© 2018 EQUINOX PUBLISHING LTD Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 5.1 (2018) 53–65 ISSN (print) 2051-3429 (online) 2051-3437 https://doi.org/10.1558/jca.33282 53 Time on the Waterline RESEARCH ARTICLE Time on the Waterline: Coastal Reclamations and Seawalls in Sydney and Japan n Denis Byrne Western Sydney University, Australia d.byrne@westernsydney.edu.au Abstract Coastal reclamations may represent humanity’s overreaching lust for land, but from where I stand in 2015 on the beach below the reclamation at Elizabeth Bay on Sydney Harbour, gazing at the sandstone seawall, what compels my attention is the way this reclamation is giving up its substance to the sea. As the geological time of the wall engages with the rhythmic time of the sea, my own geosubjectivity comes momentarily into view. Recol- lection of the reclamation park of the 1980s as a gay cruising site sparks a consideration of how open minds and touching bodies in that decade form a background conducive to closer human–nonhuman relations in the present decade. Finally, moving to the Seto Inland Sea, Japan, to refect on the time of concrete, I examine the historical move from stone to concrete as the favoured material for seawall construction. On the edge of Sydney Harbour, not far from the nightclubs of Kings Cross and the Garden Island naval dockyard, is a pocket-handkerchief park upon whose half-acre of lawn people sunbathe in summertime, just as I did in 1980. The lawn’s green surface parallels that of the salty liquid surface of the harbour which lies a metre or two below it, depending on the state of the tide. As we move through the twenty-frst century, the relative position of that liquid surface will also depend on the extent to which the body of the sea has been swollen by the effects of global warming. This new, larger sea is a product of human Keywords: Anthropocene; concrete; queer ecology; seawalls; sea-level rise