Writing the Australian Beach: Local Site, Global Idea 3030352633, 9783030352639

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Writing the Australian Beach Local Site, Global Idea Edited by Elizabeth Ellison Donna Lee Brien

Writing the Australian Beach

Elizabeth Ellison · Donna Lee Brien Editors

Writing the Australian Beach Local Site, Global Idea

Editors Elizabeth Ellison Creative Industries Central Queensland University Noosaville, QLD, Australia

Donna Lee Brien Creative Industries Central Queensland University Noosaville, QLD, Australia

ISBN 978-3-030-35263-9 ISBN 978-3-030-35264-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35264-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Greg Balfour Evans/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Foreword

After a flurry of attention during the 1980s and 1990s, the Australian beach seems to have dropped off the research radar in terms of arts and humanities focused research. Scientists, historians and sociologists have continued to publish articles on that social and natural phenomenon, but it has been some time since there was a book on contemporary Australian beach culture. This is a significant lacuna, given that Australia is—as the national anthem has it—girt by sea. Although this phrase attracts a lot of mirth, it is also a truism: Australia, as an island continent, has only one national border and that is the beach. The beach is an uncertain border, changing with each tide, shifting as sea levels rise and fall. Given that humans tend to be uncomfortable in the face of uncertainty, it is perhaps not entirely surprising that scholars of cultural practice have been looking elsewhere, during these last two turbulent decades. The beach is conventionally associated with the term ‘liminal’: a word that did so much business in the 1990s that it seemingly needed to rest during the 2000s before again being put to work. It exquisitely conveys the threshold state, the transitional, the not-quite-thereness that orients thinking about the beach, and can so easily be applied to other aspects of social and political life. The liminal exists as that flicker of a something we catch from the corner of the eye; the slightest sensation, so faint that it is hard to be certain it was there; and the uncertainty reminding us that everyday reality is not a settled state.

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This may disturb individuals, but it resonates wonderfully for writers and other artists, with the inbetween-ness that characterises the liminal a spur to creative practice, as well as to critical thinking. A new volume on the beach and its unpredictability, therefore, on the multiplicity of its meanings, its uses and its users, is timely. It is timely too because the popular story of the beach in Australia remains, to a significant extent, what it has been for the last half-century. Pretty girls in bikinis; toned young men with boards; happy children; and beach umbrellas all set against the background of an azure ocean. This is the stuff of advertisingmade-real. But there is the underbelly: sharks and the careless slaughter of sharks; rape and murder under cover of darkness (or not); the not-sogradual extinction of the Great Barrier Reef; the exclusion of people of the ‘wrong’ colour and people of the ‘wrong’ class; and a refusal to accommodate what, for millennia, the beach has meant for the traditional owners and custodians of this country. It does not take many steps to move from the beach as haven to the beach as platform for ongoing social and environmental crises and, in Australian cultural imaginary, the idea of ‘beach’ accommodates the whole sweep of this continuum. If twentieth-century stories about the Australian beach can be characterised by their hints of hedonism, exemplifications of community and family and gestures towards natural and human threat, perhaps twentyfirst-century stories may afford something new: the opportunity to bring a fresh, and a more diverse, gaze onto the stories and myths of the beach and, in that, build understandings of how Australian culture has changed, and might yet change even further, to acknowledge its ancient and more recent past and assist in preparing for a complex future. Jen Webb Distinguished Professor, Creative Practice Dean of Graduate Research University of Canberra Canberra, Australia

Acknowledgements

As the editors of this collection, it is important for us to acknowledge the support and work of a number of people who helped us make this book the best version it could be. We are very lucky to have the support of our university, Central Queensland University, and especially our Dean of the School of Education and the Arts, Professor William (Bill) Blayney. This collection emerged from a symposium that took place at the Noosa campus of our university, and we thank the symposiasts who attended and generously contributed their ideas to the event. We would also like to warmly acknowledge the support of the campus staff, including our Associate Vice-Chancellor, Dr. Teressa Schmidt, and the campus professional staff in assisting in the holding of this event. In the development of the book, we were grateful to have the assistance of a team of dedicated, careful and sympathetic intern editors: Virginia Cairns, Jo French and Jacqueline Green. Intern Brodie Smart also assisted with early versions of the proposal. We are appreciative of the enthusiasm of Distinguished Professor Jen Webb, who kindly contributed the Foreword for this collection. We also thank the blind peer reviewers, whose constructive feedback provided useful direction and ideas for improving the collection. The book, of course, would not be complete without the motivation and the dedication of our contributors, who displayed intellectual curiosity and creativity, collegiality and ongoing patience with us throughout this collation and editing process. We hope they too are proud of the final result.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The team at Palgrave have been supportive and creative throughout the editing and production process. As scholarly publishing becomes more automated and impersonal, we thank everyone for their help and collegiality. Finally, we are indebted to our family and friends who supported us through the long journey of developing, writing and finally completing this book: in particular, Mark and Laika and Wes, Kim, Tiger, Kittee and Batty. And thank you to Jae, who, although unable to see the end, was an important part of the journey. Elizabeth Ellison Donna Lee Brien

Contents

Writing the Australian Beach: Texts, Sites, Events and People Elizabeth Ellison and Donna Lee Brien

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Forms of Beach Writing Surfers, Lifeguards and New Voices: A Short History of Beach Writing in Australia Elizabeth Ellison

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Screenwriting the Beach: Conflict, Catharsis and the Character Arc in Australian Film Craig Batty, Philippa Burne and Stephen Gaunson

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Instafamous: Social Media Influencers and Australian Beaches Marjorie Kibby

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Food Writing and the Australian Beach: From Leisure to Labour Donna Lee Brien

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CONTENTS

Multiplicities of Australian Beach Writing Exploring Australian Coastal Gothic: Poetry and Place Lynda Hawryluk

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Writing Noosa’s Beach: Travellers’ Narratives and Modernity Nick Osbaldiston

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Beaches in Australian Horror Films: Sites of Fear and Retreat Mark David Ryan and Elizabeth Ellison

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Challenging the Beach as Paradise in Fiction and Memoir: The Gold Coast’s Bathing Beauties Kelly Palmer

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Reading the Beach as Text Walking the Australian Beach: Mapping Footprints in the Sand Lesley Hawkes Australian Beach Soccer: Tracing Paradoxical Narratives Lee McGowan, Elizabeth Ellison and Michele Lastella Australia’s Ocean Baths: Stories of Design, Aesthetics and Swimming Susan Carson

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Sculpture by the Sea: A Visual Essay Mark Maxwell and Elizabeth Ellison

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

Craig Batty is Professor and Head of Creative Writing at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. He is the author, co-author and editor of eleven books, including Writing for the Screen: Creative and Critical Approaches (2nd ed.) (2019), Screen Production Research: Creative Practice as a Mode of Enquiry (2018) and Screenwriters and Screenwriting: Putting Practice into Context (2014). Donna Lee Brien is Professor of Creative Industries at Central Queensland University, Australia. Specialising in research on genres of non-fiction writing, Donna’s recent co-edited books include Publishing and Culture (2019), Offshoot: Contemporary Life Writing Methodologies and Practice (2018), The Routledge Companion to Literature and Food (2018) and Recovering History Through Fact and Fiction: Forgotten Lives (2017). Philippa Burne is Lecturer in Screenwriting at the School of Film and Television, Victorian College of the Arts at University of Melbourne, Australia. She has worked as a screenwriter and script developer since 2000 in Australia, Europe and the USA. Her current doctoral research is investigating writing emotion in the romantic comedy. Susan Carson is Professor and Academic Program Director in the School of Communication at Queensland University of Technology, Australia, and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Authority. Her most recent monograph is Performing Cultural Tourism: Communities, Tourists and Creative Practices (Routledge, 2017). She publishes xi

