AustLit

'Water persists in the human imagination as a place of paradox: fear, foreboding, possibility and imagination. As an element so entirely vital for life, it provides a space for literal and metaphorical exploration, while oceanic depths act as a reminder of the unknowability of its vastness. As Una Chaudhuri aptly suggests, “A space beyond the normal realm of the human senses, the ocean has also long been a space beyond human thought, almost beyond human imagining” (149). Yet in this elemental power beyond human science, technology and civilisation, water becomes a near all-powerful force that responds and reacts to ill treatment, provoked by decay and corruption to obliterate human hands through tidal waves, floods and deluges. Recent anthropocenic oceanic studies have fixated on the devolution of the natural world through the lens of the ocean, an environment in which “diverse, beautiful ecological systems still dominated by coral reefs and fish will be replaced by ‘slime-rock’ systems dominated by algal and microbial mats and jellyfish” (Zalasiewicz 191). Similarly, Stacy Alaimo has asserted that the “Anthropocene seas will be paradoxical, anachronistic zones of terribly compressed temporality” in which “the future will move backwards, into a time when the oceans were devoid of whales, dolphins, fish, coral reefs, and a multitude of other species, but jellyfish (and algae) proliferated” (Alaimo 158). From another perspective, there are other scientists who continue to consider the ocean in mechanistic, industrial terms, maintaining an imperialist approach: “The ocean itself is our single greatest tool when properly harnessed and leveraged. That tool sits ready, and we have a good idea how to use it” (Palumbi 178).' (Water : An introduction: Helen Blythe, Alexandra Lewis, Lesa Scholl and Joanne Wilkes)