Ocean
Memory: Early Modern Pasts and Uncertain Futures
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).
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).
Image: Caroline Austin, 2021 `
What we are exploring
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:
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 Wind
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.
These cultural exchanges form a critical part of Yolgnu history that has received scant attention and are evidence that Indigenous Australians were exposed to other cultures long before the European invasion. This is reinforced by the references to Makassans in Yolgnu oral, dance and visual traditions. Stone painting depictions of a Makassan prau have been carbon-dated to before 1664—the oldest date yet for contact art in Australia. This indicates contact well before this date. A deep knowledge of the seasonal winds and currents that flow between Indonesia and North Australia and a willingness to surrender to the oceanic uncertainties involved, made this long-term relationship possible.
Tidal Speeds, 2021-2022, Eastern Coast Australia
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.
BRISBANE AUSTRALIA