Ode to the Ocean

Duration: 60 minutes

RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR is no ordinary book. It mounts no straight-ahead argument. It clings to no single genre. Instead, like the sea itself, it moves, flows, absorbs, transforms. In its pages we find passages of beautiful nature and travel writing, lyrical memoir, seams of American and English history, and much more. We find Thoreau and Melville, Wilde and Byron, John Waters and Virginia Woolf, all linked through a certain refusal to be contained, to be strictly defined—an openness to discovery and change. Running throughout is an air of elegy, a reminder that the sea is an ending, a repository of lost ships, lost people, lost ways of being. It is where we came from; for Hoare, it is where he is going.

Presented by The University of Queensland