Australian colonial newspapers and the sharks of Sydney Harbour

Abstract

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.