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in Australian Studies and Communication, and postgraduate pedagogies, and is currently working on the representation of cultural landscapes on social media platforms. Elizabeth Ellison is Senior Lecturer of Creative Industries and Academic Coordinator of the Creative Arts Research Training Academy at Central Queensland University, Australia. Liz has published significant contributions in contemporary Australian beach studies and has also exhibited a collection of creative works about the beach. She has a public profile on the Sunshine Coast and nationally as a key voice on beach culture, delivering a number of public talks and media interviews. Stephen Gaunson is Senior Lecturer and the HDR Director in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Australia. His research explores the subject of history on the screen and the industries of film exhibition, marketing and distribution. In 2017, he was recipient of a Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning in the Australian Awards for University Teaching. Lesley Hawkes is Associate Professor in Professional Writing in the School of Communication in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Her areas of research include Australian Literature, spatial belonging and environmental concerns. She also has a strong research interest in transport and imagination. Lynda Hawryluk is Senior Lecturer in Writing at Southern Cross University where she is the Course Coordinator of the Associate Degree of Creative Writing. The immediate past President/Chair of the Australasian Association of Writing Programs and a Committee Member of the Byron Writers Festival, Lynda has presented workshops for community and writing groups in Australia and Canada. Marjorie Kibby worked as Associate Professor and has recently retired from a position in Film, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Since 1997, her research and teaching interests have centred on aspects of online communication and community. Her publications include examinations of the use of the Internet and social media by young people, the development of online mores and the distinct online practices of those who have grown up with the Internet.

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Michele Lastella is Senior Lecturer at Central Queensland University’s Appleton Institute for Behavioural Science in Adelaide, Australia. Michele’s research interests include sleep, sport psychology and athletic performance. A former elite athlete, Michele brings experience from the perspectives of athlete and researcher and has worked with several sporting organisations examining sleep, recovery and performance. Mark Maxwell is a house music producer, DJ and photographer currently based on the Sunshine Coast in Australia. He has released music through renowned national and international labels and has played in venues across Australia. He enjoys contrasting this work with an alternative creative outlet in his photography. Mark lives at the beach and documents beach landscapes both locally and across the country. Lee McGowan is Senior Lecturer at University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. A practitioner-researcher with a keen interest in digital narratives, football research and creative writing, his publications include locative literature projects and a work of experimental theatre. He recently won the Brisbane City Council Lord Mayor’s Helen Taylor Community History Award. Nick Osbaldiston is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at James Cook University’s Cairns Campus in Queensland, Australia. He is the author of Towards a Sociology of the Coast (2018) and Seeking Authenticity in Place, Culture and Self (2012). His research focuses on lifestyle migration and coastal development. Kelly Palmer recently completed her Ph.D. in Creative Writing, Literary Studies and Cultural Studies at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Her studies of Gold Coast texts and writing appear in The Routledge Handbook of Popular Culture and Tourism and journals Queensland Review and Transnational Literature. Mark David Ryan is Associate Professor in Film, Screen and Animation at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Writing on Australian cinema and genre cinema, Mark is co-editor of Australian Screen in the 2000s (2017) and the Directory of World Cinema: Australia and New Zealand 2 (2015). He was President of the Screen Studies Association of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand (SSAAANZ) from 2015 to 2018.

List of Figures

Australia’s Ocean Baths: Stories of Design, Aesthetics and Swimming Fig. 1

Sculpture of Mina Wylie, Coogee (Photo: Michele Withers. Permission supplied)

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Sculpture by the Sea: A Visual Essay Fig. 1

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A wide angle shot of Cottesloe’s beach at sunset, showing the Cottesloe Pavilion on the left and incorporating a number of major sculptures. Most obvious here is Geoff Overheu’s ‘Final Approach’ (2018), a red aeroplane signalling the end of Modernism Tsukasa Nakahara’s ‘Water Blocks’ (2016). One of our favourite pieces, these glass and stainless steel blocks are representative, and reflective, of the waves of the ocean behind them John Petrie’s ‘Space’ (2018) is a striking sculpture placed on the groyne at Cottesloe Beach. Petrie shaped the sculpture from ancient basalt (Sculpture by the Sea 2018a) People feel more comfortable engaging and interacting with the sculptures outside of the gallery space. Just visible in the background is Stuart Green’s ‘(b)RAIN’ (2018) Observers are captivated by the ocean and the beach, and also Yumin Jing’s ‘Travelling Bag’ (2016) at Bondi Beach

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Fig. 7 Fig. 8 Fig. 9

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Sunset over the groyne at Cottesloe. The piece visible at the end of the walkway is R. M. Gomboc’s ‘The Elder’ (2018) and, in the foreground, Overhue’s ‘Final Approach’ Cottesloe at sunrise. In the foreground is one of the many cats that form Mikaela Castledine’s sculpture ‘Feral’ (2018) Cottesloe at sunset, again showcasing Castledine’s ‘Feral’ but this time featuring a large number of visitors Alessandra Rossi’s ‘Untitled (Coral)’ (2016), a powerful piece that speaks to the damage of coral bleaching in nature while also being a “metaphor for the patination and discoloration of emotion engendered by the digital era” (Sculpture by the Sea 2016, 68) A casualty of high seas and a rough storm, Angelika Summa’s ‘Alien – Self-Consciousness is a Virus from Outer Space’ (from Bondi in 2016) was damaged, dismantled and removed before the end of the festival Denise Pepper’s ‘Waiting in the Wings’ (2018, Cottesloe) was a popular attraction, especially during sunset with the metallic segments glinting in the late afternoon light April Pine’s ‘Spirit’ (2018) on Cottesloe Beach, featuring a number of aluminium dogs that attracted the attention of many viewers, particularly, but certainly not exclusively, children

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Writing the Australian Beach: Texts, Sites, Events and People Elizabeth Ellison and Donna Lee Brien

Introduction Australian national identity has a long history of being intrinsically tied with the landscape. Representations of Australia have heavily featured the rural and, sometimes infamous, outback, with a wide range of literary and filmic texts showcasing the enduring interest audiences have in what is colloquially known as ‘the bush’. And yet, most Australians live in coastal regions and have done so for many, many decades. The Australian beach is a part of the everyday life of many residents, a popular tourist destination and an iconic symbol of international significance. Considering the ongoing influence of key Australian authors with wide international readerships who regularly write about the beach, as well as the prominence of the beach in a range of other cultural texts, including television, film and advertising, it is clear that the beach—as a site, an image and an idea—continues to play a significant role in Australian culture. One moment which can be read as re-cementing the Australian beach into the national as well as global consciousness occurred during the Sydney

E. Ellison (B) · D. L. Brien Creative Industries, Central Queensland University, Noosaville, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] D. L. Brien e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Ellison and D. L. Brien (eds.), Writing the Australian Beach, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35264-6_1

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2000 Olympics Closing Ceremony, which featured Kylie Minogue, one of the country’s best-known international entertainment stars, singing aboard a single, giant thong (the popular casual backless beach sandal also known as ‘flip-flops’ in the USA and UK, ‘jandals’ in New Zealand and ‘slops’ in South Africa). A second moment, almost two decades later, occurred when the 2018 Commonwealth Games were held on Queensland’s iconic Gold Coast. This further underlined the ability of the image of the beach as able to communicate the idea of Australia in national and international imaginations. Beach iconography was clearly evident in both these events: for example, the beach volleyball stands at the 2018 Commonwealth Games included lifeguard towers as DJ booths. Yet, the role of the beach in this idea-making is contested. John Fiske, Bob Hodge and Graeme Turner include the beach as one of their “Myths of Oz [Australia]” (1987), while Meaghan Morris deliberately considered the Australian beach in opposition to this myth-making, perhaps instead as “ordinary” (1998, 101–119). The beach, moreover, occupies a complex position as both a quotidian part of Australian life as well as a mythically beautiful and desirable iconic locale for many Australians and tourists alike. To compound this complexity, the Australian beach, despite its popularity with its users and visitors, is not well represented in non-fiction and/or academic texts outside the realm of geographical, environmental and other such related studies. Discussions of the beach as a central cultural site include the seminal work by Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore (1986), which positioned the beach as a site of colonial possession. Fiske, Hodge and Turner’s groundbreaking Myths of Oz referred to above— first published in 1987 and re-released in 2016—paid the beach particular attention in one of its chapters, which has been widely quoted in the contributions in this volume. However, despite the generally agreed iconicity of the beach as a site, few classic works about Australia and Australian identity solely focus on interrogating and understanding the Australian beach. More recent notable titles include Leone Huntsman’s Sand in Our Souls (2001), which is a significant text that examines beach culture and its representations in popular culture, but was published almost two decades ago. Also from 2001, Douglas Booth’s Australian Beach Cultures takes a more sociological view, including a chapter that specifically examines surfers. Although significant at the time and making an ongoing contribution to the field, both of these books concluded by questioning the place of the beach in the Australian psyche, asking whether

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the ‘beach was dead’ in Australia, due to the lack of serious consideration of the space. While investigations into Australian culture, such as Catriona Elder’s Being Australian (2007), often examine the beach within the broader context of Australian identity, the beach is a significant Australian landscape that in, and of, itself can provide rich material for more focused studies. Taking such a focused approach to the Australian beach, Writing the Australian Beach assumes a broad scholarly approach in examining this locale. This acknowledges the work in some more specific texts. Ed Jaggard’s Bodysurfers and Australian Beach Culture (2006), for instance, focuses in on bodysurfing and its relation to Australian beach culture. A publication that explores Australian beaches and how they are used by visitors is Tourism and Australian Beach Cultures: Revealing Bodies (Metusela and Waitt 2012). Solely addressing the beaches in the Illawarra, New South Wales, this text tailors its research towards a tourism perspective. Ann Game, a long-time researcher of Bondi Beach, released On Bondi Beach in 2013, written in conjunction with Andrew Metcalfe and Demelza Marlin. This work is a collection of evidence drawn from interviews with locals and visitors to Bondi that takes an ethnographic, lived experience approach to the topic. One of the contributors to this volume, Nick Osbaldiston, recently published Towards a Sociology of the Coast: Our Past, Present and Future Relationship to the Shore (2017), arguing for an ethical rethinking of how the coast is used in order to foster its protection. While acknowledging these strong contributions to the study of beach and its culture in Australia, the contributors to Writing the Australian Beach ground their work within a cultural and literary studies approach while also threading in perspectives from sociology, ethnography and creative arts practice. As a result, Writing the Australian Beach addresses a range of creative and cultural representations of this iconic landscape. It is concerned with the question of how writers and scholars have attempted to understand, represent and, indeed, write about this iconic landscape. This recognises that while iconically Australian, the Australian beach has resonance beyond national borders, as its imaging and representations permeate through international networks, linking global audiences to this site. In this way, local landscapes can have meaning for consumers far beyond a single country. In response, this volume brings together work from across a range of creative and cultural disciplines to investigate the role the Australian beach and its surrounds play in local and global cultural identities.

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Spaces of the Beach By definition, the Australian beach is a landscape and reading the site as a space is a focus for Philip Drew in The Coast Dwellers (1994). In this work, Drew identifies the verandah as a crucial part of Australian geography—a place between the colonial outback and more modernised urban coastal regions. At that time, Drew argued that there were “no books about Australian space and little speculation or discussion” and that recognising the use of space “reveals how Australians have responded to the physical presence of Australia” (10–11). In responding to, and imagining, this physical presence, the coastline is important, for the way that liminal edge is encountered, represented and understood identifies elements of what makes Australians Australian. Of course, the coastline and the beach are not a single, monolithic entity (Ellison and Hawkes 2016). E. V. Walter’s work on space is useful here, as it distinguishes between space and place: space being an abstract concept while place is more concrete and able to be “seen, heard, smelled, imagined, loved, hated, feared, revered, enjoyed, or avoided” (1988, 142). For Walter, space can become a place through the process of naming, and this is a concept that Paul Carter has also discussed through a more historically focused approach. For Carter, naming a space transforms it “symbolically into a place, that is, a space with history” (1987, xxiv). In The Road to Botany Bay, Carter examines Captain James Cook’s extensive process of naming the continent during his first expedition to the land which would be later (and now) known as Australia. This naming and the colonisation that followed ignored the ownership systems of the Indigenous inhabitants and instead acted as an aggressive form of symbolic ownership that has endured since (Elder 2007, 14). Aileen Moreton-Robinson suggests coloniser and migrant ideas of belonging are fundamentally racist, “based on the dispossession of the original owners of the land and the denial of our rights under international customary law” (2003, 23). Although the beach in Australia is officially listed as a public space and managed by local councils across the country, Moreton-Robinson argues that the beach “continues to be controlled by white men, the embodiment of universal humanness and national identity” (2011, 60). As such, it cannot be ignored that the beach is not only a far more complex site in Australian society than is often represented, but also that the beach and its narratives are still largely masculine and white.

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In her article titled ‘The Beach as “Dreaming Place”’ (2003), Anne Brewster provides an important investigation of representations of the beach in Australia literature. She labels the beach as a “border zone where the invader occupies the indigene’s land” (39), but also as a “zone in which different temporalities conjoin” (35). Importantly, Brewster warns against locating Aboriginality only in the past: “Although the dominant culture may locate the constitutive elements of Aboriginality solely in the past, this is not the only way Aboriginal people experience their Aboriginality” (39). As far as beach culture is concerned, there appears to be a dominance of white, masculine voices in contemporary texts, and this speaks to the Anglicised view of the beach in Australia and, indeed, of place and landscape more generally. Contemporary representations of Indigenous characters in Australia, however, continue to contribute to challenging this interpretation. This includes some examples of parody and satire that confront this normative, white interpretation of the beach. Anita Heiss uses satire in her innovative collection of humorous provocations, Sacred Cows (1996), for instance, as a way of contesting this predominantly Anglo-Australian beach culture. In the preface, Heiss identified her intention to write purposively from a position of authority: What I have done in this book is something that non-Indigenous authors have been doing for years. I have looked at an opposing culture from an assumed authoritative position, stating perceptions as well as suggestions for bettering it. (1996, xi)

Heiss targets the iconic figure of the (male) Australian beach lifeguard, who she identifies as “bowlegged, broad-shouldered, mirrored-sunglasses and walkie-talkied lifeguards [who are] on a power trip as they blow their whistles and pump their biceps” (1996, 28). In this focus, Heiss prompts an uncomfortable position of awareness in a white reader by criticising, through her use of humour, Anglo-Australian culture from an outsider’s perspective. She maintains her distance from this version of Australia, selfconsciously assigning herself as Other to it. Additional examples include Indigenous photographer Dianne Jones who inserts herself into the frame of Max Dupain’s iconic image in Sunbaker (Cathcart 2010) or the skit ‘Bondi Blackfella’ from Black Comedy (Cole et al. 2019, season 3 episode 1) which satirically plays on the premise of reality television show Bondi Rescue (2006–ongoing), in which the bronzed lifesaver character who

