It is not easy to access the interior of this epoch’s great objects: those opaque infrastructures that, in anthropologist Brain Larkin’s words, “generate the ambient environment of everyday life.”11Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 42, no. 1 (2013), pp. 327–43, here p. 337.

But with the right magical object—perhaps a plastic card attached to a lanyard, an official form printed on thin A4 paper, or a PDF with a digital signature—it is possible to officially breach the formal boundaries around dams, rail networks, oil refineries, weapons factories, and waste processing facilities like the Western Treatment Plant in Melbourne, Australia.

Totaling more than 110 square kilometers, the Western Treatment Plant (WTP) is, according to official documents, almost as big as Disney World and is one of the largest and most advanced sewage transformation sites in Australia. This self-powered facility is spread across farmland near the suburb of Werribee on the coastal plains beside Port Phillip Bay, a region where the Wathaurung people—the traditional owners of the land—fished, foraged, and shaped their surroundings in the centuries before the plant began operating in 1897. The WTP is now run by Melbourne Water, a government-owned, permit-granting body that decides what gets in and out of the city’s water system and its infrastructures.

Of course, human waste has the ultimate level access to the WTP: A direct line runs into the facility through roughly thirty kilometers of pipes and drains. Waste is not all that gets in: There is also a ghost town, once inhabited by sewage workers, now used to exhibit work by local artists; and there are shallow lagoons where bacteria are encouraged to metabolize excrement, their work interrupted only by human “poo divers” who emerge from the ponds—victorious and feces-covered—after mending broken equipment. Waste draws film crews, too: Set designers have currently turned one section of the plant into a rural village in sub-Saharan Africa. Birds come in their thousands, some from as far away as Siberia, followed by birdwatchers who require their own permits to visit the protected wetlands inside the plant. And on a brisk, sunny day in August, a range of invasive species—anthropologists, geographers and other social scientists interested in human waste—were given permission to ask the plant and its workers some questions about the future.

On a dirt road beyond the foaming bacterial lagoons of section 55E, this busload of researchers is wondering aloud how Melbourne’s main sewage processing facility will survive the coming centuries. One of our guides, Paul Balassone, the Principal of Cultural Heritage at Melbourne Water, explains that storm surges are already disrupting certain processes at the plant. Wearing a high-visibility vest and steel-toed boots, he gestures through the windows of the bus to the waste-filtering lagoon systems outside, which contain massive ponds that are barely above sea level. Although the plant is prepared for risks, a projected rise in sea level of one hundred centimeters or more over the coming century is still a hard-to-imagine scenario.

Traveling deeper within the plant, we pass fields of canola grown with recycled sewage water, disused stables for the thousands of livestock that once grazed here, and Lollypop Creek with its unseen population of growling grass frogs—endangered amphibians who seem to enjoy the altered ecology of the facility. Finally, the bus approaches the biosolids: tall mounds of dry, insoluble, nonbiodegradable waste that has passed through the bodies of Melbourne residents over the past decades. These human-made geological formations loom over the bus, silently holding toxins and sparkling with minerals. Balassone tells us that the managers of the plant are not quite sure about what to do with all of this biomatter, and invite us to think of potential uses. But someone has already answered: “Art.”

The bus pulls over for curator Cameron Bishop, a lecturer at Deakin University in Melbourne and co-organizer of Treatment—a biennial art festival involving a similar-style bus tour that has been held on the grounds of the facility since 2015. As our bus circles the mounds, Bishop plays a sound work over the loudspeakers by artist Zoe Scoglio. Her monologue, spoken low and slow, teases eerie and uncomfortable links between listeners’ bodies and the geology of the biosolids outside: Where are we located? How might we live on through our resilient nonliving waste? When are we? Asynchronous temporalities echo in and out of the mounds.

In his book Engineers of Happy Land, the historian Rudolf Mrázek claims that infrastructures like the Western Treatment Plant let us perceptually encounter modernity.22Rudolph Mrázek, Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.

We “feel” modern through the speed with which we can travel, our ability to see the city at night, and the comfort of not living beside open sewers—all symptoms of functioning infrastructures. The kind of zeitgeist-chasing or zeitgeist-generating artwork that fills the world’s festivals, fairs, biennials, and triennials, however, lets us sense a different kind of time: contemporaneity. Circling the mounds and the other sites of artwork at the WTP reveals an unexpected alignment. Both infrastructures and contemporary art are time-governing mechanisms. They are strange, enormous clocks.

We see more of this control in Cocoroc, a once-lively town within the WTP that existed from 1894 to 1973 for workers and their families. Leaving the bus, we wander past the few remaining buildings, kept as traces of the plant’s history. The surviving town hall, swimming pool, and full-sized sports field are now in various states of preservation, used for public-facing events like the Treatment festival. Sounds from artworks echo out of the ruins, and at the end of the football field, inside the rundown changing rooms, a recording by artist Shane McGrath recreates a motivational speech by the coach of a workers’ football team that once played on the weed-filled pitch beside us. Vernon McKane, once a member of the team and resident of Cocoroc, told a reporter in 2015 that he always imagined the town “would outlive him.”33Dewi Cooke, “Resurrecting Cocoroc, a Ghost Town You May Never Visit,” Sydney Morning Herald, 30 October 2015. Accessed 25/10/2018.

The tour ends. The bus exits the security gate. We stare out of tinted windows at a congested highway and at tightly packed suburban developments that creep southward. It is hard to visualize the highway in front of us sunk in a rising sea, and to think about those ungovernable “more-than-human natural processes,” in anthropologist Anna Tsing’s words,44Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Reprint edition. Princeton University Press, 2015, p. 257. which will not ask us for permission to breach our adamantine infrastructures. We leave wondering about these ungovernables, imagining the mounds of biosolids—if they remain in one hundred years—turned to an archipelago of human excrement; future islands, where boatloads of researchers like us might take core samples as they look for traces of the things that passed through Melbournian bodies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What will this site tell these curious people about time, and who will give permits to the future processes and forms of life that will enter and exit these pooey patches of altered earth?