The ‘New World’ is Old: Journeying Through Deep Time
The following essay is a revised excerpt from Samuel Alexander and Brendan Gleeson’s new book, Urban Awakenings: Disturbance and Enchantment in the Industrial City (Palgrave, 2021). In this, the authors’ practise a method they call ‘urban tramping’, as they walk their home city of Melbourne in search of disturbance and enchantment. They set out, in other words, to sojourn through urban landscapes with the same sense of wonder and critical observation that a nature-walker embodies as they saunter through a rainforest. The book reports on their various perambulations, with 22 short chapters and more than 70 colour images, to document and enrich their urban tramps.
Leaving Melbourne University’s Parkville Campus at the end of the workday, we meander down one of the main CBD drags, Elizabeth Street, in the direction of Flinders Street Station – toward the beating heart of the city and a defining artefact and enabler of the industrial order. It seems like a suitable landmark and symbol to inspire our inaugural journey.
Tramping through the bustling urban landscape, we pass by the sometimes endearing but often tacky Queen Victoria Market, as the sun moves lower in the hazy summer sky without losing much of its intensity. The busy streets move slowly with creeping cars, and the passing trams are full to overflowing with those jaded commuters with tired eyes. It is better to be walking, we say to each other with a glance, even as we recognise the hint of petroleum
in the air that fills our lungs. One feels the warmth of the pavement through one's shoes, the urban heat island effect experienced most directly.
A thin veil of smoke filters our view of the city, a result of unprecedented bushfires hundreds of kilometres away that began in late 2019 and continued through summer. These fires reduced to ash an estimated 11 million hectares (or 27 million acres) of Australian bush.
Yesterday's January air quality in our most liveable city, was officially ‘hazardous' and the day before was ranked ‘worst air in the world' by public health officials. Today's air is merely ‘poor'; tomorrow's might be toxic. Welcome to the Anthropocene.
We should be wearing breathing masks, like many of the people we pass. That said, we feel relatively responsible as we watch a man stub out a cigarette, throw it on the pavement, and immediately light a new one, relentlessly sucking tar into his lungs, personifying carbon capitalism. (Little did we know that in a couple of months we'd be wearing facemasks to protect ourselves from a different enemy.)
Countless lives have been devastated by these ongoing fires, human and non-human. The numbers almost defy human comprehension. It has been estimated that more than one billion animals have perished tragically, each of them innocent. Some species are now
1 freshly extinct. And it is early summer as we write these words, with the prospect or promise of fiercer furnaces lying ahead.
The smoke in the city air reminds us of the intimate connection – barely a distinction – between town and burning country. The smoke has already
Yesterday's January air quality in our most liveable city, was officially ‘hazardous' and the day before was ranked ‘worst air in the world' by public health officials. Today's air is merely ‘poor'; tomorrow's might be toxic. Welcome to the Anthropocene.
reached New Zealand and NASA predicts the clouds of ash will do a full circle of Earth and return to Australia from the West.
Urban theorist Henri Lefebvre argued that social reality can no longer be neatly understood with categories like ‘city' and ‘countryside', but must now be analysed in terms of the complete urbanisation of society. After all,
2 the city is, and has always been, parasitic on that which is ‘not city'. The smoke haze today affirms this connection and blurs seemingly commonsensical distinctions.
It is too late for ecological truths to be presented with kid gloves. It is time for radical honesty. An intensifying climate is turning this nation into a tinderbox that threatens to combust violently at the slightest provocation or accident, a comment that deserves both biophysical and cultural interpretation. What will next summer bring?
As tragedies compound, perhaps it is time to say that the sun is setting not in, but on, the West. We are in the midst of a Great Endarkenment, our eyes still adjusting, as Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison praises his nonexistent climate credentials. Even so, philosopher Georg Hegel once declared that the owl of Minerva only spreads its wings as the shades of night are gathering, implying that true knowledge only arrives at the end of a civilisational cycle. May we be so lucky. May insight
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We arrive at Flinders Street Station as the sizeable clock on its front face prepares to strike seven. We look up to see a grand building imposing itself on the landscape, not without a certain majesty. Do we look upward enough in the city? Are our urban goals sufficiently lofty? Dare we reach for the stars that are hidden by the light pollution of this great city?
