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.

摘要

在 19 世纪的澳大利亚，对描绘悉尼港鲨鱼袭击人类和人们袭击鲨鱼的插图报纸中的木刻图像产生了独特的社论兴趣。这篇文章认为，它们是展示英国殖民地边疆野蛮文化的一部分。这些大量复制的图像在澳大利亚境内外广泛传播。他们在不断扩大的海洋城市悉尼的海洋环境中将殖民者的生活戏剧化，并塑造了人类与非人类之间的关系。在帝国的背景下，它们形成了大量记录的一部分，为遥远的、陌生的、往往是令人恐惧的殖民生活维度提供了可见的形式。正如这篇文章所示，精心选择的图像及其在关于日常定居者和殖民生活的文本中的并列服务于一个虚构的当地历史博物馆。这篇文章还将殖民统治鲨鱼和荒野的决心与控制澳大利亚原住民（澳大利亚的第一民族）的意愿进行了对比。