The Swamposium Reading Group is an initiative of the project Surfacing Urban Wetlands, which is working to visualise connections between watery places in relation to urbanisation.
Each session, we read a piece of scholarship on water and a creative piece (a zine, visual essay, a website or another visual mode).
Our format builds on other reading groups we have been part of such as the Composting Feminism Reading Group, Magnetic Topographies,and the Place, Race and Critical Theory Reading Group.
Join: The Swamposium reading group is open to everyone — readers, writers, researchers, postgrad students, undergrad students, artists, poets, activists, designers. It is especially suited to anyone whose projects or research intersects with urban wetlands or waterways in some way.
We hold monthly reading groups on Wednesday afternoons, 5-7pm at Field Rooms, Sydney.
If you are interested in joining please email holly.oneil@uts.edu.au to receive emails about the readings and upcoming events.
Upcoming Reading Groups
TBC – WALK: ‘Queer As Swamp: Subversion and Submersion
We will be walking with Taylor Coyne and Kirst Willis to think about how swamps and queerness intersect. More details to come…
Past Swamposium Meetings
Swamposium RG 1: February 11th 2026
Swamp City (zine by Monty Hancock)
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Leah M. Gibbs (2009) Water Places: Cultural, Social and More-ThanHuman Geographies of Nature, Scottish Geographical Journal, 125:3-4, 361-369, DOI: 10.1080/14702540903364393
Swamposium Walkshop 8th March 2026
Swamposium RG 2: March 11th 2026
The river ends as the ocean Aunty Rhonda Dixon Grovenor, Astrida Neimanis and Clare Britton, Shanghai Biennale Phrase 2 – An Ecosystem of Alliances, Power Station of Art, Shanghai and along the river in Sydney. Printed in Sydney by Pinch Press, 2020.
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McLean, J., Lonsdale, A., Hammersley, L., O’Gorman, E., & Miller, F. (2018). Shadow waters: Making Australian water cultures visible. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 43(4), 615-629.
Sue Castrique – 22nd April
We read a selection from Sue Castrique’s upcoming as-yet-unpublished book ‘Gumbramorra: Water Place and People’.
Sue Castrique is a writer, researcher and historian who lives in Marrickville. She wrote Under the Colony’s Eye: Gentlemen and Convicts on Cockatoo Island (Anchor Books, 2014) which was awarded the Kay Daniels prize for outstanding original research. She has also written One Small World: The History of the Addison Road Community Centre (2017). In 2019 she was joint winner of the Nature Writing Prize for the essay, On the Margins of the Good Swamp. Sue has extensive experience in writing and script editing historical documentaries.
27th May – Sonic Swamps
Thinking about swamps as sonic spaces! We will be reading and engaging with the work of Mitchell Whitelaw, Skye Wassens, and Adrian Mackenzie, looking at their project, ‘The Sound of Water: Environmental Flows in Nap Nap Swamp’. We will also be reading ‘Can Your Hear the Swamp Sing? A Sonic Walk Through Vienna’s Wetlands’ by Julia Grillmayr, Christina Gruber, and Sophia Rut.
