Australian colonial newspapers and the sharks of Sydney Harbour

ABSTRACT

In nineteenth-century Australia, a distinct editorial interest developed for woodcut images in illustrated newspapers depicting sharks attacking people and people attacking sharks in Sydney Harbour. This article argues they were part of a culture of display of the savagery of the frontier that was the British colony. These mass-reproduced images reached a wide public both within and outside Australia. They dramatized settler-colonial life and shaped relationships of human and nonhuman beings in the oceanic environment of the expanding marine city of Sydney. Consumed in the context of empire, they formed part of a vast record that gave visible form to the remote, the strange and often the feared dimensions of colonial life. As this article shows, the careful selection of images and their juxtaposition within texts about everyday settler-colonial life served the purpose of an imaginary museum of local history. The article also draws a parallel between a colonial determination to dominate sharks and wilderness and a will to control Aboriginal people, Australia’s First Peoples.

KEYWORDS:

• Sharks
• Sydney Harbour
• colonial Australia
• illustrated newspapers
• imaginary museum
• print culture
• postcolonialism
• Aboriginal people

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Dr Pandora Syperek and Dr Sarah Wade (University College London), for the generous help they provided during the writing of this article, and independent researcher, Dr Frederico Câmara for research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The earliest collector and scientific staff member for the Australian Museum was William Holmes. The title ‘curator’ was not used until 1917. See ‘Curators and Directors of the Australian Museum’, Australian Museum, https://australianmuseum.net.au/about/history/people/curators-and-directors-of-the-australian-museum/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIjrSDyaLb4gIVFIuPCh1vrA0YEAAYASAAEgIIzvD_BwE, accessed 2 June 2019.

2. Three authoritative studies of the history of Sydney Harbour that concentrate on life at the surface include: Grace Karskens, Colony: A History of Early Sydney, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2010; Tim Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth, Miegunyah Press, Carlton South, Vic., 2000; Ian Hoskins, Sydney Harbour: A History, Sydney, UNSW Press, 2009.

3. See for example the following poem: ‘The Slave Ship’, Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 3 July 1832, p. 4.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Sydney [School of Literature, Art and Media Research Grant].

Notes on contributors

Ann Elias

Ann Elias is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Sydney. Research interests include camouflage as an aesthetic, social and military phenomenon; flowers and their cultural history; representations of the underwater and coral reefs; the floor of Sydney Harbour as a cultural site.