This article attends primarily to an important but little-known corpus of films, produced around the middle of the twentieth century, which document and dramatize the pearling industry of northwest Australia and the Torres Strait. It observes that the settler Australian pearl-film—represented here by Lee Robinson’s The Pearlers (1949) and King of the Coral Sea (1954), and Frank Bagnall’s Pearlers of the Coral Sea (1960)—both relies on the knowledges of Central Indo-Pacific seafarers and tends to culminate in those knowledges’ obsolescence. A close viewing of King of the Coral Sea reveals deep tensions between technologies of submersion, tensions that intersect with racialization, cultural and historical erasure, and the transformation of marine places into nationally regulable space. The article turns, ultimately, to the Aboriginal Australian filmmaker Wayne Barker’s Cass: no saucepan diver (1983), a documentary short which ironizes the settler Australian pearl-film while subverting the effacement of pearling subjects and histories.
Killian Quigley (Thu,) studied this question.