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berates a drowning man for not swimming between the flags is an Indigenous man. The dominance of white, masculine voices in relation to both theorising about, and representations of, Australian beach culture is noted in a number of chapters within this collection. In this light, while the volume includes a range of scholars from early career to senior researchers, we acknowledge the dominance of white voices. In this context, it is worth noting the already heavy expectations of academic labour on the growing, but still small, cohort of Indigenous scholars in Australia, a situation which is exacerbated by small numbers of Indigenous graduate student enrolments and completions (O’Sullivan 2018). Although wanting to include Indigenous perspectives and voices, we were unsuccessful in our attempts to include contributions written by Indigenous scholars for this collection. As editors, it soon became clear that we could not expect an Indigenous academic to contribute to a topic that would require a burdensome reaching beyond their expertise; nor to contribute to a collection that they felt—rightly—was not being driven by Indigenous voices. We have, however, referenced the work of Indigenous scholars and authors where possible throughout the collection and certainly flag this area as both a limitation of this book and an area worthy of future consideration. This lack of Indigenous voices reflects not only that the colonial past of the country is Eurocentric, but how much writing of, and about, the beach reflects this: there are far fewer texts written by, and about, Indigenous Australians and an absence of Indigenous representation in many non-Indigenous authored works. Notably, however, scholarship around Australian national identity and culture is shifting. Ongoing Indigenous scholarship like that of Aileen Moreton-Robinson is contesting colonial and postcolonial readings of Australia and its identity; other works, like that of Indigenous lawyer and author Terri Janke, are contributing major insights to understanding and capturing Indigenous knowledges and cultural properties. In addition, in the early months of 2019 as we write this, the current climate around Australian identity is heated. In the aftermath of a significant racially and religiously motivated shooting event in Christchurch, New Zealand, Australian scholars are attempting to make sense of this extremist, terrorist behaviour committed by a white Australian (see, e.g., Kirsty Campion writing in The Conversation about rightwing extremism in 2019). Such an event does not happen in isolation, and while there are many factors that led to this specific outrage, as an

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event it certainly echoes elements of the 2005 Cronulla race riots that occurred on a well-known suburban beach in Sydney, New South Wales, some fifteen years ago. There, the beach—that mythical symbol of egalitarianism—was the setting for days of violent, masculine confrontation, revealing what Affrica Taylor called the “selective amnesia of the White postcolonial ‘custodians’” (2009, 118). It is to be remembered that patterns of colonisation in Australia saw significant bloodshed in the coastal regions of the country, and many Indigenous communities were pushed violently inland. Michael Cathcart notes that fresh water was a key part of this conflict: “In a country where water was scarce – and where it was central to the cultures of the Aboriginal peoples – the battle for land was also a battle for water” (2009, 6). It is, thus, perhaps unsurprising that some Indigenous texts show more resonance with fresh water sources than with beaches. And yet, the beach has not been completely absent from Indigenous writing or other cultural production. Authors such as Anita Heiss (notably in Sacred Cows, discussed above) and Terri Janke, and filmmaker Tracey Moffatt, have engaged with beach landscapes. The powerful finale of Rachel Perkins’ adaptation of Louis Nowra’s play Radiance (1998) ends on the beach. Conversely, non-Indigenous works, such as Baz Luhrman’s Australia (2008), can arguably be read as romanticising Aboriginal people and their spirituality, as in this film’s narrative reimagining of the bombing of Darwin (including key scenes along the beaches) during the Second World War. In such white readings, the Australian beach often becomes a signifier of the country’s myth of being a classless, egalitarian society. Yet, the racially charged Cronulla riots in 2005 were one example of how interactions on the beach can clearly reveal the inherent tensions in Australian culture.

Texts, Sites, Events and People Writing the Australian Beach brings together works from a number of authors across a range of academic interests, backgrounds, experiences and institutions. Reflecting this range, the book covers a variety of topics. These bridge experiences, and functions, of the beach (including as a site for walking, bathing, cooking, sports) as well as investigating how cultural texts represent this space. Specific Australian beaches examined include Bondi Beach (Sydney, New South Wales), Surfers Paradise (Gold Coast, Queensland), Noosa (South-East Queensland) and Cottesloe Beach (Perth, Western Australia). In this collection, as editors, we sought

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to present a range of perspectives on the cultural representations of the beach in Australian texts, collating these discussions into three parts: forms of beach writing; multiplicities of Australian beach writing; and reading the beach as a text. These sections and the discussions within them use a range of theoretical frameworks to examine the Australian beach as space, concept and idea. Underpinning the focus of the works in this collection is a sense of examining representations of the beach in texts (novels, stories, poetry, films, cookbooks and so on) and as a space in which cultural identity is situated (in terms of beach soccer, walking, eating and ocean bathing). Of course, representation is a concept larger than what can be appropriately defined or contained in a single volume such as this. This collection, however, does approach the beach as a space in which a range of meaning-making activities can be identified, as well as a space which can reveal a number of interpretations of Australian cultural identity. That said, its geography and identity do continue to shift and it is important to identify the moveable nature of representation in the arts and media industries. As Jen Webb suggests about representation in her influential text Understanding Representation (2009), “It is not a fixed or monolithic sector; so it can be the place where both radical change and deep consolation are made available, and where the complexities and the perplexities of being both subject of representation and living body can be understood and accommodated” (129). What the chapters in this collection share is a reading of texts as markers of significance, recognising these texts as artefacts that reveal truths, interpretations and readings of the Australian beach and its role in society. Alan McKee identifies that textual analysis is, fundamentally, framed around an idea that: “If we want to understand the world we live in, then we have to understand how people are making sense of that world” (2001, 144, original emphasis). Graeme Turner, writing about national narratives in National Fictions (1993), also suggests that the cultural stories of a country (in this instance, Australia) “are ultimately produced by the culture; thus they generate meanings, take on significances, and assume forms that are articulations of the values, beliefs – the ideology – of the culture” (1, original emphasis). In this collection, our contributors take the lead from post-structuralist theories of the evolving nature of meaning, such as Roland Barthes’ (1977) assertion that texts are “multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (146). Glen Creeber’s work on television supports this

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notion that multiple meanings are apparent within texts and “rather than taking a rigid or fixed meaning to a text, contemporary textual analysis tends to explore the playfulness and open-ended textures of textual meaning” (2006, 34, original emphasis). While the first two parts of this collection refer to cultural texts (novels, films, television shows, advertising, cookbooks and others), the third part refers to the beach itself as a spatial text. While text and space are both concepts with depths that cannot be carelessly collapsed, the complexities of a site like the Australian beach do lend itself to interrogation as a textual space—a location in which meaning-making can unfold and contribute to the mythic identity of the country. Huntsman argues, for instance, that Australians took “possession of the beach imaginatively, as well as in fact” (2001, 113), and this collection interrogates how the beachscape became a site of mythic symbolism for Australian culture. The first part of the book, ‘Forms of Beach Writing’, establishes some of the key generic forms of writing about the Australian beach. In particular, this part examines examples of literature, poetry, non-fiction, screenwriting, social media (particularly Instagram) and food writing. While certainly not exhaustive, these first four chapters provide foundations for positioning the beach as a location and driver of textual content. In the chapter “Surfers, Lifeguards and New Voices: A Short History of Beach Writing in Australia”, Elizabeth Ellison, one of the editors of this collection, provides a review of key milestones of Australian beach writing. Moving through early works such as Adam Gordon Lindsay’s ‘The Swimmer’ (1870) to work by contemporary authors such as Tim Winton, this chapter provides an overview of the history of beach writing. Ellison identifies the two iconic character archetypes of beach writing— unsurprisingly, the surfer and the lifeguard. She also notes, as we have in this chapter, some of the limitations of beach writing and representation in Australia: its focus on white, male stories. In response, this chapter attempts to identify and highlight female voices, including contemporary authors like Romy Ash and Belinda Castle. The next three chapters build on this historical framing, to focus on textual forms. Craig Batty, Philippa Burne and Stephen Gaunson examine, in their chapter “Screenwriting the Beach: Conflict, Catharsis and the Character Arc in Australian Film”, how the beach functions in Australian film, with a focus on screenwriting. By focusing on that familiar lens of the character arc, Batty, Burne and Gaunson read a selection of classic beach films to understand what role the beach plays in these narratives. These, and a range of other films

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these authors discuss, reveal that the beach can become a useful setting for conflict and catharsis. This, of course, speaks to understandings of the beach as a site of rebirth or transcendence: a site that can act like a gateway between this world and a spiritual other world (Ellison 2013). Shifting to a more contemporary form of beach writing—one that embraces user-generated content—Marjorie Kibby then investigates the way photography and tourism have connected on the social media platform Instagram, considering the shrinking loop between tourism organisations and user-generated content on the platform. Performing a content analysis of images of Australian beaches and their associated hashtags on Instagram, Kibby identifies the surprisingly integral role that these networks have for further consideration of the beach in terms that lie beyond the context of this volume, that is, in relation to cultural policy, tourism and environment and infrastructure management. The other editor of this collection, Donna Lee Brien, also considers popular imagery of the beach in her chapter discussing the role of the Australian beach in the cultural production of food writing. Examining representations of the beach in Australian cookbooks and culinary television productions, Brien’s analysis reveals the inherent tension between leisure and labour on the Australian beach, an analysis inextricably linked to understandings of gender and class in this so-called egalitarian landscape. This analysis also seeks to highlight the work of women authors, as well as propose that such quotidian contemporary texts as cookbooks and reality television programmes have much to contribute to this discussion. The second part of the book, ‘Multiplicities of Australian Beach Writing’, investigates examples of beach writing, with a focus on specific Australian beach sites. Although these chapters are grounded in an Australian context, they strongly suggest that there is a universality in these stories and texts. In chapter “Exploring Australian Coastal Gothic: Poetry and Place”, Lynda Hawryluk makes a case for the coastal Gothic through an examination of island and coast stories and her own original poetry. She uses the framework of theorist Ross Gibson, whose Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (2002) is a useful tool for reading the historical complexities of landscape. She situates this discussion, and her own poetry, within the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales on the east coast of the country. In comparison, Nick Osbaldiston examines the iconic Sunshine Coast tourist haven of Noosa, focusing on its history as a destination for travellers. Using archival research and sharing the revealing detail in travellers’ letters of the 1890s, Osbaldiston identifies how

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the letter writers position Noosa as a place of escape from the harsh realities of modernity. Mark David Ryan and Elizabeth Ellison use Australian horror films as a lens through which to reveal the functions of the beach as a site of fear as well as retreat. In particular, they suggest the beach ultimately has three main purposes in Australian horror cinema: as monstrous setting within the narrative; as an offshore island site beyond the mainland; and as a haven or zone of safety both on, and off, the screen. This is a complexity rarely aired in scholarship. In the next chapter, Kelly Palmer focuses on glitzy Surfers Paradise and the greater Gold Coast, the tourist city located to the south of Brisbane. The Gold Coast, which relies heavily on ‘bathing beauty’ imagery in its tourist promotion, is a rich site for investigating female characters in memoir and literary fiction. In this chapter, Palmer challenges the ‘paradisical’ notion of Surfers Paradise and the Gold Coast through a reading of the beach in key Australian texts set in this location. The final part of the book is, as its title suggests, more interested in reading the beach as text in itself. These chapters are less focused on representations of the beach in cultural and popular texts; instead, these chapters examine the way the beach itself is read, engaged with and used. In the chapter “Walking the Australian Beach: Mapping Footprints in the Sand”, Lesley Hawkes explores the beach as a site for walking. Using Filipa Wunderlich’s (2008) identification of walking types, Hawkes suggests that the beach is, in terms of walking, quite different to either the city or other natural landscapes. While walking on the beach may feel like a frivolous activity, the connections that beach walking can engender between the walker and the environment are more than just the footprints left on the sand. This practice of mapping is a long-standing tradition in Australian culture and one deserving of more attention. The chapter “Australian Beach Soccer: Tracing Paradoxical Narratives” builds momentum from walking into a more energetic sport as Lee McGowan, Elizabeth Ellison and Michele Lastella provide the first examination of beach soccer (or football as it is known elsewhere) in Australia. Surprisingly in a selfprofessed proud sporting, and sport-obsessed, nation, beach soccer has never reached the great heights of other beach sports such as surfing, Ironman and triathlon competitions, or beach volleyball. Positioning beach soccer within its international context, this chapter questions why this game has not yet found an enduring place in the local

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beach culture. Susan Carson then examines a more leisurely beach activity, focusing on the Australian phenomenon of the ocean bath. This chapter investigates their aesthetic attributes, suggesting that reading these baths as examples of public art can speak to a broader understanding of art within Australian beach culture. Carson argues specifically that reading ocean baths as works of art contributes to a transformation of the space for swimmers and other users of these sites. And, finally, the chapter “Sculpture by the Sea: A Visual Essay” is a visual essay about public arts festival, Sculpture by the Sea. An Australian festival with now three locations (Bondi Beach, Cottesloe Beach and Aarhus in Denmark), the festival is arguably the most significant example of temporary, site-specific sculptural installation in the country. In this chapter, Mark Maxwell and Elizabeth Ellison reflect on their experiences attending, documenting and engaging with two specific instances of the festival. Using text and a series of photographic images, Maxwell and Ellison examine how the beach landscape plays an important role in the festival, not just as a setting but as an interactive component contributing to the audience experience.

Conclusion Writing the Australian Beach emerged from a symposium held in August 2017 at the Noosa campus of Central Queensland University. It represents the culmination of editor Ellison’s research into representations of the Australian beach that began with her doctoral thesis (2013), as well as editor Brien’s ongoing work on Australian non-fiction writers and their writing. The collection hopes to make a significant contribution to the dialogue about Australia’s beaches and their representation. It is, obviously, not an all-encompassing encyclopedia of either beach texts in Australia or the beaches on which they are set. We are aware that there are some theories, frameworks and concepts that this collection does not address. The growing impacts of climate change and the resulting shifts in both beach geography and our interpretations and understandings of the Australian beach is just one area that is ripe for further investigation, as is the beach as a location for Australian crime—real and imagined. While we have, moreover, consciously attempted to challenge the dominant narratives in the beach writing forms and texts we examine in this collection, we also are aware of the risk of ‘revitalising’ colonial ideas (Phillips and Archer-Lean 2019) and ask readers to read with this in mind.

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The beach has continued to remain a site that attracts minimal attention from scholars while remaining an integral part of the country’s tourist identity. Perhaps most importantly, the beach in Australia and globally is in many ways a frontier site for the increasing threat of climate change. Andrew McGahan’s futurist novel Underground (2006) opened with the protagonist, drunk, trying to ride out a vicious tropical cyclone that had ruined his new apartment development. The threat of rising ocean levels, the already catastrophic bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, rising temperatures and the changes in cyclone season will have devastating impacts on the natural geography of the country’s beaches. And yet, for now, cultural representations of the beach are not embracing this reality. While Tim Winton’s conservationist values are evident in his memoir writing and his activist actions, textual representations grappling with the realities of climate change are yet to be prevalent in this country. Considering the power of representation as a way of shifting cultural, political and popular understandings and opinions (Webb 2009), the beach—both locally and in its wider global context—is replete with opportunity for further investigation and research. It also is a site that can, and hopefully will, continue to inspire the authors and other creators of popular, literary and non-traditional beach texts well into the future.

