From Being Surrounded by Sea to Thinking Maritime

A Reflection Inspired by Michael Evans’ The Challenge of Australian Maritime Identity

Australia is surrounded by ocean.

This geographical fact seems simple. Yet geography alone does not necessarily determine how a society understands itself.

Michael Evans’ article The Challenge of Australian Maritime Identity, published in Quadrant in 2013, offers a thought-provoking exploration of this relationship between geography, history, culture and maritime consciousness. Evans begins from what he describes as an Australian paradox: Australia is an island-continent whose prosperity and strategic position are deeply connected to the sea, yet its national imagination has historically been shaped strongly by the continent, the interior and the land.

I am grateful for the opportunity to read this work. Rather than treating it simply as an argument about defence or strategy, I found myself thinking about a broader question that sits closely with the purpose of Ocean in Minds:

What makes a society maritime?

Geography Is Only the Beginning

One of the ideas that stayed with me after reading Evans’ article is the distinction between living beside the sea and thinking through the sea.

Australia has an extensive coastline. Many Australians live near the coast, and beaches, swimming, surfing, fishing and other coastal activities are familiar parts of everyday life. Yet Evans distinguishes this coastal affinity from a deeper maritime consciousness. For him, maritime awareness also involves how the sea enters national history, strategic thinking, economic understanding, literature, culture and collective identity.

This distinction is valuable.

A coastline can be mapped geographically, but a maritime relationship is also social and cultural.

People learn what the ocean means through stories, institutions, education, livelihoods, historical memory, policy and everyday experience. In this sense, maritime consciousness is not automatically produced by proximity to water.

It develops through the ways societies notice, interpret and give meaning to the sea.

Looking Inland, Looking Outward

Evans traces the historical prominence of Australia’s continental imagination. He discusses how settlement, exploration, pastoral development, mining, literature and national mythology helped make the inland landscape particularly powerful within Australian cultural identity. He contrasts this with the comparatively limited place of the sea in many national narratives.

His discussion of literature and art is particularly interesting from a human-dimensions perspective.

Landscapes are not simply physical settings. They can become cultural symbols through which societies understand themselves.

The bush, the outback, the pioneer and the inland explorer became powerful elements of Australian storytelling. Evans asks what it means when an island-continent develops such a strongly terrestrial imagination.

For Ocean in Minds, this invites a constructive extension of the conversation.

Perhaps maritime identity should not necessarily replace terrestrial identity.

Australia does not have to choose between land and sea.

A more integrated understanding might recognise that both environments contribute to how Australians understand place, belonging and their relationship with the wider region.

The Sea as Connection

Another important dimension of Evans’ article is his movement from the idea of the sea as separation towards the sea as connection.

Australia’s surrounding waters can be imagined as boundaries, but they are also routes through which people, goods, ideas, cultures and relationships move.

Evans particularly emphasises Australia’s position within the Indo-Pacific and its maritime connections with Southeast Asia. In his discussion of Australia’s future maritime outlook, he argues for understanding the surrounding seas less as defensive barriers and more as connections to the region and the wider world.

This perspective resonates strongly with Ocean in Minds.

The ocean simultaneously separates and connects.

It creates distance while also providing pathways.

For Australia, thinking maritime therefore does not have to mean thinking only about ships, naval capability or trade. It can also mean becoming more conscious of how ocean spaces connect Australia environmentally, socially, culturally, economically and politically with neighbouring societies.

Indonesia is particularly significant within that geography.

Seen from this perspective, Australia and Indonesia are not simply two countries separated by water. They are also situated within interconnected maritime spaces.

That relationship offers a rich area for continuing reflection.

Maritime Identity as Something That Can Grow

Perhaps the most constructive idea I take from Evans’ article is that national identity is not fixed.

Evans concludes that Australia’s cultural relationship with the sea can evolve and that maritime consciousness may grow alongside changes in Australia’s economy, demography, regional engagement and understanding of its position in the world.

I find this particularly important.

Identity does not need to be understood as something that a society either possesses or lacks completely.

Maritime awareness can develop gradually.

It may grow through education.

Through research.

Through maritime industries and coastal communities.

Through literature and cultural expression.

Through environmental stewardship.

Through relationships with neighbouring countries.

And perhaps simply through encouraging people to think more consciously about the ocean that is already part of their lives.

Where This Sits in Ocean in Minds

Ocean in Minds explores the human dimensions of the ocean: how people understand, value, imagine and govern marine and maritime environments.

Evans’ article provides an important strategic and historical contribution to that conversation. It also creates space for questions that extend beyond strategy:

How does maritime consciousness develop?

