Swamps are transitional spaces, neither land nor water. The boundaries of the Barrambin wetlands and waterways would have been ever-shifting, rising and falling as the wet and dry seasons came and went in turns. It was a living thing, drawing water into itself, and exhaling it in drought. Like all swamps, Barrambin would have gathered a particular kind of vegetation and fauna into itself, resistant to fluctuations of moisture (Rutledge et al., 2022).
It would be inaccurate to call Barrambin dead. Though the lands are usually dry, cumbungi (cattails) and sedges still grow around the sites where transient rivulets form in rain, and dusky moorhens and Australian ibis still forage the banks of the ponds that remain—the very same zones of permanent submersion that have existed since precolonial times.
Yet to all who are unaware of this history-before-history of these lands, Barrambin is no longer alive—divested of its cultural importance to the Turrbal country by colonially-driven displacement (“York’s Hollow Water,” 1862), then diminished to a fraction of its original size by the redirection of the waters into drainage culverts through the 1870s and 1880s (Brisbane City Council, 2008; “Drainage of York’s Hollow,” 1883). When the Kelvin Grove Urban Village was built upon the land of Barrambin, a fence was erected between the village and the parklands, as a final severance between the human and the non-human.
In a sense, our project invokes that ghost of the Barrambin waterways, so that it may speak once again. Investing power and agency in what is absent, ghosts and ghost-centred methodologies are often activated in conservation research (McCorristine & Adams, 2020) and in the study of what has vanished through colonial violence (Toso et al., 2020). The drainage of Barrambin is an act of colonial violence, inexorably tied to the policing and removal of Turrbal groups from those same lands (“The York’s Hollow Water Holes,” 1862; “York’s Hollow Water,” 1862). That there are anecdotal ghost stories associated with Barrambin’s waterholes (Hansen, 2013) may be a tacit sign of the anxieties haunting these spaces.
Toso et al. propose walking-with as a practice for sensing these ghosts—one that reconfigures our desensitised modes of experiencing the city by following the whims of the missing waterway. To follow this ghost, we walk with it; to understand the landscape itself as an experience, not as subdivisions of enclosures, and not as the background on which places are set (Ingold, 2013)—we move with it, following the undulations of the waterway and its multidimensional, contradictory story. This sort of walking is sometimes known as drifting, or dérive: a way of re-experiencing built spaces dulled by capitalistic urban development (Debord, 1956).
The land remembers: it is an inscription of history and tradition, the strange intersection of nature and artifice. Rather than divide the land into building and landscape, human and non-human, extant and disappeared, we propose to reunite these things and thereby re-voice the seemingly dead in the present.
References
Brisbane City Council. (2008, January). Brisbane Drainage Contract No. 1. Heritage Places. http://heritage.brisbane.qld.gov.au/heritage-places/2007
Debord, G. (1956). Theory of the Dérive. Les Lèvres Nues, 9. https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html
Drainage of York’s Hollow. (1883, June 16). Brisbane Week, 6.
Hansen, L. (2013, February 24). Facebook comment. https://www.facebook.com/Lost.Brisbane/photos/a.375933132517794/256125714498537/?comment_id=348232891954485
Ingold, T. (2013). Against space: Place, movement, knowledge. In Boundless worlds: An anthropological approach to movement. Berghahn Books.
McCorristine, S., & Adams, W. M. (2020). Ghost species: Spectral geographies of biodiversity conservation. Cultural Geographies, 27(1), 101–115. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474019871645
Rutledge, K., McDaniel, M., Teng, S., Hall, H., & Ramroop, T. (2022, July 2). Swamp. National Geographic Society. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/swamp
The York’s Hollow Water Holes. (1862, December 19). Courier.
Toso, T., Spooner-Lockyer, K., & Hetherington, K. (2020). Walking with a Ghost River: Unsettling Place in the Anthropocene. Anthropocenes – Human, Inhuman, Posthuman, 1(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.16997/ahip.6
York’s Hollow Water. (1862, December 29). Courier.