Shark

Abstract

When ecologists (and profiteers) suggested that kangaroos might be farmed for their meat on the grounds that they would prove less destructive of Australian ecosystems than sheep or cattle, there was an outcry both from within Australia and internationally. The most common response was outrage at Australians eating and exporting - especially on a commercial scale - their national symbol. After all, it was pointed out somewhat irrelevantly - the British do not eat lions or unicorns, and Canadians do not eat the beaver. Such responses, received from both inside and outside the country, reveal the different levels at which national symbols operate: in Australians' self perceptions, the images they wish to project, the reception of these symbols by other nations and their consequent images of Australia, all influenced by competing political agendas. Originally regarded as the continent with the most bizarre flora and fauna on earth, Australia increasingly gained the reputation as the most dangerous in terms of its more cryptic animals. While it didn't have those land-dwelling animals that provided manly contests between man and beast - India's tigers, Africa's rampaging elephants or North America's grizzly bears - its deadly collection of spiders, snakes and sharks were seen as somehow more insidiously malevolent. That Australian settlement, from 1788 onwards, tended to cling to the shoreline ensured that the shark, though feared throughout the world, would be particularly associated with Australia. The emphasis on beach culture throughout the twentieth century necessarily reinforced this tendency. It is also particularly true of the settler colonies that their self-images and national symbols tend to emerge in contrast to those of the 'mother' country. The very different character of British beaches and the more formal 'seaside' attitudes of Britons to them, together with the less than central place of coastlines in their urban settlement patterns, have led Australians to emphasise both the superiority of their beaches, their attachment to them, and their easy familiarity with even their apparent dangers. In neo-colonial terms, Australians have cheerfully played 'the last frontier' to the United States' loss of it; here men are men and sharks are sharks and Australians still have the courage and know-how to take on the creatures of the wild.