‘The chemists’ war’ in Sydney’s seas: Water, time, and everyday militarisms

Abstract

Approximately 28 kilometres off the coast of Sydney in Australia, at a depth of 275 metres, some 5000 tons of unused chemical weapons were dumped in the sea. These dumps join similar sea burial grounds all around Australia’s coasts and are part of the hundreds of thousands of tons of chemical ordnance dumped in the planet’s oceans after the Second World War. While this may seem like spectacular assault of old militarisms on fragile ocean ecologies, scientific research suggests that these dumps probably pose a negligible environmental risk. What then are we to make of these souvenirs of the First World War, also known as ‘the chemists’ war’, in Sydney’s seas? In this paper, I consider how sea dumped chemical weapons should concern us, but in ways that complicate the seemingly spectacular story they tell. Specifically, I extend Rob Nixon’s ( 2011 ) important theoretical contribution on slow and spectacular violence as a means for understanding the environmental afterlives of war. Sydney’s chemical weapons dumps underscore that Nixon’s framework cannot be interpreted dualistically; rather these undersea chemical dumps help us fathom how the slow and the spectacular are always queerly tangled, and how any unidirectionality of damage is more uncertain that a seemingly straight temporality of slowness would suggest. By productively leveraging the spectacular, I argue that Nixon’s concept helps us explore the more entangled, complex, and even contradictory ways in which militarisms pervade and shape everyday life. In tracing the queer temporal lineaments that suture the slow to the spectacular in tentacular ways, the everyday persistence of chemical militarisms, hidden in plain view, and the ways that they come to matter, are offered up for closer scrutiny.