Between the devil and the deep blue sea: negotiating ambiguous physical and social boundaries within the shark fishing industry of Bass Strait, Australia.

This thesis addresses questions of identity and ontological legitimacy within the commercial shark fishing community of Bass Strait, Australia. The implications of competing discourses for the integrity of fisher identity, environmental conservation and public narratives on environmental 'crises' are considered. Ethnographic material is drawn on and developed with commercial fishers and, to a lesser extent, fisheries 'experts', to explore ambiguities in understandings of individuality and perceptions of the marine environment. Informing this analysis are theories of practice, particularly notions of embodied relationships and knowledge, the role of 'luck' in enabling a particular expression of 'individuality', the 'skipper effect', a consideration of nation-state sanctioned and popular media representations of the environment, and the peculiarly Australian experience and representation of individuality, both as performance and as trope. These themes are considered against a backdrop of the physical and social activities involved in commercial fishing, and the 2001 nation-state-initiated introduction of an Individual Transferable Quota management system.