'From the viewpoint of their native element' : Diving in the colonial undersea

In 1952, The Australian Journal published two reports from the author Jean Devanny’s visit to Green Island (Wunyami) on the Great Barrier Reef. Diving underwater precipitated for Devanny an aesthetic and existential epiphany, as well as a minor but meaningful feminist achievement: ‘very few women,’ she wrote, had ‘actually descended in’ a diving bell previously. But most compelling – because most discomfiting – about Devanny’s articles is a moment when their watery reveries are interrupted by persons whose presences the scenario cannot seem to assimilate. Surveying her fascinating surroundings from the seabed, Devanny receives some unexpected ‘visitors’, men ‘brown’ and ‘strange’ whose arrival – and whose observations of the author herself – are framed as disturbances of the solo diver’s marinal communion. In this chapter, I approach these disruptions along three strands: the submarine erasure of Indo-Pacific labours, lives, and cultures; a solitary aesthetics of dreamlike submergence; and the strangely depoliticised construal, by The Australian Journal and others, of Devanny’s own authorship. I ask, ultimately, what these reefy reports might tell us about who and what is taken to belong beneath the waves – and how these things might matter for all our attempts to make knowledge in, of, and with the sea.