Opinion 18: Excavating the Flood

Architecture, Archeology, and Psychogeographies in Australia

By Xavier Vasco

Figure 1. R. McGeehan, Train passing through Flood Waters, South Yarra, 1907, State Library of Victoria.

In 1870, the small colony that had established itself along the banks of the Yarra River began rerouting, dredging, draining, and canalising its central waterway and tributaries. The settlement had been inappropriately sited atop a low-lying “swamp”1, and being far too close to the riverbank left the township vulnerable to interminable flooding. The fluctuations of the surrounding catchment were well known to the Woi Wurrung and Boon Wurrung peoples, forming a recurring backdrop for storytelling2 and the seasonal gathering of resources, such as the migration of mature eels into its brackish estuary.3 For the settlers, the furore of these watery events regularly submerged parts of the city and its agricultural plains, furloughing any structures or inhabitants in its spill. Upstream, waste from its warren of tanneries, slaughterhouses, woolscourers, iron and lead works—along with human sewage channelled through open drains—polluted the river, causing one visitor in 1890 to describe the Yarra as “the filthiest piece of water I have ever had the misfortune to be afloat on.”4 This defilement transformed the river into a collective cloaca, and when it overflowed, bathed the city in its own excremental mass.

Figure 2. Wilbraham Frederick Evelyn Liardet, The Flood of 1849, 1875, State Library of Victoria.

Periodic flooding reverted the city into a fleeting wetland, enacting what Rod Giblett describes as a process of displacement and transformation constitutive of a psychoanalytic return. In Cities and Wetlands, Giblett introduces the concept of the aquaterrapolis to describe places where the control of wetlands operates as a violent act of psycho-geo-somatic repression. For Giblett, the traces of repression carry a latent potentiality, “always remaining to be reactivated”5 recalling Freud’s notion of the unconscious as a container of repressed desires, fears and memories that can influence our behavior beneath our avowed sense of self. In an aquaterrapolis, reactivation occurs in moments of return occurring physically, through flooding or contamination disasters, as well as figuratively, through thematic or symbolic imagery, as in wetland cities like New York or London that exhibit a pathological “fascination with, and the horror of, the dark underside of the sewers and slums.”6 In the case of London, urban poverty has been continually mediated through a hydraulic language of filth, mud, and rot, figuring it as a kind of scatological swamp. Poverty itself is here reconceived in terms of the gastrointestinal, as a necessary discharge of capital, the streets transformed into literal sewers carrying human waste. These physical, psychic, and political histories constitute the city’s repressed allegorical underworld, where its very sine qua non becomes a fraught entanglement of settlement and control.

The post-colonial spatial history of Australia’s wetlands embodies a complex assemblage of areal associations, whose scenescape of disfiguration and exploitation has generated profound spiritual and corporeal unrest. The perennial landscape into which the colonists invaded was already a macabre cartography: a geographical inferno of floods, droughts, sandstorms, and bushfires, which could erase entire territories while simultaneously promoting regeneration, enacting destruction and creation with equal caprice. Against this backdrop, the expansion of agricultural farming introduced a new form of perversion, particularly on the region’s delicate hydro-ecologies. Pastoralists treating wetlands as drovers’ run, which  involved the moving of livestock by ploughing through existing agricultural systems, evinced the settler’s gaze of the land as an unsettled place.

Figure 3. Portion of plan showing Caulfield allotments and drovers run. Surveyor General’s Department, Caulfield Portions, 1854, Public Records Office Victoria.

The material destruction of wet-landscapes through urbanisation is neither entirely cumulative nor entirely erasing. Drawing on the notion of the palimpsest, Mike Crang argues that the temporal changes of landscapes do not completely overwrite one another, but instead accumulate as a “sum of erasures, accretion, anomalies and radiancies”, producing what he terms an underlying “symbolic landscape”.7 In the colonial city, as the surrounding terrain was formally surveyed and subdivided, these new inscriptions did not entirely erase the residual geographies that preceded them. The visible tensions between different spatial overwritings are most clearly captured in the 1854 plan of Caulfield North, where Crown allotments are superimposed onto the fading traces of stock trails, underscoring persistent conflicts over land, memory, and control. 

The repression of spatial histories in Australia was its pathological original sin, beginning with the First Fleet’s arrival and the declaration of the continent as unoccupied, and resurfacing in ecological control. These repressions leave persistent traces, what Aldo Rossi calls “a past we are still experiencing”,8 which manifest in the city’s morphology. Not only in its architecture and monuments, but also in the spatial vectors that shape its collectively imagined worlds: its fantasies and fears, its heroes and monsters. In this context, archaeology can be interpreted as an evaluative method analogous to psychoanalysis, tracing symptoms back to their repressed origins by excavating the buried strata from which the surface has emerged. Suzanne C. Bernfeld underscores this parallel, exploring Freud’s frequent use of archaeological analogy in describing the process of psychoanalysis, such as excavation, fragmentation, burial, preservation, and erosion.9 In doing so, Freud brought the act of archaeological discovery into equivalence with the recovery of repressed memory.

