Voices from the Southern Ocean

Voices from the Southern Ocean is a Living Data project for children. Animations, installations, performances and picture books are being made to give voice to ocean creatures and their relatives on land.

Fish, Snake, Bird, Whale, Krill and Plant embark on an expedition from Antarctica to Australia. They seek knowledge of how they relate, and of how they co-evolved through time and space with natural cycles of global climate changes driven by Antarctic sea ice.

Whale leads the way and narrates a journey from the sea and then onto land, as in the Yuin peoples’ Whale Dreaming story. That journey reflects how Western scientists understand the evolution of the whale: The whale came from the sea, evolved on land into an almost wolf-like organism and eventually became amphibious and went back into the ocean to become the whales we see today. All mammals evolved from the ocean to be air-breathing organisms. Whales then adapted to marine life.

This blog is part of an animated interactive interface being made for children to experience and respond to stories told by the creatures.

Workshops and travelling shows are key to developing the stories and for assessing their impacts. The project has begun with meetings this year at the Australian Antarctic Division and University of Technology Sydney, and will culminate in 2022 to coincide with publication and announcement of the International Panel of Climate Change (IPPC) Report.

As project lead I acknowledge the risk that we will make mistakes in the story telling and so we are guided by Indigenous knowledge holders and Western scientists. And, dear reader, we welcome your responses as we go.

Algae, Krill, Fish, Snake, Bird and Whale are Categories in this Blog.

Note to co-creators of this online journal: When posts are written in ‘Document’ mode, the categories can be selected to identify your content. Posts linked to categories are visualised in the animated interactive ‘Chronoven‘ interface to this blog.