Australian Historical Studies | 2019
The Pilbara: From the Deserts Profits Come
Abstract
tion and imperialismmake clear, these are stories that need telling. But they also signal a vital problematic: is it possible to refresh our awareness of the Southern Ocean while working through histories and understandings that have tended to ignore it, or to value it for all the wrong reasons? If the Western view, as it issues from Wild Sea’s case studies, can be said to express a unifying tendency, it has been a tenacious refusal to dignify these regions as comprising a realm unto themselves. The Southern Ocean is always being made to stand for something more or other than itself: a blank space where Ptolemy’s Great Southern Land was meant to be; the liquid remainder of Gondwana, that ‘ancient southern supercontinent’ (141); a key ‘barometer of planetary climate change’ (xiv). All this abstraction may be said to issue, to a certain extent, from practical inconvenience: even the many landmasses that speckle the main, like Macquarie Island, Tierra del Fuego, and the South Shetland Islands, to name a very few, are famously antipathetic toward human habitation. But treating the Southern Ocean as a curiosity has also proven convenient for those desirous of and outfitted for exploiting it. McCann writes indelibly about the ghastly slaughter – an overstatement does not seem possible – of southern right whales, penguins, seals, and countless more residents of the far south. When he discovered lots of large whales at further than 70 degrees south, the Scottish explorer James Clark Ross mused darkly that the animals would ‘now, no doubt, be made to contribute to the wealth of our country, in exact proportion to the energy and perseverance of our merchants’ (159). Ross’s speculation is an awfully apt emblem of the extent to which the North’s relation to the Southern Ocean, as narrated by Wild Sea, has been essentially extractive and imperial. Science has regularly been allied to dubious, and evenmilitaristic, forays on behalf of ‘national glory’ (94). When it has not, it has been tainted nonetheless by an uncanny sense of working on scorched earth: after a visit to the Australian scientific station at Macquarie Island, the marine biologist Isobel Bennett recalled a place marred by the ‘wanton and unrestricted destruction of native species’ (80). Wild Sea renders wonders as well as horrors. At South Georgia Island, a congregation of king penguins puts paid to any misguided notion that these latitudes are the domain of nothing: the beaches McCann finds there ‘are a study in sensory overload’ (56). The Southern Ocean’s aesthetic novelties are manifold, and some of the greatest must derive from the sea ice – ‘neither land nor sea but something else entirely’ (86) – that covers more than half its surface in wintertime. Indeed, this book’s northern interlopers are at their least loathsome when they stick to admiring their environs: Edward Adrian Wilson, naturalist and surgeon aboard the Discovery expedition (1901–04), wrote with feeling about the ‘colour’ and ‘toning’ of icebergs, as well as the unusual behaviour of pack ice, which was somehow simultaneously in ‘constant motion’, possessed of ‘irresistible force’, and yet remarkable for its ‘gentleness’ (96). ‘Is it possible to develop an ocean consciousness?’ (198). That is another of McCann’s driving queries, and it is one this book works assiduously to answer. It is true that a twentyfirst-century response issues, in part, from recognising the Southern Ocean as a ‘massive global engine’, responsible for removing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than any of earth’s other water-bodies (195–6). But it bears re-emphasising, too, that, as Alice Te Punga Somerville and others have recently observed, there exist persons, communities and cultures who don’t need educating in oceanic awareness, because they already live it. That said, Wild Sea will bring the Southern Ocean to mind, and into care’s ambit, for many who haven’t much heeded it – and that is a mighty development in consciousness indeed.