How do cultural narratives influence whether societies look toward the land or toward the sea?

Can maritime identity coexist with strong terrestrial identities?

How might education, ocean literacy, community experience and regional relationships contribute to a stronger awareness of the ocean?

And how might Australia increasingly understand the surrounding seas not only as geography, but as part of its relationship with the wider Indo-Pacific?

These are not questions that require immediate answers.

They are invitations to keep looking.

Perhaps becoming maritime begins not with declaring a maritime identity, but simply with becoming more attentive to the many ways the ocean is already present in national life.

Acknowledgement

This reflection was inspired by Michael Evans’ article The Challenge of Australian Maritime Identity. I acknowledge the author’s scholarship and the historical and strategic perspective developed in the article. This reflection does not seek to critique or reproduce its argument, but to consider some of the questions it raises through the human-dimensions perspective of Ocean in Minds.

An Island Surrounded by Sea: Does Geography Make Tasmania Maritime?

Beginning to wonder about maritime identity from Lutruwita/Tasmania

Living on an island makes the ocean difficult to ignore.

In Tasmania, the sea is never particularly far away. Coastlines shape the island. Harbours connect communities with places beyond them. Fisheries, aquaculture, shipping, marine science and recreation bring people into different relationships with the water. To the south lies the Southern Ocean and, beyond it, Antarctica.

Hobart itself is recognised as one of the world’s five Antarctic gateway cities and is home to significant Antarctic and marine science, research and logistical activity.

All of this seems unmistakably maritime.

And yet it leaves me wondering about something slightly different:

Does living on an island surrounded by sea necessarily mean that people develop a maritime identity?

Geography and identity are not necessarily the same thing

An island can be defined geographically.

Identity is more complicated.

Being physically close to the ocean does not necessarily tell us what the ocean means to people—or whether they think about it at all.

For one person, the sea might represent livelihood.

For another, recreation.

For someone else, scientific curiosity, environmental responsibility, family history, migration, food, transportation or simply the landscape visible from home.

And perhaps for some people, despite living on an island, the ocean occupies relatively little space in everyday thought.

This distinction interests me.

Tasmania is unquestionably an island.

But what makes a society—or a person—maritime?

Is proximity enough?

Or does maritime identity emerge through something more: experience, knowledge, culture, memory, livelihood, stories, institutions and relationships with place?

Relationships with sea did not begin with contemporary Tasmania

Any wondering about maritime identity from Tasmania also needs to recognise that relationships between people and sea here have histories extending far beyond contemporary maritime industries, institutions or European settlement.

The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre describes Country as encompassing lands, waterways, seas and sky, and describes the Palawa relationship with Country as ongoing, reciprocal and carrying responsibilities of care across generations.

This is important for the way I approach this question.

I am not seeking to interpret Palawa identity through my own framework, nor to incorporate Aboriginal relationships with Country into a definition created by me.

Rather, their existence reminds me that when we ask questions about maritime identity, we need to ask whose relationship with the sea we are talking about, whose knowledge we are learning from, and how different relationships should be understood on their own terms.

That is something I hope to continue learning about through Aboriginal voices and sources.

Tasmania’s many maritime relationships

Tasmania also offers many other ways of encountering the maritime world.

Its waters contain a substantial maritime heritage, including shipwrecks and other underwater cultural heritage.

Hobart has developed a particularly visible relationship with Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. Today it supports Antarctic science, education, research, logistics, policy and governance, while the city’s waterfront hosts major marine and Antarctic research institutions.

These connections make Tasmania fascinating to me.

But they also create another question.

Do strong maritime activities necessarily produce a strong maritime identity?

A place can have ships.

A place can have ports.

A place can have world-class marine scientists.

A place can have fishing communities and maritime industries.

But whether and how these things enter people’s understanding of themselves seems to be a different question altogether.

Perhaps there are many maritime Tasmanias

I am beginning to wonder whether searching for the maritime identity of Tasmania would itself be the wrong starting point.

Perhaps there are many.

The relationship of a Palawa community with Sea Country cannot simply be equated with that of a marine scientist.

The relationship of a fisher with the sea may differ from that of someone sailing recreationally on the Derwent.

An Antarctic researcher, an aquaculture worker, a recent migrant, a coastal resident and someone growing up inland may each understand the ocean differently.

These relationships might overlap.

They might also have very little in common.

And perhaps that diversity is itself important when thinking about maritime identity.

Beginning with a question

I am not beginning this series because I know what Australian—or Tasmanian—maritime identity is.

Quite the opposite.

My previous academic journey made me interested in relationships between people, identity and the maritime world. Encountering Tasmania has given me a new place from which to ask questions, but not a reason to assume that ideas developed in one sociocultural context can simply explain another.

