Sydney Environment Institute

Picturesque prospects of its Harbour are, arguably, Sydney’s preeminent aesthetic motif. But what happens to knowledge of Sydney when we shine a light on the under-Harbour? How do understandings of Sydney change when the focus becomes the underwater framed through the concepts of boundaries, transitions, invisibility, extraction, and spectacle?

Enlarging the Harbour View is a partnership between SEI and the Power Institute and will draw on the insights of a multidisciplinary group of researchers, including curators of library and museum collections and resources, and scholars in the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences.

The workshop will build a picture of how the underwater realms of Sydney Harbour have ranged from sublime wonder in wilderness, to utilitarian business and resource use, and to the measurements and explorations of science and technology. A major theme will be the assessment of environmental change through human impact, including the tropicalisation of our Harbour waters. In this re-thinking of Sydney Harbour, from the viewpoint of the histories and poetics of the underwater, the Harbour view will be enlarged, and histories, practices, narratives, knowledges, and lives that have been overlooked, or actively suppressed, brought to the surface.