As International Shark Awareness Day rolls around, the dialectics of shark representation re-enter the discourse. The damage caused to marine ecosystems by half a century of shark attack blockbusters is well documented. But how have shark metanarratives impacted life on land?
On 15th June 2000, the Australian federal Minister for Immigration, Philip Ruddock, released an anti-tourism campaign. The series of videos was designed to paint Australia in the most undesirable light possible to some, but not all, potential visitors. It was targeted to specific countries – those most likely, in the government’s eyes, to produce refugees – and distributed to their consulates and embassies (including Pakistan, Turkey, Jordan, Syria and Iran). The videos included dubious accounts by anonymous former asylum seekers who regretted the journey, description of life conditions in detention centres and – most bizarrely – sharks. As menacing words filled the screen, the video switches from unflattering shots of sharks – teeth glistening to the camera – to fragmented images of brown bodies seemingly struggling in the water.
My intention here is to take seriously Meg Samuelson’s invitation to “think with sharks” as a mean to “bring human histories of slavery and settler colonialism to the surface”. In this article, I consider the campaign’s unlikely recruitment of sharks as border patrol to draw broader considerations about the settler relationship to borders, refugees and ecosystems, and contextualise the technology of the shark within a broader history of racialised capitalism.
The standout feature of this grotesque campaign is the unlikely recruitment of the shark as guard dogfish to the colony. From eagles as national symbols, to octopuses as companions for middle-life crises, the settler colonial imagination is no stranger to anthropomorphising projections; and as I have written elsewhere, the weaponisation of the coastal ecosystem against migrants and refugees is a central technology of Australian settler colonialism. Nonetheless, the drafting of a marine creature as border patrol invites further examination.
Sharks hold crucial cultural resonance within Australian culture and, within international perceptions, are perhaps as closely associated with Australia as the image of the coast itself. They are a crucial part not just of Australia’s marine ecosystem, but of its collective imagination, with novelist Tim Winton passionately remarking:
Australians have a peculiar attitude toward sharks. It’s pathological and it runs deep. Other cultures have their wolves and bears, their lions and tigers – the carnivorous demon lurking in the shadows. Here, there’s no growling menace out there in the dark. Our demon is silent and it swims.
The campaign, then, is assuaging more than one type of national anxiety. The imagined savagery of the shark, typically conceptualised to threaten the colony, becomes instead another weapon in its military arsenal against ‘invading’ migrants – the Great White guarding whiteness. There is a sense of colonial triumph in this illusion of control over nature. There is also a historical precedent that complicates the use of the shark in the context of both settler colonialism and racial violence.
The notion of shark – that is, the mythology that surrounds the marine creature – and the notion of race are two fictions that hold power and resonance because they are believed to be true. They are also two fictions that originated simultaneously and interdependently. In 2007, Marcus Rediker produced The Slave Ship: A Human History, a formal study of one of the key spaces of the Atlantic slave trade, the slave ship. The Atlantic trade that transported nearly 13 million enslaved people into America claimed the lives of many before the passage was even over: “no fewer than 1.8 million of them died during the journey; their bodies were thrown to the sharks that trailed the ships across the sea”.
In studying the slave ship, Rediker intended to reflect primarily on the new entity – Blackness – that was created along the journey from the original identity of its forced passengers. Rediker observes that “the whole concept of race was created aboard the slave ships. The people who boarded the slave ships did not speak the same language and were often members of ethnic groups that were enemies on land”.
Rediker argues that the terror of violence was a crucial technology in the production of race, and that “the shark functioned as an integral part of a system of terror utilised by the slave ship captain”: captains would feed sharks to lure them into following the slave ships on their journey, so as to discourage their captives from attempting to swim to freedom. Previously known as dogfish, Rediker’s research indicates that the very term shark was created to describe what was essentially a new invention, produced specifically for the Atlantic slave trade, and derived from the Caribbean term xoc: “the shark and the slave trade had gone together from the beginning…‘shark’ seems to have entered the English language through the talk of slave-trade sailors”. The Atlantic trade then produced not only race, but also sharks, making racial violence and sharks intimately interlinked.
Colonial enlisting of the shark, therefore, has a complex and circular history. There is a direct thread between the legacy of sharks in the Atlantic passage – and therefore, the constitutive role of sharks in the building of American settler colonialism – and the Ruddock campaign. Both enlist the symbolic shark to produce racial terror and enforce colonial discipline. Both enlist the existence of real sharks to deter behaviours that are seen as a threat to settler sovereignty. The Ruddock campaign is able to build upon centuries of racial terror to make its case: the demonised figure it deploys, the man-eating shark, was produced through the Atlantic trade.
By implying that the very beaches that are enjoyed by settlers would prove deadly to asylum seekers, the campaign seeks to distinguish or rather delegate to the technology of the shark. Sharks are given the prerogative to distinguish between which people are food and which ones are not, seemingly attributing to sharks bureaucratic skills such as racism and the ability to check visas. In reality, just as enslaved people would be thrown to the sharks, refugees are left to them – which is to say, refugees who perish at sea are killed by the state, not the sharks. The savagery of the shark, its seemingly indeterminate killing, is the savagery of the state.
However, this structure is complex and at times circular. While being symbolically appropriated and exploited, real sharks are also killed en mass by the colony. While racial terror creates a situation wherein some shark attacks can become legalised executions, state killings, when sharks attack settlers, the narrative changes. Deaths caused by animal predators generate emotional disturbance in part because they are perceived as violating colonial laws and hierarchies, primarily the idea that human beings are not food. Similarly, when sharks interfere with profit activities (such as fishing), they are acting in opposition to the goals of the settler state, transgressing its boundaries and laws. Their existence is now acting in opposition to the goals of the settler state: they are a danger, or most often, a nuisance, to the colony.
The destruction of settler colonialism, then, functions multi-directionally. Samuelson makes a crucial observation to this effect: “the sharks that followed ‘in the wake’ (Sharpe) of the slave ships became entangled in the carnage of Black lives, ultimately helping in the production of a global capitalism that “enhanced their own prospects of extinction”. “Fueled by the labour that was forcibly extorted from enslaved Africans”, writes Samuelson, racial capitalism “has propelled destructive commercial fishing practices, degraded marine habitats”. Samuelson wonders if wake work “might also embrace sharks”, and come to reckon with its destructive engendering of animal accomplices.
A word then, at last, about real sharks. Media attention inevitably centres around sharks’ least common behaviour: sharks attacking humans. To Adrian Peace, this focus is partially a matter of optics: sharks “never appear to do anything but hunt. Unlike brown bears which cavort with their young or lions which idle around in their prides, hunting is the only thing great whites seem to do”. This is, of course, not true. If sharks never appear to do anything but hunt it is largely because sharks puncture the line and enter our field of vision – come near the coast, leap above the waterline – when hunting. Hammerton and Ford report that while “between the years 1990–2000, shark incidents averaged 6.5 per year… humans kill one hundred million sharks annually”. This endemic interpretation of sharks as dangerous to humans, when the reality is the opposite, is based on the limited glimpses we see of them. Other shark activities, such as cruising, socialising, exploring and reproducing, are largely hidden from human vision. But limited visibility – limited data – does not inherently produce inaccurate understandings. A second element is required for that to happen: the colonial confidence that one’s data is both sufficient and exhaustive. Perhaps, to decolonise the symbolic shark, we might begin with a call for the ocean’s right to opacity.