A world of fins and fences: Australian and South African shark management in the transoceanic south
Date
2017-10
Authors
Powell, Miles
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ANU Press
Abstract
This paper examines the world’s two oldest and largest national shark control programs, those of South Africa and Australia. Officials from these two countries have spent more than a century trying to dictate the movement and behaviour of sharks to improve bather safety. To this end, people have deployed technologies ranging from barriers, to nets, to drum lines and even to electrical fields and depth charges. This essay treats these programs as prime examples of the enduring, perhaps inescapable, tensions between mobile nature and the real and imagined boundaries with which we seek to control and administer it. This topic reveals important new dimensions to trans-boundary environmental history. First, this story highlights the need for environmental histories that consider vast (even transoceanic) scales, while simultaneously maintaining attention to local contexts. Second, bather safety programs provide a useful case study for exploring how efforts to control nature have historically intersected with attempts to discipline and regulate humans. Third, this history demonstrates how changing perceptions of nature and predators have forced policymakers to alter the placement and enforcement of barriers that structure interactions between the human and non-human worlds.
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Source
International Review of Environmental History
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Journal article
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Access Statement
Open Access via publisher website