We urge you, dear reader, next time you wander the streets of your neighbourhood or city centre, don't forget to cast your eyes higher. Doing so can change the state of one's thoughts, drawing them higher too, as if by way of a current. Almost inevitably, however,
It is time to say that the sun is setting not in, but on, the West. We are in the midst of a Great Endarkenment
the human situation and condition draws one's eyes and thoughts downward, the curse of fallen creatures. Our task is to resist, to demand more of ourselves.
The steps of Flinders Street Station are amongst the most fascinating places to watch the city of Melbourne unfold in all its spectacular diversity. The tramp and the flâneur do more than ‘people-watch', but if you want to engage in the pastime of quiet observation in Melbourne, the steps of this central station (or any central station) are a prime place to do it. Cities are full of symbols and signs, waiting to be decoded, interpreted, and woven into new patterns of meaning and significance. For a time we sit quietly and try to read our complex city.
According to Baudelaire, ‘[f ]or the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world.'
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Your tramps are not mere idling flâneurs, but outside the station this evening our individuality fades to vanishing point as we find ourselves in a melting pot of business people and parents, lawyers and goths, preachers, backpackers, buskers, and police, and everything between and beyond. We take a moment to pat a dog that has kind, grateful eyes, while a sparrow nervously swoops nearby to collect crumbs from the city floor.
The unbounded variety of appearances amongst urbanites is astounding and somehow uplifting. Most fascinating of all is that the human experiment in living has arguably just begun. The deep future awaits, starting today – what will we make of it?
As pioneering environmental philosopher Henry Thoreau once
So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say.
opined, ‘there are as many ways [to live] as there can be drawn radii from one centre… [and human] capacities have never been measured… so little has been tried.' He was cautioning us not
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to live our lives in the ruts of unthinking tradition and conformity, and instead to become something new, not merely a tired restatement of history.
Writing in the mid-nineteenth century, Thoreau was living in a time (like ours) of great economic transformation, and for him the railroad was the emblem of industrialisation. He often spoke of it metaphorically, as a representation of the emerging economic system that was fast changing the face of America and indeed the world. ‘ We do not ride upon the railroad,' he concluded, ‘it rides upon us.'
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Nevertheless, it appeared to Thoreau as if his neighbours had fallen into the common mode of living not because they preferred it to any other but because they honestly thought there was no choice left. We look out at our fellow city-dwellers on this hot evening and ask the same question. ‘So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say.'
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Thoreau believed, however, there was more to life than the industrial city – and so do we. Or rather, we are exploring the possibility that there is more to life in the industrial city, a thesis we are testing in the hope of expanding the conditions for collective transcendence, as we sojourn through civilised life.
But the great clock at Flinders Station. We are drawn to the clock. A hurricane of busy people encircles us and then moves on with the traffic lights, a blur of noisy intention, but the clock, which we have each passed a thousand times, this evening invites us to pause, to step out of the rush, and to reflect on our temporality.
What does it mean to live in this city of Melbourne during this third decade of the twentyfirst century? The question has no single answer, obviously. Theoretical physicists report that something happened thirteen billion years ago, a singular event which a child with a limited vocabulary named the ‘big bang'. Earth was formed around four and a half billion years ago, and perhaps a billion years later the earliest signs of life sprung forth. Our species emerged around 200,000 years ago, and about 10,000 years ago the Neolithic revolution marked the dawn of agricultural society. In 1859 the first oil well started being pumped in Pennsylvania, producing about twenty-five barrels each day.
