Open Space Weathering

Abstract

Pine Avenue is a small side street in the Sydney suburb of Earlwood. It terminates abruptly at the Cooks River, a tidal estuary that defines the contours of Sydney's inner south-west and reifies colonial exploration. While engineered from asphalt, Pine Avenue is also shaped by waters both slow and spectacular: every King Tide, the road floods with brackish water seeping up from underground; during storm surges, an excess of storm water from neighbouring areas can cause the Cooks to breach its banks, pouring itself out onto Pine. Due to the creep of the tide or the inundation of storm water, city-planning regulations dictate that any house constructed on Pine Avenue must match the elevation of the runway at Kingsford Smith Airport, some two kilometres to the east. In this, the tiny thoroughfare becomes a repetition of that larger thoroughfare–one that gives Sydney access to globalisation, mobility and myriad fossil-fuelled desires, and one that, like the microcosm of Pine Avenue, is also built on stolen indigenous land and engineered to mute the whims of the water (Figure 1).