The Underharbor

Reviews / Votes

"Descending into Sydney Harbor, Elias composes an extensively researched, lavishly detailed, and generously illustrated study of this undersea site, through multiple perspectives and many decades. Elias analyzes Indigenous knowledges and diving practices, settler labor practices, marine zoology, journalism, photography, paintings, radio, and cinema, elegantly attending to the tensions between fact and fantasy, cultural imaginaries and the material environment. This overlooked aquatic place, as it turns out, harbors capitalism, colonialism, mastery, maritime salvage, Romantic aestheticism, alienation, fantasy, monsters, melancholy, macabre corpses, leaping mollusks, and feminized cephalopods. This vivid, readable book is a model for research that illuminates the rich, multifarious, and often surprising underwater histories that saturate places we presumed we already knew." -- Stacy Alaimo, author of "The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters with Deep Sea Life" "Drawing on multiple interdisciplinary sources-art history, film, photography and literature, as well as archaeology and environmental sciences-Elias offers unusual angles on what she calls the 'uncanny place' beneath the surface of Sydney Harbor. Her argument also suggests more generally how the enigmatic undersea has functioned as 'the planet's last unknown frontier.' Written in an engaging style with multiple illustrations, The Underharbor dredges to the surface many concealed aspects of this submarine realm and radiantly illuminates 'the cultural importance of ocean depths' in our own time." -- Paul Giles, author of "Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture" "Elias takes us beneath the glittering surface of Sydney's world-famous harbor to its muddy depths. Through the inquisitive exploration of an eclectic collection of historical illustrations and mysterious photographs, she discovers a vast, hitherto hidden place created by the competing currents of industry and ambition. The Underharbor focuses on the human experiences of this strange submarine world, from the colonial period to Modernity. At a time when the significance of our oceans is swelling before our eyes, Elias's empathetic examination of undersea activity near such a crucial port is more relevant than ever." -- Martyn Jolly, author of "Face of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography"