Beneath the Sea, Inland: Reading Aquifers and Opals in Australian Literature

ABSTRACT

Deep beneath the surface of the continent, memories of the ancient Eromanga Sea are retained in subterranean aquifers and the veins of opal that flash above them in lithic fissures. The excavation of these hidden resources has been critical to the advancement of establishing the settler-colony, Australia, and in perpetuating the ongoing violence of Indigenous dispossession. In this paper, I examine the entangled subterranean figures of aquifers and opals as they surface in the Australian literary archive. I read early twentieth century representations of groundwater usage and opal mining communities in works by Banjo Paterson and Katharine Suzannah Prichard against contemporary evocations of these themes in novels by Janette Turner Hospital (Oyster) and Tara June Winch (Swallow the Air). In doing so, I explore the challenges of representing, reading and interpreting deep watery spaces.*

KEYWORDS:

• Australian literatures
• Indigenous literatures
• postcolonialism
• ecohumanities
• geohumanities
• hydrohumanities
• aquifers
• groundwater
• opals
• mining

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Danielle Clode. Prehistoric Marine Life in Australia's Inland Sea (Melbourne: Museum Victoria, 2015), 5.

2 M A Habermehl, “Hydrogeological overview of springs in the Great Artesian Basin,” The Proceedings of the Royal Society of Queensland 126 (2020): 31.

3 Patrica Rey, “Opalisation of the Great Artesian Basin (central Australia): An Australian Story with a Martian Twist,” Australian Journal of Earth Sciences 60.3 (2013): 310.

4 On the ‘discovery’ of the Great Artesian Basin and subsequent groundwater extraction practices, see: Michael Cathcart, The water dreamers: the remarkable history of our dry continent (Text Publishing, 2010), 173; Leah M Gibbs, “Just add water: Colonisation, water governance, and the Australian inland,” Environment and Planning 41.12 (2009): 2964-2983.

5 Geoscience Australia, “What is Groundwater?” Australian Government:Geoscience Australia, n.d., https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/water/groundwater/basics/what-is-groundwater, accessed 23 February 2023.

6 A recent example of this is the record-breaking Singleton Station water licence, which was controversially granted in 2021, allowing the extraction of 40000 megalitres per year despite fierce opposition from Indigenous and environmental groups. For further information, see the report from Samantha Jonscher, “Fortune Agribusiness’ plans for massive water licence a risk to cultural sites, report finds,” ABC News, 10 February 2023, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-10/sacred-sites-at-risk-from-fortune-agribusiness-singleton-station/101952884, accessed 23 February 2023.

7 Simon Robert Pecover, “Australian Opal Resources: Outback Spectral Fire,” Rocks and Minerals 82.2 (2007): 103-15.

8 Australian Government, Australian Symbols Booklet, (Canberra: Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, 2022): 18.

9 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011): 2.

10 See inter alia Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Karen Barad, Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

11 Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, “Introduction: Stories Come to Matter,” Material Ecocriticism, edited by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014): 1-17.

12 Two examples of scholarship drawing upon material ecocritical approaches within Australian literary criticism include: Emily Potter, “‘No New Nails Under the Sun’: Climate Change, and the Challenge to Literary Narrative in Thea Astley’s Drylands,” TEXT 21.Special 40 (2017): 1-14; Samuel Cox, “I’ll Show You Love in a Handful of Dust: The Material Poetics of Voss,” JASAL 22.2 (2022): 1–11.

13 On the hydrohumanities, see inter alia Hester Blum, “Introduction: oceanic studies,” Atlantic Studies 10.2 (2013): 151-155; Laura Winkiel, “Introduction: Hydro-criticism,” English Language Notes 57.1 (2019): 1–10; Kim De Wolff, Rina C. Faletti, and Ignacio López-Calvo, Hydrohumanities: Water Discourse and Environmental Futures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021). On the geohumanities see inter alia Jeffery Jerome Cohen, Stone: An ecology of the inhuman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); Elisabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life (Santa Barbara: Punctum Books, 2012).