References Barthes, R. 1977. Image—Music—Text, trans. S. Heath. London: Fontana. Booth, D. 2001. Australian beach cultures: The history of sun, sand, and surf. London: F. Cass. Brewster, A. 2003. The beach as ‘Dreaming Place’: Reconciliation, the past and the zone of intersubjectivity in Indigenous literature. New Literatures Review 40: 33–41. Campion, K. Right-wing extremism has a long history in Australia. The Conversation, 21 March. https://theconversation.com/right-wing-extremism-has-along-history-in-australia-113842. Accessed 31 March 2019. Carter, P. 1987. The road to Botany Bay: An exploration of landscape and history. London, UK: Faber and Faber. Cathcart, M. 2009. The water dreamers: The remarkable history of our dry continent. Melbourne: Text Publishing Company. Cathcart, M. 2010. Dianne Jones: A Noongar take on Aussie icons. ABC Rural, 16 September. http://www.abc.net.au/site-archive/rural/telegraph/ content/2010/s3013615.htm. Accessed 24 July 2017.

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Cole, B., C. Anderson, and E. Glynn (dirs.). 2014–ongoing. Black Comedy. Australia: Scarlett Pictures. Creeber, G. 2006. Tele-visions: An introduction to studying television. London: British Film Institute Publishing. Davies, B. (creator). 2006–ongoing. Bondi Rescue. Australia: Network Ten. Drew, P. 1994. The coast dwellers: Australians living on the edge. Ringwood: Penguin. Elder, C. 2007. Being Australian: Narratives of national identity. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin. Ellison, E. 2013. The Australian beachspace: Flagging the spaces of Australian beach texts. PhD thesis, Queensland University of Technology. Ellison, E., and L. Hawkes. 2016. Australian beachspace: The plurality of an iconic site. Borderlands E-Journal: New Spaces in the Humanities 15 (1). http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol15no1_2016/ellisonhawkes_beachspace. pdf. Accessed 31 January 2019. Fiske, J., B. Hodge, and G. Turner. 1987. Myths of Oz: Reading Australian popular culture. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Game, A., A. Metcalfe, and D. Marlin. 2013. On Bondi Beach. North Melbourne: Arcadia. Gibson, R. 2002. Seven versions of an Australian badland. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Gordon, A.L. 1870. The Swimmer. In Bush ballads and galloping rhymes, 18–22. Melbourne: Clarson, Massina & Co. Heiss, A. 1996. Sacred cows. Broome: Magabala Books. Hughes, R. 1986. The Fatal Shore: A history of the transportation of convicts to Australia, 1787–1868. London: Harvill. Huntsman, L. 2001. Sand in our souls: The beach in Australian history. Carlton South: Melbourne University Press. Jaggard, E. 2006. Between the flags: One hundred summers of Australian surf lifesaving. Sydney: UNSW Press. Luhrmann, B. (dir.). 2008. Australia. Australia: Twentieth Century Fox. McGahan, A. 2006. Underground. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. McKee, Alan. 2001. A beginner’s guide to textual analysis. Metro Magazine 127 (128): 138–139. Metusela, C., and G. Waitt. 2012. Tourism and Australian beach culture: Revealing bodies. Bristol: Channel View Publications. Moreton-Robinson, A. 2003. I still call Australia home: Indigenous belonging and place in a white postcolonising society. In Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of home and migration, ed. S. Ahmed, 23–40. UK: Berg Publishing. Moreton-Robinson, A. 2011. Bodies that matter: Performing white possession on the beach. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 35 (4): 57–72.

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Morris, M. 1998. Too soon too late: History in popular culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Osbaldiston, N. 2017. Towards a sociology of the coast: Our past, present and future relationship to the shore. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. O’Sullivan, D. 2018. Australia could look to New Zealand to increase the number of Indigenous academics and students. The Conversation, 2 March. https://theconversation.com/australia-could-look-to-new-zealand-toincrease-the-number-of-indigenous-academics-and-students-92174. Accessed 31 January 2019. Perkins, R. (dir.). 1998. Radiance. Australia: Eclipse Films. Phillips, S.R., and C. Archer-Lean. 2019. Decolonising the reading of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writing: reflection as transformative practice. Higher Education Research & Development 38 (1): 24–37. Taylor, A. 2009. Australian bodies, Australian sands. In Lines in the sand: The Cronulla riots, multiculturalism and national belonging, ed. G. Noble, 111–126. Sydney: Institute of Criminology Press. Turner, G. 1993. National fictions: Literature, film, and the construction of Australian narrative. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin. Walter, E.V. 1988. Placeways: A theory of the human environment. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Webb, J. 2009. Understanding representation. London, UK: Sage. Wunderlich, F.M. 2008. Walking and rhythmicity: Sensing urban space. Journal of Urban Design 13 (1): 125–139.

Forms of Beach Writing

Surfers, Lifeguards and New Voices: A Short History of Beach Writing in Australia Elizabeth Ellison

Introduction The Australian beach is an iconic location in Australian society. It features as a key part of the country’s tourism campaigns and is responsible for the success of some of the most popular cultural exports such as the soap opera Home and Away (Bateman 1988–ongoing) or reality television show Bondi Rescue (Davies 2006–ongoing). Considering the extensive number of accessible beaches along the continent’s coastline, it is unsurprising that the majority of the Australian population lives in proximity to the coast. Major capital cities like Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide all feature beachside suburbs, and many—if not most—Australians are familiar with some of their closest, local beaches. The beach is a drawcard for international and domestic visitors alike and as such has become an important part of the iconic national culture of Australia. Interestingly, however, the beach has not featured as prominently in national stories in the same way as the bush or outback landscape. National myths in Australia have previously circulated around the idea of the bush and the alien landscape of central Australia, which is steeped in

E. Ellison (B) Creative Industries, Central Queensland University, Noosaville, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 E. Ellison and D. L. Brien (eds.), Writing the Australian Beach, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35264-6_2

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colonial history. Graeme Turner suggests “living with the land is mythologised as the authentic Australian experience” (1993, 37), and therefore, the bush landscape becomes a shorthand for the ‘real’ Australia. Foundational narratives of modern Australia in the years after the English colonisers violently arrived on the shores of the continent were primarily focused on this “hostile, alien, oppressive” landscape (Rickard 1996, 41), as can be seen in the works of Henry Lawson. While Australian culture has become more accepting of the city as an integral part of the national identity—if primarily in opposition to the country—there has not been the same push towards embracing the beach as an inherent part of Australian identity. Some of the earliest calls for considering the role of the beach within Australian culture came from Geoffrey Dutton (1985) and John Fiske et al. (1987). Dutton identified the tendency of Australians to accept myths that we are not personally familiar with, citing the First World War ANZAC myth as one example that has come to symbolically represent mateship and a volunteer ethic for generations who have not experienced combat. In comparison, he states: “the tradition of the beach is not yet understood or accepted in intellectual terms, although it is instinctively endorsed by the vast majority of Australians” (1985, 6). Fiske et al. (1987) specifically called for the beach to be included as a national mythic icon, providing a reading of the beach site and analysis of its role in establishing cultural identity. A decade later, Brian Matthews argued that “we have no legend based on the way we do live and have always lived, as an urban coastal people” (1997, 15). While a brief flurry of academic discourse emerged in the 1990s and, especially, the 2000s that specifically engaged with the beach (Ann Game [1990], Leone Huntsman [2001], Douglas Booth [2001], Francine Winnett [2003] and Catriona Elder [2007] are some examples), there is still an underlying sense that the beach is too frivolous a location, too associated with pleasure and holidays, to really warrant serious investigation. And yet, as Leone Huntsman has identified, cultural representations of this space in Australian advertising, tourism and creative content support the “deep emotional significance of the beach” (2001, 166). Despite this emotional significance, the beach has a fraught modern history. Francine Winnett, in her doctoral dissertation, argued that there is a coastal identity in Australia or a “coastal sense of place” (2003, 13). Importantly, this

