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Aquariums and human–animal relations at the Great Barrier Reef
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 April 2022
Abstract
In the early twentieth century, great delight in the unique tropical beauty of the Great Barrier Reef, coupled with an opportunistic spirit for commercial development, inspired the commission of eye-catching posters and advertisements by Australian tourist organisations. The aim of this article is to discuss a pictorial device that developed alongside the rise of modern tourist advertising images of Great Barrier Reef – a split-level viewpoint that approximates the effect of looking at the Reef through the glass sides of an aquarium. Building on my earlier research published in 2019 on wildlife photography and the construction of the Great Barrier Reef as a modern visual spectacle, and combining art history with environmental history, this article also turns to coloured advertising lithographs. It argues that split-level visualisations separate human from non-human and elevate the idea of human superiority. With the Great Barrier Reef facing unprecedented ecological pressures, the historical images at the centre of this article are instructive for understanding the deleterious effects of anthropogenic impact, as well as early twentieth-century attitudes towards human–non-human relations.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Queensland Review , Volume 28 , Special Issue 2: Between pride and despair: Stories of Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef and Wet Tropics rainforests , December 2021 , pp. 98 - 113
- Copyright
- © The Author(s), 2022
References
Notes
1 See Ann Elias, Coral empire: Underwater oceans, colonial tropics, visual modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).
2 Frank Hurley, ‘The wondrous sea floor’, The Richmond River Herald and Northern Districts Advertiser, 11 February 1921, 3.
3 Celmara Pocock, ‘Romancing the Reef: History, heritage and the hyper-real’, unpublished PhD thesis, James Cook University (2003), p. 240.
4 See Michelle Hetherington, James Northfield and the art of selling Australia (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2006).
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6 W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Showing seeing: A critique of visual culture’, Journal of Visual Culture 1(2) (2002), 170–1.
7 Randy Malamud, An introduction to animals and visual culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 3.
8 Judith Hamera, Parlor ponds: The cultural work of the American home aquarium, 1850–1970 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012), p. 9.
9 Aquariums were nineteenth-century optical technologies that innovated ways of seeing and conceptualising the undersea and its animals. See Palle B. Petterson, Cameras into the wild: A history of early wildlife and expedition filmmaking 1895–1928 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2011), p. 55.
10 Anon, ‘Great Barrier Reef’, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 June 1929, 15.
11 Anon, ‘Wonders of Great Barrier Reef. Tourist asset to Queensland. Potentialities not yet exploited’, Nambour Chronicle and North Coast Advertiser, 26 January 1934, 4.
12 Deirdre Gilfedder, ‘The visual rhetoric of Australian travel posters between the wars: Branding a new nation’, Cultures of the Commonwealth 15–16 (2010), 99.
13 John Urry, Consuming places (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 1.
14 Gilfedder, ‘The visual rhetoric of Australian travel posters’, 97.
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17 Kari Weil, Thinking animals: Why animal studies now? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), p. 35.
18 National identity informed by narratives of early explorers is discussed in Gordon Waitt, ‘Selling paradise and adventure: Representations of landscape in the tourist advertising of Australia’, Australian Geographical Studies 35(1) (1997), 47–60.
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21 The Great Barrier Coral Reef, published by the Queensland Government Tourist Bureau, quoted in E. W. G. Bogner, ‘The Great Barrier Coral Reef’, Horsham Times (Vic), 14 July 1933, 10.
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26 Alexsandra Ilicheva, ‘Plenty of fish in the sea: Geography of abundance, sustainability and ethics of non-mammalian marine animals’, unpublished MA thesis, California State University (2011), p. 45.
27 Donna Haraway, ‘Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective’, Feminist Studies 14(3) (1988), 581.
28 Judith Wright, The coral battleground (Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2014), p. 2.
29 Frank Hurley, ‘Beneath the waves: strange grotesque life; forests of amazing foliage’, Sun, 11 November 1921, 9.
30 Norman Caldwell, ‘The fangs of the Australian sea’, Voice (Hobart), 5 October 1935, 2.
31 Gaston Bachelard, Water and dreams (Dallas, TX: Pegasus Foundation, 1983), p. 179.
32 N.Q. Naturalists’ Club, ‘Green Island Aquarium’, Cairns Post, 4 September 1936, 3.
33 Bernd Brunner, The ocean at home: An illustrated history of the aquarium (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005), p. 126.
34 Anon, ‘Thrills and joys of the Barrier Reef: Teeming with game fish’, Proserpine Guardian, 24 August 1935, 3.
35 Bogner, ‘The Great Barrier Coral Reef’, 10.
36 T. C. Roughley, Big game angling Australia (Sydney: National Travel Association, 1937), unpaginated.
37 Anon, ‘Wonders of Great Barrier Reef’, 4.
38 Anon, ‘Thrills and Joys of the Barrier Reef’, 3.
39 H. G. McKay, ‘Undeveloped resources of the Barrier Reef’, Smith’s Weekly, 1 September 1923, 4.
40 William D. Robbins, Mizue Hisano, Sean R. Connolly and J. J. Howard Choat, ‘Ongoing collapse of coral-reef shark populations’, Current Biology 16 (2006), 2314.
41 J. E. N. Veron, A reef in time: The state of the Great Barrier Reef (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 49.
42 Earle cited in Will Abberley, ‘Introduction’ in Underwater worlds: Submerged visions in science and culture (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018), p. 10.
43 William Cronon, ‘The trouble with wilderness: Or, getting back to the wrong nature’, Environmental History 1(1) (1996), 15.
44 Anon, ‘The Great Barrier Reef: Nature’s bounty’, Port Macquarie News and Hastings River Advocate, 10 December 1927, 4.
45 For a discussion of colonial impacts and dispossession at the Great Barrier Reef see I. Lyons, R. Hill, S. Deshong et al. ‘Putting uncertainty under the cultural lens of Traditional Owners from the Great Barrier Reef catchments’, Regional Environmental Change 19 (2019), 1597–1610. For information about Indigenous ownership and historical displacement, see Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, ‘Traditional Owners of the Great Barrier Reef’, https://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/our-partners/traditional-owners/traditional-owners-of-the-great-barrier-reef.
46 Bernard Klein, ‘The ocean at home: An illustrated history of the aquarium’ review in Victorian Studies 48(4) (2006), 710.
47 J. Malcolm Shick, ‘Towards an aesthetic marine biology’, Art Journal 67(4) (2008), 78.
48 Ralph R. Acampora, Corporal compassion: Animal ethics and philosophy of body (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), p. 5.
49 Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of water: Posthuman feminist phenomenology (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 137–8.
50 Alphonso Lingis, ‘The rapture of the deep’, in Alphonso Lingis, Excesses: Eros and culture (New York: State University of New York Press, 1983), p. 13.