory, repositories of knowledge, keepers of secrets, and conveyors of wisdom, through a creative lens of literature, sound, and video.
Project Background
This project explores the spatiotemporal history of human relationships with the complex system of ocean currents and prevailing weather systems that move between the Indonesian Archipelago and Australia. While there exists a plethora of human histories with ocean currents, and the resulting encounters and cultural exchanges, our focus is what we can learn from the currents themselves. We read the currents as agents of memory, repositories of knowledge, keepers of secrets, and conveyors of wisdom.
This project employs the use of sound in the form of a spoken word description of the currents and how they have carried seafarers over time, as well as, video and music.
We situate our work in the larger conversation generated by the Notes from the Sea Reading Group discussion of 13 November. In particular, our interdisciplinary project relates to two of the main concepts emerging from that discussion: “volumetrics” (ocean and sea noise), and “pressure” (intensities of colour and saturation), and to the statement that “the repetition of sound might measure the passage of time”, which strikes a chord with our process of audio-visual mapping of the temporal variables of tides, currents and air through the Tidal Speeds video below. We bring to this conversation the concept of “surrender.”
Our exploration of ocean currents asks:
- In what ways are our historical relationships with ocean currents acts of physical and psychological surrender that bring us into new realms of imagination, experience, and ways of knowing?
- How do we visualise and best describe these phenomena and the connections and cultural exchanges enabled by ocean currents from the 16th century onwards?
Tavernier’s Travels
The idea of human
mastery over the ocean is illusory. While ocean currents, winds and seasons
have a certain predictability, human experience shows that they are in fact
notoriously unpredictable. We begin with this uncertainty in the descriptions
of ocean currents between India and Makassar, Sulawesi, found in the works of
Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, seventeenth-century French gem merchant and traveller,
who made six voyages to Persia and India between 1630 and 1668.
Please click here download and listen to a passage from Tavernier’s travels.
The People Beneath the Winds
We pick up these winds and currents in Makassar, Sulawesi, Indonesia. Long before European seafarers such as Tavernier, Makassan fishing fleets used them to travel south to Arnhem Land, home of the Yolngu people, on the North Australian Coast. The Makassans referred to the Yolngu as the “people beneath the wind”—a recognition of the seasonal changes they needed to negotiate to reach them. The main purpose of the Makassan voyages was to harvest trepang, which are large sea cucumbers that were highly prized by the Chinese, and trade in other goods. In their praus they made the risky 1,500 km voyage south, which typically took 10 days, taking advantage of the North-West monsoon that blows throughout December and January, navigating purely by oral tradition and deciphering the ocean’s codes. At the height of the trade the fleet was more than sixty strong, and its praus would range along the coast in groups of three or four, stopping at suitable points to catch and process trepang. When the winds shifted and the South-East monsoon began in April, the praus would head home to Makassar. Often Yolngu people would travel with them.
This video and music work above, Tidal Speeds, builds on Tavernier’s writings with an infra-ordinary exploration of the currents and the spaces they inhabit, in this case, coastal inlets on the Eastern Coast of Australia.
Accompanying the video work, the electric guitar music is based around quintal harmonies. These harmonies replicate the way that ocean currents push and pull, and do not point towards easily discernible key structures. A key timbral element in the accompaniment is the removal of the attack of the guitar from each note, creating an amorphous element to the sound of the instrument.
Uncertain Futures
Today, these currents also carry debris at the surface. Poor disposal practices have combined with regional water movements to produce a garbage hotspot. Much of the rubbish enters the Gulf of Carpentaria from Indonesia, is carried by the seasonal currents and the winds, and accumulates on Arnhem Land beaches. The Arafura Sea contains some of the largest fisheries, both legal and illegal, in South-East Asia. This pollution is relatively recent to the area. The debris began appearing in force in the late 1990s. The volume of debris has doubled since 2008 and little can be done to reverse the flow. Local Yolngu man, Mandaka, tells the story of enjoying the beach when he was growing up because it was all clean. Now, he says, it’s been taken over by rubbish: “Plastic, plastic, plastic. There’s so much plastic...in the end plastic will take over. Plastic in the land, plastic in the sea, plastic everywhere.” This is, indeed, an uncertain future.
List of Works
Please click here download and listen to a passage from Tavernier’s travels.
The People Beneath the Winds
We pick up these winds and currents in Makassar, Sulawesi, Indonesia. Long before European seafarers such as Tavernier, Makassan fishing fleets used them to travel south to Arnhem Land, home of the Yolngu people, on the North Australian Coast. The Makassans referred to the Yolngu as the “people beneath the wind”—a recognition of the seasonal changes they needed to negotiate to reach them. The main purpose of the Makassan voyages was to harvest trepang, which are large sea cucumbers that were highly prized by the Chinese, and trade in other goods. In their praus they made the risky 1,500 km voyage south, which typically took 10 days, taking advantage of the North-West monsoon that blows throughout December and January, navigating purely by oral tradition and deciphering the ocean’s codes. At the height of the trade the fleet was more than sixty strong, and its praus would range along the coast in groups of three or four, stopping at suitable points to catch and process trepang. When the winds shifted and the South-East monsoon began in April, the praus would head home to Makassar. Often Yolngu people would travel with them.
This video and music work above, Tidal Speeds, builds on Tavernier’s writings with an infra-ordinary exploration of the currents and the spaces they inhabit, in this case, coastal inlets on the Eastern Coast of Australia.
Accompanying the video work, the electric guitar music is based around quintal harmonies. These harmonies replicate the way that ocean currents push and pull, and do not point towards easily discernible key structures. A key timbral element in the accompaniment is the removal of the attack of the guitar from each note, creating an amorphous element to the sound of the instrument.
Uncertain Futures
Today, these currents also carry debris at the surface. Poor disposal practices have combined with regional water movements to produce a garbage hotspot. Much of the rubbish enters the Gulf of Carpentaria from Indonesia, is carried by the seasonal currents and the winds, and accumulates on Arnhem Land beaches. The Arafura Sea contains some of the largest fisheries, both legal and illegal, in South-East Asia. This pollution is relatively recent to the area. The debris began appearing in force in the late 1990s. The volume of debris has doubled since 2008 and little can be done to reverse the flow. Local Yolngu man, Mandaka, tells the story of enjoying the beach when he was growing up because it was all clean. Now, he says, it’s been taken over by rubbish: “Plastic, plastic, plastic. There’s so much plastic...in the end plastic will take over. Plastic in the land, plastic in the sea, plastic everywhere.” This is, indeed, an uncertain future.
List of Works
- Gross, Philip. The Water Table. Bloodaxe Books. Highgreen, Northumberland, UK. 2010.
- Garrick, Matt. “Toxic tides: the rubbish washing up in East Arnhem Land.” Australian Geographic. 31 August, 2018. https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/science-environment/2018/08/toxic-tides-the-rubbish-washing-up-in-east-arnhem-land/
- May, Sally K.; Tacon, Paul S.C.; Wesley, Daryl; Travers,
Meg. “Painting history: Indigenous observations and depictions of the ‘other’
in Northwestern Arnhem Land, Australia.” Australian Archaeology: 71,
2010, 58-59.
- Suzuki, David. The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering our
Place in Nature. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin. 1997, 7
- Tavernier, Jean Baptiste. Collection of Travels Through
Turkey and Persia, and the East-Indies. The First Volume. London: 1676.
- Thompson, Jesse and Liz Trevaskis. “Indonesian waste floats ashore.” ABC Radio Darwin. 21 June, 2018. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-21/indonesian-waste-tarnishing-pristine-arnhem-land-beaches/9891764