So I want this exploration to begin slowly.

By reading.

By listening.

By noticing.

And by allowing questions to remain questions when I do not yet have enough knowledge to answer them.

Tasmania seems an appropriate place to begin because here the ocean is so physically present.

But perhaps physical presence is only the beginning.

An island can be surrounded by ocean. But when, how, and through what relationships does that ocean become part of the way people understand themselves?

I don’t yet know.

And that is precisely where I would like this journey of wondering about Australian maritime identity to begin.

Sources and further reading

For readers interested in the perspectives and contexts informing this reflection:

When Maritime Infrastructure Meets Antarctic Science: Reflecting on the RSV Nuyina

Australia’s Antarctic program connects some of the most remote places on Earth with a familiar waterfront in Hobart.

At the centre of that connection is the RSV Nuyina, Australia’s Antarctic research and resupply vessel. From its home port in Hobart, the vessel supports scientific research, station resupply and Australia’s wider Antarctic operations.

Yet an apparently straightforward operational requirement—refuelling the vessel—reveals how complex the relationship between science, maritime infrastructure, safety and governance can become.

A Ship, a Bridge and a Refuelling Question

Nuyina’s home berth is at Macquarie Wharf in Hobart. However, the marine fuel facility at Selfs Point lies beyond the Tasman Bridge.

The issue is not simply whether the vessel physically fits beneath or between the bridge structure. The key concern has been navigational safety and directional stability.

Following extensive simulations, the TasPorts harbourmaster determined in 2023 that the vessel should not transit the bridge. In 109 computer simulations, the virtual vessel made contact with the central pylons four times, while additional simulated passages were terminated before potential collisions occurred.

Consequently, Nuyina has been travelling to Burnie in north-west Tasmania for refuelling. The return journey adds approximately 674 kilometres and almost $900,000 annually to its fuel costs.

The Australian Antarctic Program’s published voyage schedules demonstrate how Burnie has consequently become incorporated into Nuyina’s operational logistics.

Safety Is Part of Maritime Governance

The Tasman Bridge also carries particular historical significance for Tasmania.

In 1975, the bulk carrier Lake Illawarra struck the bridge, resulting in the collapse of part of the structure and the loss of twelve lives. That history inevitably forms part of the context within which contemporary navigational risks around the bridge are assessed.

This makes the Nuyina situation particularly interesting from a governance perspective.

Operational efficiency matters.

So does cost.

So does maintaining Australia’s Antarctic capability.

But maritime governance also requires decisions about risks whose consequences, however unlikely, could be extremely serious.

The challenge therefore becomes one of finding solutions that allow these objectives to coexist rather than treating them as competing priorities.

Infrastructure Shapes What Science Can Do

There is another lesson here that extends well beyond Hobart.

Scientific capability does not end with laboratories, researchers or sophisticated vessels.

It also depends upon the infrastructure surrounding them.

Wharves, fuel facilities, ports, bridges, logistics networks and regulatory systems may appear peripheral to scientific research, yet they help determine whether scientific operations can function efficiently.

The current $188 million agreement between the Tasmanian and Australian governments for Macquarie Wharf includes work towards a longer-term refuelling solution for Nuyina. Options considered over time have included different approaches to delivering fuel as well as further consideration of whether safe bridge transit might ultimately be possible.

The eventual solution is for the responsible authorities and maritime experts to determine.

But the situation itself provides a valuable case for reflection.

An Ocean in Minds Perspective

Nuyina connects Tasmania with Antarctica.

Yet before the vessel reaches the Southern Ocean, its operation depends upon decisions made within a few kilometres of Hobart’s waterfront.

That small geographical distance contains a remarkably complex system: science, engineering, maritime expertise, infrastructure, public safety, environmental considerations, government and long-term planning.

Perhaps this is one of the less visible dimensions of our relationship with the ocean.

Ocean capability is not created by ships alone.

It emerges from the systems of people, knowledge, infrastructure and institutions that enable those ships to operate.

And strengthening our relationship with the ocean may therefore require us to think not only about what happens at sea, but also about the systems we build on land to support it.

Ocean Reflection#1: Ocean Literacy Begins with People

(Acknowledging the authors)

Before sharing my reflection, I would like to encourage readers to refer to the original white paper by Francis, Kelly, Swanson, Adyel, Arthur, Benkendorff, and their colleagues. This reflection is not intended to replace or summarise their work comprehensively. Instead, it is a personal reflection inspired by their publication. Readers interested in the full discussion, evidence, recommendations, and context are encouraged to read the original paper.

