What Lies Below: Cephalopods and Humans

Abstract

Two days after Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was deposed by his deputy, Julia Gillard, an illustration featuring a large octopus appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald. The so-called ‘bloodless coup’ was sudden and unexpected by the public and by, apparently, Rudd himself. The article adjacent to the illustration was captioned ‘Grisly Thud of a Kneecapped Rudd’. Walking across a deceptively regular (if not exactly calm) sea surface, the Prime Minister is depicted exiting to the right, while, below the waves and to his left, the shape of an octopus can be seen. Projecting above the water, and snaking towards the now former Prime Minister are two red tentacles extending from the octopus’s body, red where it is seen above water. (Gillard has red hair and her backers were allegedly Australian Labor Party Faction members.)¹ The ‘Octopus’ thus represents Gillard and a political ‘mafia’ (the Mafia has frequently been zoomorphised as an octopus) whose cryptic power can threaten all social and political groups. Even without the ‘knee-capped’ in the adjacent column, readers of the Herald can be expected to understand the reference, because the Cephalopoda, particularly the octopus and giant squid, are much more familiar as metaphors and in representation than as living animals; the exceptions to this being the foods into which the smaller species of the group are captured and ‘processed’.