From 2006 the newly appointed Sullivans Cove Waterfront Authority set up a series of meetings called Conversations in the Cove to be held every four to six weeks as a way of involving the public in the management and development of Sullivans Cove. This was an opportunity to observe some of the actors together, to give some embodiment to ‘the people of Hobart’ and to more generally ‘flesh out a picture of this place’ (after Latour 2005: 185). At these meetings I took the role of a non-participatory observer which meant I did not intend to speak during the meetings, although I would not hesitate to approach people before or after them. The main purpose of attending the meetings was listen, observe and record how in one space various interests came together to discuss what mattered in developing Sullivans Cove.
Transcriptions of the meetings were posted to the Authority website however I took my own notes and my ideal of ‘non participant’ was compromised when I found myself to be quite conspicuous (scribbling pages of notes) among the crowd. At the same time the interest I attracted in this way proved useful in terms of encountering some of the important actors in this study. Consequently my ‘participation rate’ during these meetings was in part determined by my relations with those around me and I moved between various degrees of participation (and see Tedlock 2003: 180) over the course of time.
Some of the speakers were public figures like the editor of The Mercury. Some were known to me through their association with the University, and we learned of each other’s mutual interest through the meeting itself. The meetings were themed chronologically since the first three were dedicated to the historical development of Sullivans Cove as reported through The
155 Mercury, by Tasmanian Indigenous interpreters and according to urban planners.176 These retrospectively set up a register of what has gone before to make Sullivans Cove what it is today in contrast to the following three Conversations that were more like forums for elaborating visions for the future direction of the Cove.177
To the interview and public meeting transcripts and notations, and the field-notes that I had recorded around these, were added things that were already made into texts. Alongside The Mercury, Sunday Tasmanian and Tasmanian Times newspapers, consultations were made with The Sullivans Cove Planning Review (1991); The Sullivans Cove Planning Scheme (1997) and The Hobart Waterfront Urban Design Framework (2004). Other documents like site specific consultancy reports, as well as published histories, civic and promotional material were also important at discrete times in the study. The State Library of Tasmania, Hobart City Council library and Hobart City Council Planning Division, TasPorts and the Sullivans Cove Waterfront Authority along with many of the interview participants
themselves were sources for the documents I consulted. I took many photographs as well as collected postcards and (cheap) art and souvenirs. Archival as well as present day maps were also consulted as important sources for linking discourse, material and people.
What seems natural (enough), but should be noted (I think) was my compulsion to render everything to text. Conversations with people are turned into transcripts and field-notes along with what people say and do at the public meetings. This is natural enough since it makes these all too fleeting spoken words and observations last, where the text acts to make these things durable. On the other hand when I translate a building into text or a photograph I do not necessarily make it more durable while it exists, so much as add another text to its existence and make it more transportable. At the same time those things that are already conveniently made into text like planning schemes, frameworks and newspaper articles where added to those I had textualised myself and then translated back into full-blown actors since they “grasp the things they describe” (Latour 1999: 116).
This translating is evident in the way some of the actors themselves behave. The Mercury for example is a source of information while at the same time it propels the controversy of Zero Davey. The stories it tells involve real things like Zero Davey and this report is then added to the story it takes part in telling. The planning scheme informs of the development of Zero
176
Conversations in the Cove Numbers 1, 2 and 3.
177
156 Davey and is a source of information while it also acts to shape the same development and also the professionals who were interviewed. The professionals informed me about Zero Davey and also took part in its very existence. Before there is a textual laboratory (Chapter Six) there is the technology that translates things into text; that consequently levels the playing field by translating heterogeneous actors, and facilitates the study of things and people together. At the same time without a solid theory of representation, there is also the reverse translation that transfers this action back into people and buildings and also extends to things that are already texts their own right to act. Furthermore actors translate sources where they ‘tell about’ but events into event co-ordinators when they perform the very stories they report. Rather than interpret actors translate and text is one way they do this.
7.5.1
Taking up the gesture and continuing it
178These texts were not analysed thematically or with a view to eliciting underlying meanings. Since the aim was to understand how tourism works and how this involves heterogeneous actors, texts were read for the ‘action’ by which is meant how actors were linked together ‘story-like’ to convey what mattered. As important in other words, was ‘how’ they mattered to each other in the advent of Zero Davey. Each actor was taken at its apparent worth or value as dictated by what it ‘did’. Texts were read as descriptions of how materials interact and organise events starting with but never quite limited to Zero Davey. This meant there was a lack of concern with how people ‘behaved’ or what people ‘intended’ by way of attempting to generate or authenticate an explanation. Keeping the focus on material relations meant ‘how people behaved with’ and ‘what they meant to’ were important questions and these were never then limited to people.179 They included buildings and signs, concrete wharf aprons and fish-punts and the strategy was to avoid reducing them to a ‘symbolic framework’ (Palmer 2005:12), a practice that is common in both tourism and tourism research.
