Watery Ghosts
- Publisher:
- UTS ePRESS
- Publication Type:
- Chapter
- Citation:
- Locating Suburbia: Memory, Place, Creativity, 2013, 1, 1 pp. 226 - 242 (17)
- Issue Date:
- 2013-01
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De Certeau states, in The Practice of Everyday Life, that “There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can “invoke” or not. Haunted places are the only ones people can live in…” In Watery Ghosts, Megan Heyward explores Sydney’s Parramatta River as a place haunted by troubling “spirits”; a set of complex, shifting histories that encompass the poisoned remnants of the Radium Hill uranium refinery at Hunter’s Hill, chemical contamination of the river from the AGL and Union Carbide plants at Rhodes, and the Victorian structures of insane asylum at Bedlam Point, Gladesville, alongside more recent sanitisation and re-imagining of the river. The chapter examines intersections of social history, personal memory and place at the site of the Parramatta River, and how these uncomfortable and and ambiguous narratives formed the basis of a media art installation, Cleanse, which conveyed these histories to a broader gallery audience in the Memory Flows exhibition, staged on the banks of the Parramatta River at Newington Armoury in 2010. eBook version includes video materials from "Cleanse", print version contains colour images and screenshots.
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