“What Do You Want to Catch?”: Exploring the Maritime Cultural Landscapes of the Queenscliff Fishing Community

Abstract

This paper explores an innovative approach to the analysis of maritime cultural landscapes in an Australian Colonial setting, which was developed during Doctoral research. The study explored wider definitions of cultural landscape, and ways of accessing them. It explores the landscapes of a fishing community in Queenscliffe, a nineteenth century coastal town in Victoria, Australia, and delves into how the notion of maritime cultural landscapes might be expressed and investigated. It will be demonstrated that the methodological approaches commonly adopted in studies of Pacific Island mariner societies can be readily adapted for the examination of European maritime cultures. This study explored several unconventional data sets not usually employed in maritime archaeological research, but which are routinely utilised in hunter gatherer research worldwide to elucidate cognitive aspects of landscape formation and perception. These include oral histories, folklore, superstition, toponymy, symbology, and local traditional knowledge networks. This précis examines how, by using these alternative data sets to examine another hunter gatherer society, that of Australian fishermen, a whole raft of unexpected archaeological, social and cognitive observations emerged that expanded upon previous notions of their maritime cultural landscapes.