Figure 4. Piranesi’s fictional map of ancient Rome. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Ichnographia Campi Martii antiquae urbis, 1762, Wikimedia.

Freud’s most explicit transgression into an archaeological vision of the psyche emerges in his description of a fantastical Rome, where all previous layers of development have been preserved. Freud directly compares the psychic permanence of the unconscious to a Rome:

in which nothing once constructed had perished and all the earliest stages of development had survived alongside the latest... On the Piazza of the Pantheon we should find not only the Pantheon of today as bequeathed to us by Hadrian but on the same site also Agrippa’s original edifice. And the observer would need merely to shift the focus of his eyes perhaps or change his position, in order to call up a view of either the one or the other.10

Freud’s image of Rome presents an impossible actuality, akin to Piranesi’s Ichnographia, which offers a fictional cartography of the city’s classical past. Published in 1762, the Ichnographia presents a speculative image of Rome as a streetless single navigable plain of isolated monuments in made-up constructions. The map freely abandons historical accuracy, but in doing so generates a new topology, where time unfolds as a seamless and simultaneous history in the form of an archaeological phantasmagoria. The notion of multiple pasts existing together, is in a sense, manifested in Australia’s colonial landscape, where space is figured not as conquered terrain but as an unstable palimpsest of fragile ecological, cultural and historical tensions. 

Underlying Australia is a stratum of psychogeographies, which, having been repressed by political, economic, or social exigencies, find ways to resurface. Sometimes this has occurred violently, as in floods. Other times, it emerges thematically, as in Gerry Turcotte’s explorations of the Gothic mode in antipodean literature, which speaks to a sense of corporeal perversion articulated through anxieties related to its geological isolation, cultural deracination, and the grotesque strangeness of its fauna.11 Archaeological methodologies, interpreted through a psychoanalytic lens, offer potential for reconciliation through the literal act of resurfacing material. The archeological act thus constitutes a powerful therapeutic act, making us cognisant of this repressed content and compelling us to confront it by asking us to live in-common with it. This has been articulated in approaches such as Ida Sandström’s advocacy for a practice of “minor urbanism”, which envisions a radical engagement with conflict by “placing a number of different experiences side by side”, resisting the assimilatory tendencies of shared spaces.12 These speculative methodologies introduce discursive architectural strategies that reframe space—not as a linear record of time, but as a field of synchronic play of its pasts, present and futures. In turn, this temporal reframing may facilitate more collective enunciations, human and non-human, by excavating the repressed.

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Citations:

1. James Fleming and Charlse Grimes, Port Phillip, Department of Lands and Survey, 1803.

2. “Aboriginal Creation Stories of Victoria,” Victorian Collections, accessed October 5, 2025, https://victoriancollections.net.au/stories/nyernila---listen-continuously-aboriginal-creation-sto/metropolitan-and-central-victoria.

3. “First Peoples and the Yarra,” Old Treasury Building, n.d., accessed October 5, 2025, https://www.oldtreasurybuilding.org.au/yarra/first-peoples-and-the-yarra/.

4. Karen White and Hannah Pexton, Imagine the Yarra: How Community, Legislation and Land Use Planning Is Shaping the Future of an Iconic Waterway, 2018, 2.

5. Rod Giblett, Cities and Wetlands: The Return of the Repressed in Nature and Culture (Bloomsbury, 2016), 5.

6. Giblett, Cities and Wetlands: The Return of the Repressed in Nature and Culture, 6.

7. Mike Crang, Cultural Geography, Routledge Contemporary Human Geography Series (Routledge, 1998), 22.

8. Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (MIT Press, 1982), 59.

9. Suzanne Cassirer Bernfeld, “Freud and Archeology,” American Imago 8, no. 2 (1951): 107–28.

10. Bernfeld, “Freud and Archeology,” 119.

11. Gerry Turcotte, Australian Gothic, University of Wollongong, January 1, 1998, https://ro.uow.edu.au/articles/chapter/Australian_Gothic/27839484/1.

12. Ida Sandström, Towards a Minor Urbanism: Thinking Community without Unity in Recent Makings of Public Space (The Department of Architecture and Built Environment, Lund University, 2019), 263.

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Xavier Vasco is an Australian architectural graduate based in Melbourne, holding a Master of Architecture and a Master of Urban and Cultural Heritage from the University of Melbourne. His work specialises in neoclassical geometric systems and digital rendering, while occasionally writing on the intersections of architecture and philosophy. In 2023 he founded Archiology, a heritage and design collective exploring new technologies to capture, analyse, and communicate architectural environments. He is the current recipient of the 2025 Rome Scholarship in Architecture at the British School at Rome, where he is in residency preparing a cartographic study on the use of typography in ancient urban environments.