Reputed playboy Peter Merriman inherits a company that harvests shells and pearls in the Coral Sea. He decides to visit the operations, arriving around the same time that the company's manager, Ted King, discovers a body out in the ocean. When King brings the body back, it sets off an investigation into the possibiilty of people-smuggling in the area, and the local police appeal to King for help.
Merriman arrives and a mutual attraction develops between him and King's daughter, Rusty. Some tension develops between Merriman and King, however, when the new boss shows them the modern diving equipment he wants to use in order to streamline the operation and save lives. King is later convinced when the equipment saves his own life. When the people-smugglers learn that King is on their trail, they take Rusty hostage, but King, his assistant Jack, and Merriman follow, using Merriman's aqualungs, rescue her, and capture the villains before the police arrive.
'In the aftermath of Second World War and in the beginning years of the Cold War, newly elected Prime Minister Robert Menzies reaffirmed the institutional relationship between masculinity and breadwinning that also spoke to a specific national ideal. In accordance with the ‘national narrative of work’, this article looks to historicise the relationship between historically specific understandings of gender and work, and how that relationship was represented in the 1954 Australian film King of the Coral Sea. Based around the pearling industry in the Torres Strait, the film’s narrative shows the introduction of new technology and the management of the workplace; both these representations functioned in accordance with post-war middle-class values. This article argues that King of the Coral Sea’s engagement with gendered ideals of work and class not only carries specific national meanings but also had broader implications for understandings of masculinity in the context of the Australian 1950s.'
Source: Sage Publishing.
'This article examines the genial 1950s matinee-styled adventure, King of the Coral Sea, a film set on Thursday Island. With Chips Rafferty playing pearling lugger captain Ted King, the film extends Rafferty's previous iconic national repertoire of digger, drover and bushman in an unprecedented (in entertainment cinema) imaginative 'nationalization' of the Torres Strait. The article proposes that the narrative - concerning the protection of the nation's daughters and borders from the threat of shadowy European illegal migration - can be read as a fantastic reversal of power relations in the post-war Pacific, where Australian multiracial enterprise is ably supported by American muscle. It locates the production and reception of the film within the discursive habitat of popular illustrated magazines, focusing on the visual deployment of race and gender in respect to assimilationist anxieties that form part of the imagining of a modern 'Australian way of life'. It further considers how this discourse shapes the deployment of the Torres Strait in a diegetic and extradiegetic relay, in order to imagine an established nationhood for Australia.'
'This article examines the genial 1950s matinee-styled adventure, King of the Coral Sea, a film set on Thursday Island. With Chips Rafferty playing pearling lugger captain Ted King, the film extends Rafferty's previous iconic national repertoire of digger, drover and bushman in an unprecedented (in entertainment cinema) imaginative 'nationalization' of the Torres Strait. The article proposes that the narrative - concerning the protection of the nation's daughters and borders from the threat of shadowy European illegal migration - can be read as a fantastic reversal of power relations in the post-war Pacific, where Australian multiracial enterprise is ably supported by American muscle. It locates the production and reception of the film within the discursive habitat of popular illustrated magazines, focusing on the visual deployment of race and gender in respect to assimilationist anxieties that form part of the imagining of a modern 'Australian way of life'. It further considers how this discourse shapes the deployment of the Torres Strait in a diegetic and extradiegetic relay, in order to imagine an established nationhood for Australia.'
'In the aftermath of Second World War and in the beginning years of the Cold War, newly elected Prime Minister Robert Menzies reaffirmed the institutional relationship between masculinity and breadwinning that also spoke to a specific national ideal. In accordance with the ‘national narrative of work’, this article looks to historicise the relationship between historically specific understandings of gender and work, and how that relationship was represented in the 1954 Australian film King of the Coral Sea. Based around the pearling industry in the Torres Strait, the film’s narrative shows the introduction of new technology and the management of the workplace; both these representations functioned in accordance with post-war middle-class values. This article argues that King of the Coral Sea’s engagement with gendered ideals of work and class not only carries specific national meanings but also had broader implications for understandings of masculinity in the context of the Australian 1950s.'
Source: Sage Publishing.
