Tanya King

Tanya King is a Senior Lecturer in anthropology at Deakin University, Geelong, Australia. She is interested in issues relating to natural resource management, ‘consultation’, rural and regional health, the environment, gender, national identity, public policy and mythical sea creatures. Her doctoral research considered the lives of Bass Strait shark fishermen and the Commonwealth fisheries public servants who manage the industry from Canberra. Her research stresses the disjunction between practical parameters salient to fishermen (eg. tides, markets, crew dynamics) and to fisheries managers (eg. international trade agreements, political cycles, legal precedents). Her more recent work has addressed conflict over drought mitigation measures in Australia, particularly in relation to reverse-osmosis desalination. One of the key findings from this study is that there is a lack of consensus over what constitutes ‘consultation’ between governing bodies and stakeholder communities, and that Australians tend to have a low level of understanding of, and even less faith in, formal government consultation procedures. Her current research investigates how Australian fishermen access health information, and proposes practical and cost-effective strategies for enhancing and augmenting these avenues.