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Swash Oscillations - Coastal Readings from a TranAustralian Emailbook.
Richard Read, School of Architecture and Fine Arts, The University of Western Australia
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Extracts from the Western side of an extended electronic correspondence between Perth academic Richard Read and Sydney-based public artist Nola Farman which derives from interactive observations and imaginings of their respective swimming beaches at Port Beach, Fremantle, and Clovelly Bay, N.S.W. Sometimes in the faction style of techno-parody, Farman's reportage of a daily Truman's Show of elderly swimmers at the Clovelly end prompts Read constantly to project the cultural baggage he has brought with him from the industrial Midlands of England onto the marine events around him, yet his pathetic fallacies are qualified increasingly by a dawning recognition that the beachface is in a constant stage of adjustment to the incident wave energy through the diurnal seap-breeze cycle alternative between dissipative and reflective morphodynamic regimes consistent with the impact of a medium-sized storm on the beachface. (The scientific language with which the proposal ends is conned from oceanographical articles on the beaches in my area. The fact is that my readings from this correspondence about marine experience are, in contrast to my scholarly work, highly subjective and 'imaginative'.)
