A Week on the Cooks River

Abstract

A Week on the Cooks River addresses the question: What Australian history and attitudes are exposed through embodied observation of the Cooks River, and can those findings be communicated as visual art? Through the practice of turning attention to the history, geography and visual language of an overlooked urban river, A Week on the Cooks River uses a small frame to consider broader issues and ideas. This thesis proposes that images and installations can play a role in disseminating research, thereby making places like the Cooks River more legible. Named after Captain James Cook, the Cooks River is a tidal estuary that flows twenty-three kilometres from Yagoona to Botany Bay in Sydney, Australia. Over its course, the water moves through the traditional lands of the Wangal, Gadigal and Gameygal people and past middens and cave shelters, suburban houses, Sydney's largest cemetery, an ice-skating rink, industrial areas and golf courses. The water in the Cooks merges with Botany Bay where the river's mouth has been engineered a kilometre off course to make way for Sydney's International Airport. This research has followed the river on foot and by boat and establishes that Sydney's history is reflected in the Cooks River, but the river holds an under observed place in Australia's post-colonial narrative. A Week on the Cooks River argues that Sydney's Cooks River is an entangled, worldly, troubling place and a potential training ground for enacting Feminist theorist Donna Haraway's suggestion that we "stay with the trouble.” A week on the Cooks River proposes tracing the Cooks River's length, tributaries and tidal patterns as a productive frame for considering complex layers of Australian culture.