Week 6: Collecting (Journalistic) Samples

Welcome, daring explorer! In this edition of the weekly blog, I’ll be delving into the archives of Australian newspapers for a couple of decades and some general notes I’ve taken from them. This update will be “rather” short compared to its predecessors (by my standards), simply because I haven’t been able to create a general conclusion for all my observations yet and because I am missing a few more decades to round out my research until 2000.

Filtering the Grub from the Gravel

With data ranging from 1938 up to 2000, I obviously could not go through every newspaper article mentioning sharks through the years. Instead, how I narrowed down my search was by first using the noted “significant” years in the numbers of sharks caught from the New South Wales (NSW) and Queensland (QLD) shark control programs, and the biennial catches of the Game Fishing Club of South Australia (GFCSA). As a callback to previous weeks, “significant” years were identified by using a running average of one datapoint’s five prior entries and then determining whether the current datapoint fell below or far surpassed the running average, specifically by a margin of 30%.

From these noted significant years, I then roughly grouped certain years together so that I could study any particular trends that existed within successive years. In the end, I was left with the distinct time period groups of 1953-1954; 1955-1956; 1957-1958, 1960-1962, and 1963-1966; 1969-1976; 1977-1982; 1985-1991; and finally, 1992-2000. In each of these years, using the Trove, an archive of Australian media, I looked at the earliest and more relevant articles to get a sample of the newspaper coverage on sharks at the time. This process was pretty time-consuming, so I was only able to reach 1969 this week and will continue to press forward over this upcoming week.

A Survey of the Current Samples

Presently, I can make some general observations from my readings of these time periods of Australian journalism. Overall, sharks are mainly only given either a negative or a neutral depiction in Australian newspapers. Overwhelmingly and reasonably, many of these articles were written around shark attacks and sightings. In a significant proportion of these stories, sharks, especially “White Pointers” or White Sharks, would be written as villainous and deliberately predatory stalkers for bathers, swimmers, and spearfishermen. Related to spearfishing, the sport was and still is quite popular in the country, and protections for those involved is highly emphasized. These protections spanned from more or less harmless methods like “shark repellant” to more shark-lethal technologies like explosive-tipped spears and skin-piercing guns.

Surprisingly as well, Australia proudly marketed its shark fishing trade. At a time where conservation for sharks was an extremely low priority, shark fishing for species like gummy and school sharks was prevalent, and big catches were highly praised. According to the GFCSA at the time, “No one likes sharks, so kill them by all means in any manner that the killer wishes to use. However, if sharks are fished for as a sport — and they are worthy opponents — then we should treat them as worthy opponents, and not ‘stunt fish’ and be termed as ‘big game bandits’ and ‘record robbers’.” This mixed respect could also be seen with the pest-like treatment of sharks for commercial fishermen who saw them as a mixture of powerful, bloodthirsty beasts that needed to be eradicated and mindless fish that tampered net lines and stole catches from their bottom lines.

Now, for more “positive” representations of sharks, these really only appeared in cases where no blame was assigned to the culprit shark in the attack or mentions that sharks were merely present in various locations. However, there was one article reprimanding the negative portrayals of sharks in Australian media at the time, but this was easily overwhelmed by the waves of shark attacks, catches, and fears reported on a monthly and sometimes daily basis. Additionally, due to the nature of consumer publications, in many cases, the mentioning of sharks were likely motivated by the paranoia around the animals and the excitement they stir for audiences, no matter how significant of a role they played in an incident. These biases against sharks manifested throughout the years as it seems to me that the rhetoric and pop culture (written stories and movies) around sharks over these decades did seem to grow more jaded and “revenge” killings and calls for them became slightly more common.

This was a brief summary of the notes I have so far, but don’t worry I’ll be on the same corner of the webpage next week with a new blog. I’ll be adding onto this article, in a hopefully more organized way, with some records dating only a little over two decades ago that may shed some light into Australian White Shark populations and the public sentiment that grew around them.

Citations

Malcolm, H., Bruce, B. D., & Stevens, J. D. (2001, September). A Review of the Biology and Status of White Sharks in Australian Waters. CSIRO Marine Research, Hobart. https://publications.csiro.au/rpr/download?pid=procite:1d0d13e5-7a60-4e65-be78-636e6f2dd22e&dsid=DS1.

Numerous Articles from Trove (https://trove.nla.gov.au/) which digitizes numerous historical Australian newspaper articles and collaborates with the National Library of Australia and hundreds of partners around Australia.