There is a journalistic and tourism apparatus producing endless ‘rumours’ of places, but there is also a theoretical machine that shares a similar will to representation (Hutnyk, 1996 in Boissevain, 2002:9).
178 Taken from Serres (1982/1995).
157 Rather ‘symbolic frameworks’ were reduced to one way in which an object might act and when practices included non-humans or when the written or spoken word included non- humans their competencies, failures, effects or specialisations were added to what they symbolised and taken to be equally real.
The report in The Mercury that strung together Zero Davey, a developer and a planning brief specifying a gateway showed how all of these actors were already there. They were visible, ‘obvious’ and some quite noisy, and they were already associated in relations that started to specify an ordering (of some kind) that was related to tourism (in some way). My energy was not put to making these associations, but in allowing the actors to do this. Instead my work was to describe these associations so that they demonstrated a process of material relations that few have yet to say much about in tourism. This was the basis from which other actors were added, a taking up of the gesture and continuing it. By doing this orderings eventually emerged. The adequacy of explanation existed first among these actors and how they achieved Zero Davey and second in my ability to convey this.
7.6 Investigating controversy where everybody knows everybody
Studies that involve controversy run the risk of creating ethical dilemmas. That Zero Davey was chosen in part because it was a controversial development also gave the project the possibility of professional and political sensitivity. This sensitivity also made clear that the ethical considerations of more traditional ethnographers who were studying abroad, were very different to those confronting ethnographers who take up the programme in places much closer to home. Traditional ethnography tended to operate in a world split in two, where the task of the ethnographer was to go in to the second world and bring back an account that would explain it mainly to the people in the ‘first’ world. On the other hand this ethnography had to confront the ethical dilemmas that come of “penetrating the intimacy of life among those who are much nearer to hand” (Latour and Woolgar 1979:17), who may occupy the same world as the ethnographer and even propose to read the account s/he makes of them. Under such circumstances there is a dilemma presumably absent in the first ethnographies of whether to offer some form of anonymity to participants. This problem stems more generally from one of ‘getting to know’ the participants with a degree of intimacy based on familiarity over time, without then ‘giving them away’ in the process.
158 In order to dispense with this problem, fast-track both the process of obtaining formal and forthright interviews and to gain formal ethical clearance to attempt this, I decided to offer anonymity to all of the interview participants where possible.
In this thesis your contribution will be attributed through general titles such as ‘planner’ […]. Nevertheless there is a chance you may be identifiable through public records of your professional association.180
In the case of singular nouns like ‘the’ developer of Zero Davey and ‘the’ designer of the site development plan, de-identification could not guarantee anonymity. These participants were at risk of identification as a singularly and because many were also named in the press or public meetings during this time.181 Consequently in an added bid to allay any possible sensitivity, following each interview recordings were fully transcribed and emailed to the participants for amendments. These also became the conditions of ethical approval from the Human Research Ethics Committee (Tasmania) Network.
I anticipated that this would sufficiently deal with the problem of anonymity. However as the research developed it became clear that problems of anonymity extended beyond the singular nouns like ‘developer of Zero Davey’ to include others who I had come to recognise occupied a tight band of design professionals, in a place where everybody knew everybody. In
retrospect flags were raised with comments like ‘everybody knows what I think anyway’ and the ease with which referrals were made to each other. However it was not until I recognised how ‘local’ this scene I was working in was, that I realised how I had almost managed to compromise these participants without any intention of doing so. Their very connectedness and the durability of relations I had stumbled upon meant that these participants gradually became more difficult to make appear anonymous, if name-less.
While this problem was somewhat mediated by the fact that this project was not intended for publication or general circulation, and therefore the problem of anonymity remained confined to those ‘in the know’. However it did serve to demonstrate some of the implications of
180 Confidentiality and Anonymity clause of the Information Sheet.
181 Speculatively this may explain in part why the architects, having already received a lot of negative press,
159 following ‘equally’ those ‘near to us’ in contemporary ethnographic research. This equity between themselves and I had challenged my theoretical assumptions (Chapter Five) and now also challenged my ethical ones. This challenge also served to highlight how the small size of the city of Hobart mattered in more ways than one. The following discusses how size
mattered to the methods by considering the context of the study as a small city. In this case the context is served up last and the reason is that symmetrically a context is an invention of the actors themselves and cannot precede them making it (Latour 2005: 144).