The Underharbor

An underwater look at Sydney that surfaces new and unfamiliar histories of people, objects, spaces, and environmental and social change.

The Underharbor places the ocean at the center of a cultural history of Sydney, Australia, a place built on and around seawater, where the community is linked historically, emotionally, and psychologically to the water. Drawing on a series of vignettes that focus on Sydney’s underwater dimensions—including the harbor’s relationship to technological modernity, Indigenous ideas and practices, artistic experimentation, and scientific inquiry—Ann Elias creates a unique portrait of a city and its past. By shifting the terrestrial perspective to the subaquatic, Elias uncovers an area filled with political meaning, poetic significance, and ideological struggles.

Few harbors are as researched as Sydney’s, where fishing, exploration, colonialism, warfare, science, and industry all shaped cultural ideas about underwater space. Between 1850 to 1950, only a few groups of people had access to the remote underharbor: Indigenous divers and First Nations peoples, who were dispossessed by colonizers; divers working primarily to further the maritime industrialization of the growing city and to salvage objects from the harbor floor; researchers in the emerging field of marine science who dove for first-hand observation; and beachcombers, naturalists, and dredgers who got to know the underharbor by bringing it to the surface. Through press stories, models, illustrations, maps, and photographic and cinematic representations, The Underharbor reveals how these watery visions of Sydney shifted over the course of a century.