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identity is varied and “the beach can be read as a site for contesting established notions of national identity” (Winnett 2003, 12). In 2005, this infamously occurred violently in the Cronulla riots, a period of racially fuelled rioting that was centred on Cronulla Beach. There has been much academic discourse about the Cronulla riots. A particularly useful discussion of the event is found in Catriona Elder’s Being Australian (2007), in which she identifies the insular nature of normative white suburban beaches and how this established a grounding for racially charged tensions that erupted violently during the riots. Elder describes how the Australian “suburban beach space is racialised and the Anglo-Australian group has the most power to shape how the space is used and to monitor the boundaries of the space” (306–307). Aileen Moreton-Robinson and Fiona Nicoll also specifically discuss the Cronulla riots in their 2006 article ‘We shall fight them on the beaches: Protesting cultures of white possession’, noting: “We argue the events at Cronulla display the operation of patriarchal white sovereignty through racialised containment of space that is relatively systematic and more or less formalised in different times and places” (152). Affrica Taylor (2009) has also written about the contested space of Australian beaches—in many ways considered a pinnacle of white Australia’s mythic national identity and yet simultaneously the site of colonial invasion. From the 1980s onwards, Australian writing about the beach has proven to feature in the works of both literary and popular works. Tim Winton, one of Australia’s most decorated authors and four-time winner of the prestigious Miles Franklin national literary award, writes stories almost exclusively set in beachside towns. As such, it is worth considering Australia’s “coastal sense of place” (Winnett 2003, 13), although exactly how this should be explored is less clear. This chapter aims to provide an overview of beach writing in Australia by identifying two significant characters—the surfer and the lifeguard—and by examining a (nonexhaustive) selection of representative texts. These texts should be read within the context of the contested, challenging historical symbolism of the Australian beach in Australia and while dismantling the myths of how the beach functions in Australian culture. However, it is possible to identify some thematic intersections in how fictional writing (predominantly prose) has represented the Australian beach over time.

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The Surfer and the Lifeguard Writing about the Australian beach often features an array of Australian characters. However, there are two key figures that emerge as a common part of beach narratives: the surfer and the lifeguard. These two characters are regular fixtures at most beaches around the country, and they have in many ways become part of the iconography of Australian beach culture. As noted in chapter “Writing the Australian Beach: Texts, Sites, Events and People”, the Australian beach remains dominated by male, white voices and these two character archetypes further this singular view. Notably, both these characters are often represented as male, fit and bronzed. They embody the idealised elements of beach culture—tanned, healthy and athletic—but there remain distinct differences between the two. In Australian patterns of representation of the two groups, it is possible to see the lifesaver and the surfer in a dichotomy with each other. If the lifesaver is culture, the surfer is nature; if the lifesaver is responsible, law-abiding and community spirited, the surfer is irresponsible, feckless and ‘a bludger’ (i.e. dependent on welfare); if the lifesaver is civilised, the surfer is primitive; the lifesaver is the land, the surfer the sea (Fiske et al. 1987, 66). While the lifesaver is the authority, the surfer is antiauthoritarian. Fiske et al. (1987) and Booth (2001) discuss how the surfer is frequently set up in opposition to the lifesaver, the authoritative figure on the beach, suggesting that these two figures are the epitome of the binary oppositions that exist within the beach space. It is true that the lifesaver is generally positioned on the sand whereas the surfer is positioned in the ocean. Kay Saunders states the lifeguard is an icon that emerged from idealised ideas of the ANZAC hero during the 1950s (1998). The lifeguard (always male within this era) embodied many similar characters and physical traits as the ideal soldier: a brave member of a trained team, an able-bodied individual volunteering to serve the nation and a protector (Saunders 1998, 99). Importantly, the lifeguard continued what Fiona Nicoll (2001) suggests is the hypermasculinised and white tradition of the Digger, something linked again to concepts of invasion in foreign lands (MoretonRobinson 2011). Contemporary representations of lifeguards in Australia are linked with fitness and heroism, as the protectors of the less capable in the water. Whereas the lifeguard has continually been associated with the beach itself—the sand along the shoreline and the lifeguard tower—the surfer is positioned in opposition to this, in the more purely natural ocean

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and as a figure less concerned with structure and routines of authority. Where the lifeguards need to stand apart from the rest of the beachgoers, distinctive in their red and yellow uniforms, surfers are often difficult to spot bobbing in the ocean. They are mostly submerged and further out in the depths of the water, away from the swimmers. The surfer tends to be a more unobtrusive figure, frequently spending hours off-shore without coming out of the water and often blends into the natural elements. The issues between the two iconic Australian figures arise out of the authoritative position of the lifeguards and their commitment to providing safe swimming conditions to beachgoers. Although the figures of the lifesaver and the swimmer do not appear in every text analysed in this chapter, the identification of these two common character types is useful for establishing the masculine, athletic, predominantly white figure that is considered normative in these types of narratives. Interestingly, despite the prevalence of sunbathing, tanned girls in visual texts (such as the bikini-wearing girls of surfing films like Newcastle [Castle 2008] or the prevalence of these images on postcards), written texts about the beach, do not prioritise these female characters in the same way. Instead, as will be discussed later in the chapter, female voices are often muted or—when written by female authors—more complex.

The Early Works One of the first recorded works about the Australian beach is Adam Lindsay Gordon’s poem, ‘The Swimmer’, published in 1870. Gordon’s writing gained significant popularity after his suicide, although he is more commonly associated with bush landscapes rather than coastal ones. Part of his last volume of poems, Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes, the first two stanzas identify a dark, unsettling image of the ocean and the beach. For Gordon, the ocean is isolated (“shores trod seldom by feet of men”) and angry (“Only the swirl of the surges livid” and “A grim grey coast and a seaboard ghastly”). Robert Drewe (2005, 28) noted that ‘The Swimmer’ is an example of how slowly writing and literature caught up to more visual artistic representations of the beach: Strangely, the moral aversion to the perceived hedonism of the beach was peculiar to our writers. Our painters, of course, from Streeton, Roberts, and Conder through Boyd and Blackman and Nolan to Whiteley, have always been fascinated by the coast’s artistic possibilities. So have the best

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photographers, especially that pioneer of modernism, Max Dupain, and, increasingly, the film makers. Why not the writers? To take just one example cited by Dutton, one wonders why the critics for years ignored Adam Lindsay Gordon’s extraordinary poem ‘The Swimmer’, published in 1870, and comparable to much of Byron and Walt Whitman, while ‘The Sick Stockrider’ was encouraged, well up until my schooldays, to gallop on and on?

Perhaps the answer lies in Lindsay Gordon’s dark and less palatable representation of the beach, quite tonally distinct from Dupain’s now-iconic ‘Sunbaker’ photograph. Regardless, the lack of longevity for this work as Drewe notes enforces this notion that the beach is less worthy of serious consideration. Lindsay Gordon was not alone in documenting his unease with the natural landscape. D. H. Lawrence, the English writer, used his time visiting Australia as inspiration for his 1923 novel Kangaroo. Of course, Australian beaches are geographically quite distinct from the British seaside. Despite the enticing warmth of the day, the waves are strong and so powerful that they can be disarming for those unfamiliar with them. This emerges in scenes in Kangaroo, in which protagonist Somers and his wife Harriet are nervous in the ocean: In the morning sunlight Harriet and Somers were out first, after Somers had made the fire, having a frightened dip in the sandy foam. They kept far back from the great rollers, which, as the two sat in the dribbling backwash, reared up so huge and white and fanged in a front attack, that Harriet always rose and ran, and it was long before she got really wet. And then when they did venture to sit in a foot of water, up came a sudden flush and flung them helpless rolling a dozen yards in, and banged them against the pebbles. It was distinctly surprising. Somers had never known that he weighed so little, that he was such a scrap of unimportance. (1923, 101)

Here, the ocean is portrayed as something quite wild and untameable. Somers’ Australian neighbour, Jack, is much more comfortable with the ocean, immersing himself in it and understanding the rhythm of the waves: Somers walked slowly on. Then suddenly he saw Jack running across the sand in a bathing suit, and entering the shallow rim of a long, swift upwash.

