Underground Adventures
2010; Volume: 12; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/hah.2010.0007
ISSN1839-3314
Autores Tópico(s)Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation
Resumo134 Health & History, 2010. 12/2 Exhibition Review Underground Adventures Tank Stream Tour Historic Houses Trust, Sydney www.hht.net.au Visited 18 April 2010. Le Musée des Égouts (Paris Sewer Museum) Opposite 93, Quai d’Orsay, Paris 75007; Metro station AlmaMarceau www.paris.fr Visited 27 September 2010. there’s a world going on underground - Tom Waits (Beautiful Maladies album) Modern museologists know that exhibition visitors are not empty vessels waiting to be filled up with information. Visitors bring with them their own lifetime of experience, and what they take away from an exhibition is highly coloured by their present mood and their prior interests and knowledge. Often they ignore a large part of the carefully researched text and audio-visual material and instead pore over a single picture that has captured their attention or some quirky juxtaposition of objects that only they find amusing. I am no different to other visitors in this respect even though I worked in a museum for many years. In fact, it is an insiders’ joke that curators don’t read other curators’ labels. I am now a student of pavements and the decorations upon them, obsessively photographing everything from chalked inscriptions to cast-iron manhole covers. It was with this idiosyncratic approach to the world that I organised to take myself on two excursions that would give a reverse view of the streets—a tour of Sydney’s underground Tank Stream, and a visit to the Paris Sewer Museum. Both experiences were fascinating but both had their disappointments. Beneath most city streets lie what my Paris Sewers brochure calls ‘a city beneath the city’ where people work on a busy network Health & History ● 12/2 ● 2010 135 of communication, power, and water utilities. Manhole covers are the doorways to this city and the durability of cast iron means that the history of many utilities can still be read from the embossing upon them. In Australia, for instance, Telstra evolved from Telecom which in turned evolved from PMG (the Post Master General’s Department), and there are places where nests of manhole covers in the footpath carry the logos of all three organisations. Similarly the lettering MWS&DB reminds us that Sydney Water was formerly called the Metropolitan Water, Sewerage and Drainage Board, but it was to catch a glimpse of manhole covers from below that I chose to join other curious visitors on my two underground adventures. The Tank Stream is intrinsic to the history of Sydney. It was the fresh water running in this wide-mouthed rivulet that led Captain Philip to choose the spot on the harbour’s shore where the First Fleet would disembark, establishing the encampment that would become Sydney Town. Although its flow was unreliable the stream was the colony’s primary source of drinking water for forty years. By the 1820s, however, it was so polluted that it was judged unfit for consumption and it was superseded as a source of domestic water by Lachlan Swamp, located on the present site of Centennial Park. As Sydney continued to develop the Tank Stream became an open drain and sections of it were variously diverted, channelled, enclosed in pipes, or incorporated into an oviform sewer. In the 1930s a new sewerage system was constructed and the Tank Stream, by now totally underground, reverted to carrying stormwater only, a function that it retains to this day. For the general public, entry to this unseen waterway is a matter of luck. Tours are arranged by the Historic Houses Trust on just two days of the year, once in April and again in November. The demand is so great that a ballot is conducted for tickets. This year my number came up and on a Sunday afternoon at our allocated time my companion and I arrived at a laneway in the Central Business District, the location of which is revealed only to ballot-winners. Our group was taken through a door and down narrow stairs to an anteroom where we were kitted out in gumboots, safety harnesses, disposable hair covers and miners’ helmets with lights. A video on the history of the Tank Stream played as we struggled with our footwear. Then...
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