Introduction: Approaching the Bottom of the Bay

Text: Killian Quigley

The sea cucumber Rowedota allani is a benthic detritivore, which means that it lives on the seafloor and eats dead stuff. Its soft, footless, wormy body is colored a rich purply-red. It has ten “digitate”—fingery—tentacles. It is known to be endemic to just two seabeds: the bottom of Bass Strait, a sea channel which separates the island state of Tasmania from the Australian mainland; and the floor of Port Phillip Bay, a broad, shallow inlet of Bass Strait which forms the southern edge of Melbourne, Victoria, a city of more than five million people (Mackenzie 2020). Rowedota allani was originally described, in Western-scientific terms, by an amateur Melbournian naturalist named E. C. Joshua. In 1912, Joshua delivered the “first” news of a sea cucumber that was “carmine in life” and that lived “on mud banks, in from 5 to 10 fathoms, Port Phillip Bay” (79). (5 to 10 fathoms is equivalent to about 9 to 18 meters, or 30 to 60 feet.)

Blair Patullo, Rowedota allani, Museums Victoria

A couple of years later, Joshua published an overview of Victorian sea cucumbers in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria. Rowedota allani was “extraordinarily abundant,” he wrote, “on the sludge banks which form the greater part of the bottom of Port Phillip Bay.” The species was so numerous, in fact, that Joshua had observed “the dredge”—a scientific tool for drawing up marine specimens—“presenting the appearance of having been dragged through a mass of blood slime from the thousands of this species adhering to it” (1914, 8). Tentacled, detritus-eating, seafloor-dwelling, carmine-colored: Rowedota allani can seem about as unlike us humans as a creature could possibly be. (As this photograph suggests, Rowedota allani becomes white when preserved.) By inhabiting Port Phillip Bay in such huge numbers, these marine invertebrates conjure a realm of spectacularly prolific—but radically inhuman—liveliness. For a reader of Joshua’s reports, references to “sludge banks” and “blood slime” evoke a seabed-scape characterized by slimy, grotesque, even gothic alterity.

This is one idea of the bottom of the bay. A somewhat different, and rather more august, sensibility arrives from Aboriginal Australian tradition. N’Arwee’t Carolyn Briggs is a senior elder of the Boonwurrung (or Bunurong) people, whose country includes the central and eastern shores of Port Phillip Bay. More accurately, Boonwurrung country encompasses those shores and a large part of the bay itself, which is known in Boonwurrung language as Nairm. Nairm refers to a modern-day body of water, of course, but in Aboriginal knowledge it also evokes periods of the past when what is now a bay was a good deal less wet. As Briggs writes, Boonwurrung people share cultural memories of a time when the place that Rowedota allani now calls home was “a large flat grassy plain” where Aboriginal people hunted, gathered seafood, and cultivated edible plants. Across that plain—now, the seafloor—wended the river Birrarung, en route to the sea (2010, 9).

The Birrarung is known in settler Australian parlance as the Yarra River. Its unofficial laureate must be the polymathic Melbournian Aboriginal writer Tony Birch. As Birch points out, Boonwurrung and other local people have for hundreds of years been telling outsiders “of an older time when the bay did not exist at all, when what had become a seabed was open country” (2019, 135). Where the modern river spills into the bay, southwest of central Melbourne, Birch perceives “the old river” carrying along its ancestral, and now benthic, route: “a repository of story and knowledge, flourishing in deep time.” One of the obligations this implies, for Birch, is to “consider country itself to be a living archive, a repository of memory holding both the narratives of the past and the knowledge we require to live with and protect country today” (2019, 133).

Henry L. Cox, surveyor, Hobson Bay and River Yarra, 1864, State Library Victoria

Boonwurrung people and their westerly neighbors, the Wadawurrung (or Wathaurong), are understood to have been living on, next to, and with Nairm (in Wadawurrung, “Nerm”) for more than 40,000 years (Ryan et al. 2022, 32). Around the middle of the twentieth century, settler Australian science articulated a theory of the bay’s history which harmonized with Aboriginal knowledge. Scientific tradition now holds that what had been open country started becoming submerged with the end of the last Ice Age, about ten thousand years ago. Far from sudden, the ensuing inundation unfurled over the course of millennia. Nor, for that matter, was it a simple matter of unidirectional flow. Between about three thousand and one thousand years ago, sand accumulated in great quantities at the mouth of the bay, leading to another period of relative dryness (Norris 2021, 60). A millennium is, for many of us, an exceedingly long time. But it is just about accessible to historical consciousness—and this means that even for those of us who lack a connection to Aboriginal cultural memory, it is sort of possible to imagine a time when the bottom of the bay was mostly unwet.