And here we are now – in a world (before-covid) demanding 100 million barrels of oil every day – looking up at a clock outside a train station at the centre of this industrial city, listening to the complex beat of urban time passing in a globalised world. How is it that we live in a world with more advanced technology than ever before, and yet, as we read the latest IPCC reports, it is clear there is less time than ever? No wonder the people leaving or entering the station look to be in an agitated rush. Everyone, it seems, needs to be somewhere other than where they are. Modern life defined.
Everyone, it seems, needs to be somewhere other than where they are. Modern life defined.
How long have homo sapiens walked the land beneath our feet? Even today it is hard to comprehend the depth of Australia's human history. Billy Griffiths, in his book Deep Time Dreaming, tells
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of how, when Australian archaeologists began serious work in the 1950s, it was generally thought that Indigenous Australian's had only arrived a few thousand years before British colonisation.
Carbon dating techniques have since pushed Australian history back into the mind-boggling expanse of deep time, with human arrival in Australia now estimated to be 60,000 years ago or more. It seems the so-called ‘new world' is in fact very, very old. That we so easily forget this reminds us that ‘time has been a most effective colonising tool'.
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To refer to this period of time before colonisation as ‘prehistory', as was commonplace not so long ago, is of course both absurd and arrogant. Archaeologist Vere Gordon Chide once remarked, ‘it is not a sort of prelude to history but an integral part of history itself'. Needless to say, history does
10 not begin when white people arrive. And yet, here we are, your tramps, ‘born of the conquerors' as poet Judith Wright puts it, in a ‘haunted country', feeling
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a deep connection with this great land but still learning how to belong. The lack of appreciation of ‘deep history' today is somewhat ironic given that the clock, as E.P. Thompson argued, was instrumental in organising and disciplining workers as industrial capitalism was born. Clocks would mark workers' hours of arrival and measure their idleness or efficiency in production. ‘ Time is now currency,' Thompson said, ‘it is not passed but spent.'
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Of course there were sundials, water clocks, church bells, and crowing chanticleers to help regulate the day before industrial civilisation. But the mechanical clock, as Lewis Mumford contended, introduced a technique for time-discipline that made possible the idea of regular production, regular working hours, and a standardised product.
‘TIME IS NOW CURRENCY,’ THOMPSON SAID, ‘IT IS NOT PASSED BUT SPENT.’
Equally time can be enslaved to the cause of consumption. We think of a clock nearby at Southern Cross Station, where Old Father Time is suspended and upended by an illuminated red advertisement for money.
Paradoxically, then, the mass production of mechanical watches and clocks was both dependent on, and a product of, the mass production of watches and clocks. Indeed, the connection between clocks and capitalism was so well understood in previous eras that revolutionary activity has at times targeted clocks as being fundamental to capitalism. Destroy
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the technology of time-discipline, and the capitalist cannot control the worker. The logic is too simplistic but it is understandable. Destroy all clocks!
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We, the children of industrial civilisation, do not know how young we are. Not even newborns, we are but cultural embryos, destined, it seems, to miscarry – for better or for worse. But as with all things in this finite biosphere of natural cycles and seasons, death is merely the precursor to new life, new beginnings, which in turn will end as something new emerges, over and over again, for eternity. History is this process, this flow, repeatedly lapping against the shores of deep time.
From a geological perspective, the Anthropocene is but a blink of the eye, not so much an epoch as an event. It too will pass and one day be a memory, hard though that is to imagine today. For now, however, most human beings live in urban contexts that are both the product and process of industrialisation. Our species has become homo urbanis.
The shriek of a passing ambulance shakes us from our reverie and we find ourselves again sitting on the steps of Flinders Street Station in silence, beneath that instructive clock which surreptitiously disciplines all who accept its order. It is time to move on.
Next to us a brood of youthful goths pass the time in peaceful co-existence in this most public of urban places. Why have they chosen these steps to gather? To be witnessed in order to feel alive? Perhaps they wonder of our purposes too – as do we. Uncomfortable glances are exchanged. We are all seeking, but seeking what?
Enchantment in the industrial city.
Most human beings live in urban contexts that are both the product and process of industrialisation. Our species has become homo urbanis.