|
|
|
Kings of the Coral Sea: Colonial Identities on Australia’s margins.
Jane Landman, Victoria University of Technology
| [ Go to this paper in the timetable ] |
"Few passages of the sea hold so much of rude adventure and romance as the Torres Strait" (Frank Hurley, 1924).
This paper traces shifting configurations of spacial, racial and gender relations in three Australian fiction feature films set on Thursday Island (Hound of the Deep, 1925, Lovers and Luggers, 1938, and King of the Coral Sea, 1954). In contrast to the languid or lascivious tropical islands of many ‘South Seas’ films, the status of Thursday Island - as a working island - is central to these films. Against the backdrop of the ‘colourful’ pearling industry, whose labour force was constituted from across the Pacific, each of these narratives invents Thursday Island as a site for adventure where tensions about white, male colonial identity can be resolved. In each story romantic love guarantees the narrative’s resolution.
With the reiterated visual and narrative economy of these stories, it is possible to trace shifts in the relations and orientations through which the films locate Australia in the imperial world order. This paper examines the ways in which the figures of white heroines of these stories (incarnated finally in King of the Coral Sea as the Australian ‘beach girl’ of the 1950s) are called upon to negotiate complex anxieties about race, gender and place.