In times long-ago and not-so-very-long-ago, that is, the places that now make up the seafloor of Port Phillip Bay were more or less terrestrial. Emphasizing this, today, may seem a strange way to get us thinking about the bottom of the bay. But maybe such strangeness is just the place to begin. To approach Port Phillip Bay and its seabed is to approach entities that have been phenomenally changeable, on historical as well as geological timescales. As a result, our intuitive sense of what they are in the present is haunted, to a stronger-than-usual degree, by our awareness of what they have been and may be. How, then, to apprehend this seabed? As basically land that happens to have been recently (and perhaps temporarily) submerged? Or do Rowedota allani and its benthic companions suggest a realm that is unequivocally marine—and that is continuous not so much with dry ground as with the beds of Bass Strait, the Indian Ocean, the Tasman Sea, and on and on, into the deep?

These questions reflect a few of the particular complexities that the Port Phillip Bay seabed claims upon us. At the same time, they reflect its wide promise as a site for critical thinking.

Neither straightforwardly oceanic nor simply urban, brilliantly historied with human memory but abundantly inhuman, Port Phillip Bay’s splendid idiosyncrasies put our fixed categories to the test.

By recognizing this, we might cultivate more accurate ways of defining and understanding the bay and its floor as objects of knowledge. This is a significant ambition. At least as important, however, is the work of accepting Port Phillip Bay’s lively challenges for our own ingrained habits of observation, imagination, and intellection. This work is bound to be uncertain, even awkward—but it may also hold the promise of fuller (if never complete), better (if never perfect) relations with the places and lives that form the subsurface of our home waters. And such relations may furnish a few hints, in turn, of how the bottom of this bay helps us hail, and learn from, other floors, nearer- and further-flung, present, past, and yet to come.

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For this project, our collective has been thinking, writing, picturing, and—not least of all—feeling our ways toward the bottom of the bay. We came together for the first time in early 2025. Over the course of the proceeding year, we convened two field trips “to” the PPB seafloor (of which more shortly) and exchanged a host of images, reflections, stray notions, and (ultimately) contributions to this “handbook.” The point, throughout, was to speculate about, experiment with, and trouble over the question of what it has meant, and could mean, to approach the bay-bottom. We neither arrived at nor emerged from this task with a unitary point of view. We are practitioners of literary studies, architecture, watercolor, poetry, anthropology, and cultural studies. We are educators, researchers, editors, writers, and artists. And so on, and so on: we carry our entangled professional and personal selves to this collaboration, in order not to resolve them into a single voice but to hold their responsive varieties in energetic suspension.

Working with—as opposed to through or past—numerous perspectives is an ethos we draw, in part, from the environmental humanities, a “matrix” of practices “that seeks,” to quote the comparative literature scholar Ursula Heise, “to connect environmentally oriented research across a variety of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences” (2017, 294). Inevitably (if perhaps belatedly), many practitioners of the environmental humanities have come to concern themselves with oceans and the undersea, realms which sometimes confront conventional humanistic knowledges with unusual, and unusually compelling, difficulties. “Oceanic studies,” “blue humanities,” “critical ocean studies,” and “submarine turns” are a few names for these developments (Blum 2010; DeLoughrey 2017; Mentz 2024; Quigley 2023). Very recently, an array of marine-oriented projects in the environmental humanities has focused explicitly on Earth’s ocean floors. Inspired, not least of all, by the apparently growing likelihood that some of those floors will soon become the objects of industrial-scale natural resource extraction, a “critical seabed studies” is rapidly taking shape across, at the intersections of, and well beyond a range of humanities and social science disciplines (Quigley et al. 2023).

Apparatus used in collecting samples of bottom organisms, NOAA Historical Fisheries Collection

For some very good reasons, critical seabed studies has frequently centered its attention on the “International Seabed Area” (“the Area,” for short), a legal term drawing together all the benthic places that lie “beyond the limits of national jurisdiction” (Ranganathan 2019). Such places can be wildly abstracted from everyday social and cultural attention, and therefore especially susceptible to exploitation. For this project, however, our collective has sought to supplement globe-spanning conceptions of the seabed with concerted attention to specific and (for us) local floors.

What difference could it make, we ask, to direct our benthic inquiries toward nearshore waters and neighborly lives?

How does the bottom of the bay deliver the defamiliarizing effects of sea-floor space into our day-to-day environments? How, conversely, might our connections to Port Phillip Bay’s seabed, witting or unwitting, strike us as invitations to intimacy with remoter shelves and plains?

