p. 6 “Williamson was a practiced suit-and-helmet diver. Hurley claimed to be practicsed at diving but the proof is hard to find… the way Hurley and Williamson conceptualised the undersea and visualised marine animals was mediated by the artificial underwater environments of aquariums… an optical devise invented forviewing the underwater and its creatures in the safe, dry space of land and air”
p 7 To anyone who was British-descended, and white, the coral islands, reefs and waterways of the Bahamas and Australia in the 1920s were known as the empire’s “possessions”. THe “edenic isles set in sparkling seas” – as David Arnold described Western ideas of the tropics – generated much imperial self-satisfaction. .. the British Empire was also a “coral empire” in which the figure of the coral reef became a suggestive symbol of expansionism.”
p.18 “coral reefs were models for a wide variety of social claims about the British Empire.In 1861, they were a demonstration of the correct structure of a colonial society in whjich “the broader the base, the loftier the apex”. In 1908, they wer seen as mirrors of the human character, which “like a coral reef, is made bit by bit”. They served as a precautionary tale for the potential chaos and randoness of exxpanionsim, with some observers concluding that the British Empire “grew like a coral reef, without a plan”. They justified the significance of brotherhoods, guilds, and fraternities because “society has been built up like a coral atoll of innumerable fraternities – social, political and industrial”. And, when, in 1929, there was mounting concerns across the empire about worker exploitation, coral reefs served as a threat and a warning to anyone who would forget that “{the workers] build the reef, and the reef maintains them. Disaster to the reed meas death to its inhabitants”.
p. 72 “Williamson’s chapter on sharks in Twenty Years Under the Sea syands as one of the earliest, lengthy, firsthand observations of shark behaviour. But he was not a disinterested observer: sharks were vicious, untristworthy and dangerous. Mostly, he felt horrified by them and called them “wolves of the sea”, “man-eaters”, “ravenous beasts”, “the enemy” “frenzied demons” and “cold-blooded cannibals”. … The undersea harboured shady life and suspect characters, of which the shark and the octopius were Williamon’s most feared..”
p. 73 “Killing shatks was blood sport, and the joy of killing a display of masculinity and bravery despire the reality that Williamson preferred the protected space of the photosphere to immersion in the sea. The scene in which he had the camera turned on himself as he stabbed a shark – a shark that had been attracted to his boat by a dead gorse and animal blood poured into the water – takes place very quickly. By completing the act, Williamson had delivered on a promise to a financial baker that he would secure on film a fight between a man and a “man eater”.
p. 101 Williamson “no eyes are like that of the octopus. They are everyting that is horrible. Dead eyes. The eyes of a corpse through which the demon peers forther, unearthly, expressionless, yet filled with such bestial malignancy that one’s very soul seems to shrink beneath their gaze, and cold perspiration beads the brow.”
p. 108 “In 1922, at Coogee, a beach in Sydney once described as “shark infested”, 80,000 white Australians gathered to watch nine Loyalty Islanders of the South Pacific take to the surg in lioncloths to hunt and kill sharks with knives. Spectators were disappointed when no sharkes were sighted, but the story shows that by 1920, the spectacle of Indigenous men fighting srarks had become a way of defining Islander peoples, and something of a blood sport”
p. 108 “The motif of the shark and “native diver” became a common signt in Australian popular culture illustrations of the 20th century. In 1948, for instance, Sanitorium, a food company that produced breakfast cereal issued a set of pictorial cards of the Great Barrier Reef for children to collect. One card shows a naked diver at the Great Barrier Reed, a figure not distinguished by name as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander but implied to be Indigenous. The male figure is shown striking through the underwater followed by a shark… Also in the card set was .. a struggle between an Indigenous diver and a giant clam. The viewer is left to imagine the man drowning or being eaten alive, if not by the clam then the shark. From a very young age then, Australian children learned through popular imagery to recognise and stereotype racial difference and species difference, to imagine both the racial and animal Other as savage and terrifying, and to displace animality onto the bodies of Indigenous people”
p. 119 “when Hurley ventured forth, the Torres Strait Islands, Papua and the former British New Guinea were known as Australia’s “tropical possessions” and “our unknown lands”.
p. 121 The heroic life entails the idea of leaving behind the everyday world of domestic affairs to enter one of unfamiliarity and danger. It entails a masculine ideal of putting distance between heroics and the feminity fo the everyday. Even in 1915, Hurley was praised as the main who made the unknown known. He was described as “Australia’s most daring photographer”… conceiving of wilderness as a stage on which to act out masciline ideals of “battling” and then return home with evidence in the form of photographs and films.
p. 125 Diaries … there are no descriptions of swimming – only descriptions of wading in the shallows. .. Hurley did, though, watch intently as two Torres Strait Islander, who were assistants, dived underwater to collect diant clams and marine life that would later serve as camera subjects. As with JE Williamson’s “native” labourers, the men who assisted Hurley made it easy for him to undertake photography and filmmaking without he himself having to prepare, collect, carry, and operate equipment and machines on his own…. The situation was similar to the more general social condition described by James Clifford in relation to the invisibility of “native labour”. “europeans moved through unfamiliar places, their relative comfort and safety were ensured by a well-developed infrastructure of guides, assistants, suppliers, translators and carriers. Does the labour of these people count as #travel’?”
p. 127 “The collection of photographs produced on the second expedition, which show fish and corals underwater but wer in fact photographed in an aquarium, are to this day labelled “underwater photographs”, a categorisation that implies they were taken by a diver submerged in the sea.”
p. 191 “There are many photographs of Carl Akeley and his helpers on location in Africa, preparing drawings of the environment for future reference when designing dioramas. Akeley had implicit faith in the unity of science, fact and documentary … Donna Haraway argues that the fear of nature faking was a fear of the “failure of order” of class, race and sex, a stable social order based on ideologies that deremined what was real and true, and a social order that had been in place for centuries. Never before had that social order been so undermined as it was by modern society’s increasing inclination towards simulation and deception, by the social challenges presented by the emancipation of women, and by the increasing agency sought by non-white people.”
p. 219 Williamson’s account of the dying stingray recalls a recent argument put forward by Timothy Merton about human pity towards neighbours in the nonhuman worl in which he states that “pity for the living world is an aspect of a sadistic relish for devouring it”. When nature is externalised as somthing outside and distant from human life, pity is another way of reinforcing the exclusion and objectification of others.”
p. 227 “With the camera, or “techno-remora” as Haraway calls it, strapped to the back of the turtle, it does suggest that humans are in control. Yet when watching the turtle from the viewing position of the GoPro, there is a sense of being drawn into a political frame where much more is at stake than the pleasure of viewing. Rather, there is some hesitations and uncertainty about our own place in the world that comes from seeing the subjectivity and sentience of the turtle. It comes from noticing the turtles decisions, movements, expressions, actions, thinking, personality, appearance, performances, aesthetics and subjectivity, and from feeling bound to the turtle through the camera. The crittercam is effective in encouraging something that Jonathan Burt appreciates in watching worthwhile films about animals, namely “a sense of what is meant by our co-habitation with other forms of life.”
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