Reflection: Ocean Literacy Begins with People

Inspired by Francis, P., Kelly, R., Swanson, L., Adyel, T. M., Arthur, B., Benkendorff, K., and colleagues (2026). Strengthening Ocean Literacy: Marine Science Education and Training to Ensure Australia’s Blue Future. Australian Journal of Maritime & Ocean Affairs.

One of the privileges of reading academic work is recognising the immense effort behind it. This paper represents more than a literature review or a collection of recommendations—it reflects collaboration among researchers, educators, practitioners, and institutions who share a common aspiration: to strengthen Australia’s relationship with the ocean through knowledge, education, and collaboration. I sincerely acknowledge the authors and everyone who contributed to this vision. Their work provides an important foundation for future conversations about ocean literacy in Australia.

As I read the paper, one idea remained with me throughout: ocean sustainability ultimately depends on people.

The authors describe ocean literacy not simply as learning facts about the sea, but as developing understanding, stewardship, participation, and informed decision-making. They argue that marine science, education, government, industry, Indigenous knowledge holders, and communities all have a role in building a society capable of making better decisions for the future of our oceans. Rather than separating science from society, the paper encourages stronger connections between them through trust, dialogue, and collaboration.

Reading this paper also helped me understand where Oceaninminds sits.

Oceaninminds is not intended to duplicate the important work already being undertaken in ocean literacy, marine science, or environmental education. Instead, it offers a complementary perspective. While this paper focuses on strengthening ocean literacy through education systems, research, communication, and governance, Oceaninminds is interested in another question:

How do human mindsets shape our relationship with the ocean before knowledge becomes action?

Knowledge is essential, but people do not always act according to what they know. Values, identities, beliefs, lived experiences, culture, and social environments influence how knowledge is interpreted and whether it leads to meaningful behavioural change. Oceaninminds is curious about this human dimension—the internal processes that connect understanding with action.

This reflection also reminds me of my own research journey through Maritime Identity Development (MID) and Social Mindset Restructuring (SMR). My research has long explored how identity and mindset evolve through social interaction and collective experience. Reading this white paper suggests that these ideas may contribute another layer to conversations about ocean literacy. Ocean literacy can explain what people need to understand; Maritime Identity Development explores who people become in relation to the ocean; and Social Mindset Restructuring considers how societies gradually transform the ways they think and act over time.

Rather than viewing these perspectives as competing, I see them as complementary. Ocean literacy provides a strong national framework for building informed citizens. Oceaninminds seeks to explore the cognitive, cultural, and social pathways through which that literacy becomes part of people’s identities and everyday decisions.

One aspect of the paper I particularly appreciate is its recognition that meaningful progress depends on collaboration across disciplines and sectors. The authors acknowledge Indigenous knowledge systems, interdisciplinary education, community participation, co-produced research, and dialogue between science and society. This openness creates space for different perspectives to contribute toward the shared goal of healthier relationships between people and the ocean.

For me, this paper does not define the destination for Oceaninminds; rather, it helps clarify its direction.

If ocean literacy asks how society can become more informed about the ocean, Oceaninminds asks how people come to see themselves as part of the ocean’s future.

Perhaps these questions are not separate at all. Perhaps they are different parts of the same journey.

Tonight, I leave this paper with gratitude—for the generosity of its authors, for the collaborative spirit it represents, and for the reminder that sustainable oceans will always depend on the ways people learn, think, connect, and ultimately choose to care.

A note to readers

This reflection represents my personal learning journey after reading the authors’ work. It should not be interpreted as a review or a substitute for the original publication. I warmly encourage readers to explore the original white paper, Strengthening Ocean Literacy: Marine Science Education and Training to Ensure Australia’s Blue Future, by Prue Francis, Rachel Kelly, Louise Swanson, Tanveer M. Adyel, Benjamin Arthur, Kirsten Benkendorff, and colleagues. Their work provides a comprehensive and thoughtful vision for advancing ocean literacy in Australia, and this reflection simply captures how it has informed the evolving perspective of Oceaninminds.

Why Ocean in Minds?

The ocean is more than a physical environment. It shapes our identities, cultures, livelihoods, governance, and the future we share.

Ocean in Minds was created from a simple belief: that the future of our oceans depends not only on scientific knowledge, but also on how people think about the ocean and their relationship with it.

This platform is a space for research, reflection, and interdisciplinary dialogue. It explores the human dimensions of the ocean, connecting ideas from marine science, social science, governance, and public policy.

Whether you are a researcher, student, policymaker, practitioner, or simply curious about the ocean, I hope these reflections encourage new ways of thinking and meaningful conversations.

Welcome to Ocean in Minds.

Author: Ocean in Minds