As these questions are meant to imply, one of our hypotheses is that for all the marvelous work that is being done to direct humanities (among other) practices toward marine spaces, including seabeds, there remains a great deal to be done to reckon with the kind of liminal zone that is Port Phillip Bay. Not-land (at least, not for now!), but not-quite-sea; partly a marine park, and partly a working port; formed by slow (and not-so-slow) hydrographic processes, and by sudden (and not-so-sudden) infrastructural projects; clearly “natural,” and manifestly “artificial.” If the “littoral zone” is, in the words of the environmental humanities scholar Hannah Freed-Thall, “an undertheorized space,” Port Phillip Bay may be distinctly well-suited to furnish incitements for thought (2021, 131). We have been eager to discover the affordances of our practices for knowing realms that have tended to be objects of strictly scientific concern, when the disciplines of Western academia have bothered to address them at all. But less than simply directing our habits of mind at novel objects, our ambition has been to approach the bottom of the bay in a spirit of openness to all the ways it would disturb our conventions—as well as to all the things it would leave continuously unsaid.

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Some of us are waders, swimmers, snorkelers, and divers with a bit of firsthand experience of the Port Phillip Bay seabed. But this work has not (yet) taken us underwater together. Our two field trips were designed, instead, to bring us into forms of mediated contact with the bay-bottom—and to prompt us to reflect on the numerous ways the bay-bottom is known. For our first excursion, we caught a ferry from Melbourne, where we work and live, to Portarlington, a town on the Bellarine Peninsula famed for mussel cultivation. From there we drove to Queenscliff, near one of the bay’s heads (where it meets Bass Strait), for time in the aquarium—including the touch tanks—of the Marine and Freshwater Discovery Centre, an arm of the Victorian Fisheries Authority tasked with delivering educational programs to the public, especially schoolchildren.

Claire Mosley, touch tank, Marine and Freshwater Discovery Centre, Queenscliff

We were also in Queenscliff to embark upon a “marine biology cruise” upon the waters of the bay. A-shipboard, we motored over to Pope’s Eye, an unfinished nineteenth-century colonial fortification which is mostly known nowadays for good snorkeling and diving, as well as for a growing population of resident Australian fur seals and a famous colony of Australasian gannets. Off Swan Island, we visited the ruins of HMS J3, a British submarine built for surface speed, commissioned in 1916, and scuttled in the bay in 1926. Touring these far southern reaches of Port Phillip Bay, we dragged behind us an epibenthic sledge, which our guides emptied into specimen bins aboard the boat. We thus encountered, and sorted, a variety of lives, from ascidians to sponge crabs. Some of us felt not entirely comfortable with dredging these creatures up from their homes, however attractively they may have presented themselves to our senses.

Weeks later, we gathered in the inner-city Melbournian neighborhood of Abbotsford for a day at the Artefact Research Centre—“The Lab”—of Heritage Victoria, the state body tasked with managing heritage places, archaeological sites, and so forth. There we encountered the bottom of the bay in the form of wreckage. A multitudinous variety of ruins—of ships, airplanes, coastal infrastructure, etc.—have co-constituted, and still co-constitute, Port Phillip Bay’s seafloor. All this detritus is inflected, sometimes subtly and sometimes spectacularly, by its time at depth. Lingering with Heritage Victoria’s voluminous collections of so-called maritime heritage, therefore, we asked how the Lab hosted a crowd of benthic ecofacts as much as, if not more than, anthropogenic artefacts. Better still: the materials we encountered at the Lab, in company with Heritage Victoria’s expert, curious, and collegial crew, were signs of unravellable intrication among the human and the inhuman, the historical and the environmental, the natural and the artificial, and so on.

These entanglements are metonymic of the more broadly natural-cultural character of the bottom of the bay.

The Port of Melbourne is the most highly trafficked container port in Australia (Fyfe 2005, 11). Since the nineteenth century, colonists have been undertaking large-scale projects to deepen sections of Port Phillip Bay, which as mentioned previously is for the most part fairly shallow. The most recent, and perhaps most spectacular, of these projects was the Port Phillip Bay Channel Deepening Project, completed in 2009. It entailed “removing,” in the words of one former Minister of Planning, “500,000 cubic metres of rock from the Port Phillip Heads”; “dredging and disposing…over 1.7 million cubic metres of Yarra sediments”; and “dredging…30 million cubic metres of sediment, sand, and clay” (Hulls 2005). These numbers are basically impossible to fathom—but in case it helps, imagine a standard (25-liter) topsoil bag, emptied and refilled with benthic matter (very much including benthic life). Shifting thirty million cubic meters of such matter would require the use of 1.2 billion bags.

