Fowler, Madeline (2017) Book review of "Please God Send Me A Wreck: responses to shipwreck in a 19th century Australian community" by Brad Duncan and Martin Gibbs. New York, NY, USA, Springer, 2015. ISBN: 978-1493926411. Journal of Anthropological Research, 73 (3). pp. 493-495.

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Abstract

The title of Brad Duncan and Martin Gibbs's 2015 book, Please God Send Me a Wreck, rapidly conveys the contradiction between wrecks as crises and wrecks as boons— savior and salvor, altruism and opportunity. This third volume in the Advisory Council on Underwater Archaeology (ACUA) and Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA) series When the Land Meets the Sea represents the work of the state maritime archaeologist (New South Wales Heritage Branch) and a professor of Australian archaeology (University of New England), respectively. This Springer-published set covers archaeological work on single, or a collection of related, sites that encompass both underwater and terrestrial investigations. The recent addition, in the genre of anthropologically oriented archaeological essays, adopts the nineteenth- and twentieth-century communities of Queenscliffe, in the southern Australian state of Victoria, as a case study. It casts the community as the central protagonist in a landscape where shipping mishaps take center stage. Pilot, lighthouse, hydrographic, lifeboat, and customs services act as the key players, orchestrating responses to shipping mishaps encompassing stranding, wrecking, rescue, salvage, looting, caching, beachcombing, and souveniring.

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