Deep Sea Divers Below the City: The Case of Sydney Harbour

Built by British convicts and settlers on the ancestral lands of the Gadigal people, following invasion and dispossession in 1788, Sydney began as a colonial town and in 1842 became a colonial city. Sited on the shores of Sydney Harbour, for much of the nineteenth century the city was designed for ships and shipping and from the start the area underwater figured directly in the city’s expansion. Yet maritime history and ocean history take a lesser place in Australian European culture to land history, and some ocean-oriented histories have been neglected, among them the story of diving and divers in the construction of the city and in conceptions of place.

This presentation, selected from work in progress, addresses this; relating the history of deep sea divers who worked below the harbour’s surface to build urban infrastructure, salvage lost treasure and remove obstacles to industrial progress. Wearing standard diving dress and screwed-down helmets they undertook hidden labour in an unstable environment. Returning to the surface they shared their impressions and aesthetic experiences with the press and through the media shaped states of imagination about the harbour floor in the centre of everyday life.

The first European to descend to the bottom of Sydney Harbour, and to test the first diving dress imported from London, was a convict. Sent below by his master in 1837 to retrieve a sunken box of silver coins his story sets the stage for an undersea history of the iconic Sydney Harbour that begins with the interconnection of colonialism, capitalism and convict slavery. While the presentation situates ocean studies in relation to a specific geographical location, it also recognises that many social, cultural and environmental issues are global.

Respondent: Morgan Daniels, Senior Lecturer in History and Media at Arcadia University, The College of Global Studies, London Centre.