What are we to make, to borrow a resonant phrase from the journalist Melissa Fyfe, of the “surface the dredger leaves behind”? (2005, 11) Is it useful to call that surface a seafloor? This sense of an environment thoroughly transformed is rendered even more acute by a consideration of Port Phillip Bay’s biological history. “One of the most invaded marine ecosystems in the world” is the phrase the marine biologist Maria Byrne and the marine invertebrate curator Tim O’Hara have employed to characterize the bay (2017, 126). Besides settler humans, the most notorious of Port Phillip Bay’s interlopers is arguably the Northern Pacific seastar (Asterias amurensis), which is supposed to have made its way first from Japan to Tasmania, in the ballast water of ships, and then across Bass Strait to Victoria. In 2001, just six years after individuals were first reported in Port Phillip Bay, researchers estimated that North Pacific seastar “biomass” there was equivalent to half that of all demersal (bottom-dwelling) fish. Local species who found themselves in competition with the Northern Pacific seastar for food, such as eagle rays, globe fish, and the Eastern Shovelnose Stingaree, are thought to have declined as a result (Byrne and O’Hara 2017, 114-15). Besides the Northern Pacific seastar, Japanese Kelp (Undaria pinnatifida) and the European Fanworm (Sabella spallanzanii) are other introduced species understood to have the potential to pose substantial risks to local algal and benthic communities (Parks Victoria 2020, 58,60).

Mark Norman, Northern Pacific Seastars, Asterias amurensis, feeding on mussels, Museums Victoria

Of course, it is—or ought to be—impossible to mention biological “invasions” in Port Phillip Bay without continuing to bear in mind the colonial histories, violences, and legacies borne by the bay-bottom. After all, the movements of a so-called invader such as the Northern Pacific Seastar, having crossed Bass Strait, can seem a striking, unsettling, trans-species iteration of the arrival of the human “overstraiters” who settled Port Phillip from (what was then) Van Diemen’s Land in the 1830s (Measham 2014, 56). As this collection attests, no venture along, upon, or beneath Port Phillip Bay’s waters floats free of the settler-colonial relations, and disrelations, that do so much to form the substrates of our lives. This is vividly true of such ventures as ours, which directly engage the practices, epistemologies, and—it must be said—ideologies of Western scientific knowledge and state heritage. Not for a moment do we mean to imply that the humanities—or our works, here and elsewhere—are unburdened by similar baggage. But we have intended that our impressions reflect a spirit that is earnestly curious but does not go in search of totalizing revelation. We mean, in other words, to contribute to the sort of benthic “literacy” that would “go deep while relinquishing claims to certain scrutiny or confident inscription” (Quigley et al. 2026).

What you are reading is therefore a handbook of and for the unresolved. It contains texts and images which articulate some views of our encounters with the bottom of the bay. In keeping, loosely, with the genre of the handbook, we have focused our writings and images upon a motley selection of things. “Thing” is a strange and controversial word that I am invoking as a term which gathers “natural bodies”—including human bodies—together with “technological artifacts,” and which spurs an “openness” to the “material vitality” of them all (Bennett 2010, x, xiii). In the context of this handbook, “things” serves, helpfully and imperfectly, to designate some (present and former) occupants of the Port Phillip Bay seafloor without organizing them into categories. The point is not that categorizing them would be wrong; this handbook is after all doing just that, in its own way. The point, instead, is to find what we can learn about the bottom of Port Phillip Bay, as a realm of places and as a network of heterogeneous relations, by descending just so far as to feel below the surface and ask: what is here?

Our things bear the names abalone, ascidian, copper skimmer tool, encrusted bottle, epibenthic sledge, Pope’s Eye, sand plain, and sponge crab. We met them, along with many, many other things, in the course of our field trips. We offer our accounts of them to you and—we would like to think—to the bottom of the bay, as some tokens of our beginning to learn its places and relations together. The texts that make up our handbook have been individually composed, and the images come from yet another hand. While our words have been edited, and our pictures commissioned, these works do not aspire to uniformity of style or method. We hope that, in their heterogeneity, you will find them useful. We would love, above all, to hear how they have been, or might be, of use to you—and we would be thrilled to receive word, image, or other trace of your own ways of thinking, feeling, making, and living with the seafloor of Port Phillip Bay.

