Kim Satchell
Postgraduate Student, Southern Cross University
Making eco-sense of water: Surf Culture, Cultural Studies and the Eco-humanities
This paper uses auto-topographical fragments situated in the tension between Indigenous, Settler and Post-colonial narratives and histories. These fragments have resonance with an ecological imagination based upon theorising the connection between the embodied practice of everyday life and the poetics of reverie. These ideas are philosophically underpinned in a framework mapping an expanding environmental consciousness through such ideological positions as resource conservation, wilderness preservation and environmental ethics (each anthropocentric) towards the paradigmatic leap to an ecological sensibility (ecocentric). Inter alia the significance of water figures in material forms, as a cross-cultural and trans-generational communicative medium, as a lens for an ecological imagination and after Deborah Bird Rose’s (2004) Invitation to the Eco-humanities (AHR online) as a poetics to multiply ecological readings of place. In an Australian context and specific to this paper, the spread of surf culture prior to and from the mid-twentieth century around the coastal fringe and more recently in the coastal development popularised as Sea Change, is indicative of the ‘place’ beach culture and more acutely water plays in the National Imaginary and the material everyday life of Australians-as such in need of a range of creative research agendas.
Background
My academic interest in culture, space, place and ecology stems from the intersection of my engagement with surf culture and community activism, in opposition to a proposed Sewage Outfall at Look At Me Now Headland at Emerald Beach and my involvement with Cultural Studies at Southern Cross University. The Outfall protest known as ‘The Siege of Emerald Beach’ resulted in a ten year embargo on development of the Northern Beaches of Coffs Harbour (since lapsed), the gazetting of the Moonee Nature Reserve, the establishment of the Solitary Island Marine Reserve (the first of its kind in NSW) and the re-routing of effluent back to an upgraded but existing Outfall in Coffs Harbour (not a desired outcome). I continue to live at Sandy Beach, twenty kilometres north of Coffs Harbour on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales (adjacent to the Marine Reserve) since moving from Sydney in the 1980s. As a keen surfer I try to get in the water most days, depending upon the swell and alternatively can be found wandering aimlessly along the beach most mornings and evenings.
Biography
I currently work as an academic teaching Cultural Studies in the School of Arts and Social Sciences Southern Cross University Coffs Harbour, as an educator/trainer for the North Coast Institute of TAFE in the Community Services-Welfare section and am also a Postgraduate student with the Graduate Research College Southern Cross University Lismore in the Centre for Peace and Social Justice. One of my current projects ‘Surfing Cultural Diversity: Women in the Waves’ involve making a DVD about cultural diversity for the North Coast Institute of TAFE. The project follows a group of women (South African, Greek, Liberian, Sudanese, PNG, Aboriginal-Australian and Anglo-Australian) learning to surf at a local Coffs Harbour Surf School, while telling their back story, following their progress and highlighting their interaction, both in and out of the water. In the near future I hope to be conducting social and cultural research in a partnership between Southern Cross University and the Solitary Marine Park Authority with the various user-groups of the Solitary Island Marine Reserve and the adjacent communities.
Email: kim.satchell@scu.edu.au