The Greek philosophy of the four elements was syncretised with Judeo-Christian theology in the seventeenth century CE by John Milton in Paradise Lost in which he rewrote the biblical story of creation out of what he called “the womb of Nature,” the pre-mixing of the four elements. In imperialist adventure-romances the journey of the hero into the swamp figures the horror of repeating birth in reverse of going up the birth canal. J. G. Ballard’s post-apocalyptic dystopian novel, The Drowned World, is concerned with the return of the spatial repressed (the tropical colonies and the uterus), temporal repressed (the uterine and colonial pasts) and psychological repressed (memories of the womb and the mother’s body). In Janet Frame’s story, the lagoon represents a way for the first person narrator of establishing and celebrating matrilineal descent. Lagoons are some of the most fertile ecosystems and habitats on the planet. Yet the lagoon at low tide is not a place of new life, but of death and destruction, part of the rhythm of life and death. Lagoons and other wetlands are places of what Hannah Arendt called natality, or being born, that she countered to Martin Heidegger’s morbid solipsism of being towards death.