Please God Send Me a Wreck: Responses to Shipwreck in a 19th Century Australian Community

Abstract

Maritime archaeology has mostly viewed the links between shipping mishaps and coastal communities through the lens of site formation studies. The focus has therefore been on the potential physical alterations to shipwreck sites caused through human agency, rather than the social factors surrounding these interactions. There has also been a tendency to view wrecks in isolation, often emphasizing the unique or dramatic qualities to their operational, wrecking or salvage circumstances, rather than as part of a wider pattern of behaviours. Rarely has there been a coherent exploration of the wider landscapes of sites, places and relationships which were a consequence of people preventing, mitigating, benefiting from or commemorating shipping mishaps, sometimes repeatedly and over extended periods of time. We will argue that by recognizing this continuum of cultural activity extending beyond individual incidents, as well as the archaeological evidence of such past and present activities, maritime archaeology has the potential to redefine itself as a more anthropologically oriented endeavour and bring a new vigour to its approaches. In this study, we explore the relationships between the Queenscliffe community and the shipping mishaps that occurred on the adjacent coastal and inland waters over the last 160 years. We draw on extensive documentary research, oral histories and archaeological investigations to examine some of their short- and long-term social, economic, technological and symbolic responses to shipping disasters. In particular, we demonstrate how these actions and understandings created a cultural landscape extending far beyond the individual wreck sites. This landscape evolved over time and across generations, even as each vessel transformed physically from ship, to derelict, to archaeological site and eventually to place.