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Another of the most prolific invertebrate occupants of Port Phillip Bay is the heart urchin Echinocardium cordatum. It lives not on the seafloor but slightly underneath it—and as it burrows and carries on its feeding, it plays a significant role in recycling nutrients, as well as in “bioturbating” sediments (Byrne and O’Hara 2017, 443). Bioturbation is a scientific term describing the way some animals and plants have a mixing effect on sediments or soils through burrowing, feeding, or otherhow. As they carry on their ways of life, writes the historian Jonathan Galka, bioturbators “mix sediment layers, confounding stratigraphy and generating sedimentary unconformities—material-semiotic breaks in geological time” (2025, 5).

Thanks to heart urchins and untold others, the Port Phillip seabed is not static—with regard to matter, time, meaning, or otherwise—but almost indescribably lively.

It has animated this handbook, which aims to convey a little of its dynamism to you. Whether we have managed this or not, we find it to be some odd, but not trivial, comfort to know that as you read this, Echinocardium cordatum and Rowedota allani go on living off the detritus that falls to the bottom of the bay.

References:

Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press.

Birch, Tony. 2019. “Walking and Being.” Meanjin 78 (4): 130-137.

Blum, Hester. 2010. “The Prospect of Oceanic Studies.” PMLA 125 (3): 670-77.

Briggs, Carolyn. 2010. “Boonwurrung: The Filling of the Bay – The Time of Chaos.” In Indigenous Creation Stories of the Kulin Nation. Arts Victoria.

Byrne, Maria and Timothy D. O’Hara, editors. 2017. Australian Echinoderms: Biology, Ecology and Evolution. CSIRO Publishing and Australian Biological Resources Study.

DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. 2017. “Submarine Futures of the Anthropocene.” Comparative Literature 69 (1): 32-44.

Freed-Thall, Hannah. 2021. “Beaches and Ports.” Comparative Literature 73 (2): 131-49.

Fyfe, Melissa. 2005. “Tales from the deep.” The Age, April 1.

Galka, Jonathan M. 2025. “‘The nodules are alive and well at the sea floor’: deep ocean minerals, invertebrate traces, and multispecies histories of abyssal environments.” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 47 (18): 1-25.

Heise, Ursula K. “Comparative literature and the environmental humanities.” In Futures of Comparative Literature: ACLA State of the Discipline Report, edited by Ursula K. Heise. Routledge.

Hulls, Rob. 2005. “Statement by the Minister for Planning: Current status of assessment process under the Environment Effects Act 1978 for the proposed Port Phillip Bay Channel Deepening Project.” Victoria State Government.

Joshua, E. C. 1912. “On a new Holothurian of the Genus Taeniogyrus found in Port Phillip Bay.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria 25 (1): 79-81.

Joshua, E. C. 1914. “Victorian Holothuroidea, with descriptions of new species.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria 27 (1) (1914): 1-11.

Mackenzie, Melanie. 2020. “Rowedota allani (Joshua, 1912), Sea Cucumber.” Museums Victoria Collections. https://collections.museumsvictoria.com.au/species/16919.

Measham, Fatima. 2014. “No Shit.” Meanjin 73 (2): 50-58.

Mentz, Steve. 2024. An Introduction to the Blue Humanities. Routledge.

Norris, Jack. 2021. “The Naming of the Yarra River as an Act of Colonialism.” Agora 56 (3): 59-67.

Parks Victoria. 2020. Port Phillip Heads Marine National Park Identification Booklet. Parks Victoria.

Quigley, Killian. 2023. “Concretion: Submarine Growths and Imperial Wrecks.” Critical Times 6 (3): 517-39.

Quigley, Killian, Charne Lavery, and Laurence Publicover. 2023. “A Call For Humanities at the Seabed.” Edge Effects, August 30. https://edgeeffects.net/seabed-humanities/.

Quigley, Killian, Laurence Publicover, Charne Lavery, Giulia Champion, Fiona Middleton, Rachael Squire, Pandora Syperek, and Jol Thoms. 2026. “Glossing Seabeds: Toward Benthic Literacies.” Environmental Humanities 18 (3): in press.

Ranganathan, Surabhi. 2019. “Ocean Floor Grab: International Law and the Making of an Extractive Imaginary.” The European Journal of International Law 30 (2): 573-600.

Ryan, Susan, David S. Jones, Murray Herron, and Phillip Roös. 2022. “Wadawurrung Dja: The Ethnography and Biogeography of Pre-Colonization Wadawurrung Country in a Digital Realm.” In The Emerging Role of Geomedia in the Environmental Humanities, edited by Mark Terry and Michael Hewson. Lexington.

Please credit as:

Quigley, Killian. 2026. “Approaching the Bottom of the Bay.” Introduction to The Bottom of the Bay, edited by Killian Quigley. http://thebottomofthebay.com.