14 Steve Mentz, “Stone Voices: Geomaterialism in the Ecohumanities,” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 6.1 (2018): 119.

15 Stephen Graham, Vertical: The city from satellites to bunkers, e-book (London: Verso Books, 2016): np.

16 Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey (London: Penguin Books, 2020): 13.

17 Deborah Wardle “Sustainable Groundwater Stories–From Disasters to Epical Narration,” Junctures: The Journal for Thematic Dialogue 21 (2020): 22.

18 Sara Ahmed, “Open forum imaginary prohibitions: Some preliminary remarks on the founding gestures of the ‘new materialism,’” European Journal of Women's Studies 15.1 (2008): 31.

19 See Alison Ravenscroft, “Strange Weather: Indigenous Materialisms, New Materialism, and Colonialism,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 5:3 (2018): 353–70; Brendan Hokowhitu, “The Emperor’s ‘new’ Materialisms,” Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies (London: Routledge): 131–46; Zoe Todd, “Indigenizing the Anthropocene,” Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among aesthetics, politics, environments and epistemologies (2015): 241-54.

20 A B Paterson, “Song of the Artesian Water.” The Bulletin, 12 December 1896, p. 10

21 For further discussion on the contextual background of Paterson’s ‘Song’ and ground water mining, see: O C Powell, “Song of the Artesian Water: aridity, drought and disputation along Queensland’s pastoral frontier in Australia,” The Rangeland Journal 34.3 (2012): 305-317.

22 Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019): 40.

23 Katharine Susannah Prichard, Black Opal (Sydney: Caslon House Publishers, [1918]1946).

24 Jason Edwards, “The Materialism of Historical Materialism,” New Materialisms : Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole, and Samantha Frost (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010): 282.

25 Mike Harding, “The Nature and Significance of Aboriginal Work in the Northern South Australian Opal Industry c.1940-1980,” Journal of Australasian Mining History 15 (2017): 47–64.

26 George Frederick Kunz, The Curious Lore of Precious Stones (New York: Halcyon House, [1915]1938): 143.

27 Karen Barker,‘“Keep close to the earth!”: the schism between the worker and nature in Katharine Susannah Prichard's novels,” Colloquy 12 (2006): 43-58.

28 Barker states that the ‘Marxist principles upheld in [Prichard’s] novels are consistently refracted through her vitalist belief that a life lived close to nature is what keeps people in touch with the vital force’(43); for further discussion of these themes, see: Ellen Malos, “Some Major Themes in the Novels of Katharine Susannah Prichard,” Australian Literary Studies 1.1 (1963): 32-41.

29 Tara June Winch, Swallow the Air (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2006).

30 Winch references the controversy between international mining company, Barrick Gold, and their opponents, the Wiradjuri people and other environmental groups, which was occurring at the time of the novel’s publication. Barrick Mining has since sold the site to Evolution Mining which continue to expand their operations on the culturally significant lands of the Wiradjuri people, see: ABC News, “Further exploration around Lake Cowal gold mine planned in 2016,” ABC News, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-09/cowal-future/7012280, accessed 23 February 2023.

31 Janette Turner Hospital, Oyster (Milsons Point: Random House Publishing, 1996).

32 Freja Carmichael, Long Water: Fibre Stories (Fortitude Valley: Institute of Modern Art, 2020).

33 Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of water: Posthuman feminist phenomenology (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).

34 Macfarlane reminds us that the verb ‘to understand’ carries ‘an old sense of passing beneath something in order fully to comprehend it’; whereas ‘to discover is to reveal by excavation to descend and bring to the light, to fetch up from depths’ (Underland 17).

35 The term, ‘underwater eye’, is borrowed from Margaret Cohen’s book of the same title, The Underwater Eye (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022).

36 Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “Submarine futures of the Anthropocene,” Comparative Literature 69.1 (2017): 33.

37 Emily Potter et al. “A manifesto for shadow places: Re-imagining and co-producing connections for justice in an era of climate change,” Environment and Planning: Nature and Space 5.1 (2022): 286.