Liquid Infrastructures: An Archive of the Central Sydney Estuary
Researcher
Thomas Woodhead
Published
14 November 2024
Funding
Design Thinking Grant
This digital working-archive, offers an in-depth exploration of Sydney’s industrial evolution, capturing the often-overlooked fragments of early industrial activities around its waters
These gaps offer fleeting descriptions of a struggling and fragile ecological network. Categorised as wetland and estuarine, the narratives within the remnant archive offer glimpses at the ecologies which nurture, filter and stabilise foreshore aquatic environments, demonstrating connections as global as the trade and industrial networks that altered these habitats.
The website is centred around an open and interactive map which focuses on producing a resource that shares how these infrastructural operations are connected to the current and future development of the Central Sydney Estuary. The communication of the ecological stories is represented through a series of collected and speculated stories, images and drawings.
All over the world, land reclamation has played a major role in the reduction of the aesthetic, recreational and scientific value of the shore. Reclamation has destroyed thousands of kilometres of natural coastline, much of it of very high landscape quality; it has buried beaches and infilled inlets formerly used for recreational purposes including bathing, boating and fishing, and it has degraded and obliterated wetlands formerly enjoyed by naturalists.
Brian L. Hudson, 1996, ‘Cities on the Shore: The Urban Littoral Frontier’
