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Please God Send Me a Wreck

Responses to Shipwreck in a 19th Century Australian Community

Martin Gibbs author Brad Duncan author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Springer-Verlag New York Inc.

Published:25th May '15

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Please God Send Me a Wreck cover

This book explores the historical and archaeological evidence of the relationships between a coastal community and the shipwrecks that have occurred along the southern Australian shoreline over the last 160 years. It moves beyond a focus on shipwrecks as events and shows the short and long term economic, social and symbolic significance of wrecks and strandings to the people on the shoreline. This volume draws on extensive oral histories, documentary and archaeological research to examine the tensions within the community, negotiating its way between its roles as shipwreck saviours and salvors.

“Useful for anyone who identifies with the younger generation of maritime archaeologists, this volume simply refutes the atheoretical stance that largely permeated the discipline in the past. … This book remains useful for thinking about how shipping mishaps affected people and what these events meant in short- and long-term perspectives. This text ultimately demonstrates that the concept of shipping mishaps deserves continued archaeological attention.” (Madeline Fowler, Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol. 73 (3), 2017)

ISBN: 9781493926411

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 5148g

243 pages

2015 ed.