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He went in gingerly – then threw himself into the swell, and rolled in the water for a minute. Then he was rushing back, before the next big wave broke. He was gone again by the time Somers came to climb the cliff-bank to the house. (104)

For Somers, the beach is majestic but unsettling and able to creep into daily life in unexpected ways. It is loud, “the noise of the sea came in [to the house] frightening, like guns” (96), and almost brash: “Tier after tier of white-frost foam piled breaking towards the shore, in a haste” (102). Despite the beachside location, Kangaroo feels in some ways like an example of what Philip Drew (1994) meant when he noted the inward-facing tendencies of Australia—looking away from the water rather than out over the ocean. Despite Somers’ position on the beach for much of the novel, both Somers and Harriet remain uncertain and nervous about it. By the end of the novel, the water is “beastly” (442); the bush in comparison is “wonderful”, “ethereal” and “indescribable” (444). One of the first examples of beach writing by a woman is ‘The Surfer’, a poem by acclaimed poet and environmentalist Judith Wright that was first published in 1945. In this piece, the sea is natural, wild and consistent—“drops there and snatches again, drops and again snatches”—while the surfer is a figure of natural strength and joy: “the gulls went wheeling / in air as he in water, with delight”. Wright played an instrumental role in conservation work in Australia, including helping to form the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland and working to stop threats of mining in idyllic locations like the Great Barrier Reef (McCalman 2013) and the Cooloola region (Davis 2019). Her surfer character is not conquering the ocean but is, instead, part of it: he “climbed through, slid under those long banks of foam” and “his brown strength drove through the hollow and coil of green-through weirs of water!”. It was uncommon for a woman author to write about the beach in this era, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, Wright’s male character speaks to the strong, bronzed figure that is emblematic of surfers (Fiske et al. 1987). Nevil Shute’s (1957) post-apocalyptic novel, On the Beach, in which bayside Melbourne was the last place standing after complete global nuclear fallout, was popular enough to inspire a Hollywood film of the same name (directed by Stanley Kramer 1959) starring Ava Gardner. On the Beach, despite its title, is not concerned only with the beach. Instead, after focusing on the predominantly urban setting of Melbourne city, the beach plays a key role in the final scene of the novel. Moira, one of the

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last protagonists alive, chooses the beach as the site for her death. Fresh from bidding Dwight, her love, farewell with his navy crew, she drives to Barwon Heads, a surf beach just on the other side of the bay although nearly 200 kilometres away by car. From her vantage point, she imagines she can see the place of Dwight’s submarine and takes the euthanising medicine she has brought with her while overlooking the ocean. The ocean is relentless. Even at this time of despair and the end of all humanity, the novel suggests, the waves continue.

Modern Times From On the Beach onwards, there was little written specifically about the beach until the next major wave in beach writing was ushered in by the 1979 release of Puberty Blues, written by Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey. In contrast to the utilisation of the beach as scenic backdrop, the book was considered an expose of some of the worst, most toxic aspects of beach culture. Its film adaptation, directed by Bruce Beresford in 1981, is now a classic of Australian cinema, its themes so enduring that it has been adapted again for television in recent years (Edwards and Banks 2012– 2014). The book is damning of the misogynistic beach culture of the era, although it ends on a poignantly hopeful note with protagonists Debbie and Sue taking to the water themselves with their own surfboard. The novel Puberty Blues was located almost entirely in the beachside suburbs of Sydney and included many scenes set directly on the beach. Debbie and Sue highlight the significance of the beach setting early in the novel: The beach was the centre of our world. Rain, snow, hail, a two-hour wait at the bus stop, or being grounded, nothing could keep us from the surf. Us little surfie chicks, chirping our way down on the train. Hundreds of us in little white shirts, short-sleeved jumpers, thongs and straight-legged Levis covering little black bikinis. We flocked to the beach. Cheep. Cheep. (Lette and Carey 1979, 3)

The beach was not only a place to spend time in the sun, but also a place to engage with the social politics of high school away from the teachers’ scrutiny. Puberty Blues is centrally important as a beach text—not only because it is one of the few to so actively engage with the landscape, instead of using it as a backdrop for that action—but also because it highlights women’s

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voices in ways that was quite unusual in this period of Australian writing. The brash, uncomfortable reality of Debbie and Sue’s life, littered with drugs, sexual assault and rampant misogynistic behaviour, was all the more shocking because Debbie and Sue were thirteen-year-old schoolgirls and representative of a very ordinary type of Australian teenager. In Puberty Blues, the beach itself becomes complicit in the social politics embedded within the narrative. Debbie and Sue’s social standing—gendered, financial and athletic—plays a key role in how they are ‘allowed’ to use the beach. Greenhills Beach is considered the prime location for surfers; South Cronulla Beach is for families and ‘losers’. Debbie and Sue spend much of the narrative trying to navigate the social cliques, compromising their own personal values to stay ‘cool’ and part of the ‘surfie gang’. Importantly, girls at Greenhills had to stay on the sand: “you had to be interested in surfing, but not interested enough to surf” (1979, 7). In comparison, the male characters are what Josephine May calls “selfcentred sexual predators” (2008, 65). As such, Puberty Blues is a chilling story that speaks to the challenges of youth and the power of social influences including punishing levels of peer pressure. It is an important inclusion when considering writing about the beach because it deviates so strongly from the work before it. In Puberty Blues, the beach is gendered and ordinary and represented as complicit in the exploitation of the girls within the narrative. Despite these exceptions, modern Australian beach writing has been dominated in many ways by male authors and two in particular—Robert Drewe and Tim Winton—authors who can be identified as Australia’s most prolific beach writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It is possible to consider The Bodysurfers (1983), Drewe’s first collection of short stories about the beach, as a sign of shifting times in Australian literature as it brought the beach into serious consideration. While Drewe has also published a number of novels and memoirs, his short stories are perhaps his most coastal-centric work. The Bodysurfers, The Rip (2008) and the most recent addition to works on this theme, The True Colour of the Sea (2018), showcase Drewe’s capacity to capture very ordinary beach scenes while revealing the murkier realities of life underneath. For instance, Drewe’s ‘The Silver Medallist’ from The Bodysurfers subverts the traditional and iconic lifesaver figure in the character of Kevin Parnell. Kevin is a local celebrity, a one-time Olympic silver medallist who remains bronzed, a strong swimmer and popular. However, underneath he is an insecure alcoholic, who—after suffering embarrassment trying to

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save a swan in the ocean—sets the surf club on fire and is revealed to be sexually abusing his daughter. This darker side of the beach or what Leone Huntsman calls “the sinister” is, of course, intertwined with, and in comparison to, “the serene” or beautiful, idyllic beach. Drewe’s narratives are distinctive in their exposure of the sinister that lies below the surface of life at the beach. For example, in the titular story from The Rip (2008), a father is on the beach with his daughter the day after a fatal shark attack. The story is embued with a chilling sense of death, captured particularly in the moment when John wades into the ocean to assist a struggling woman. When he returns to the shore, his daughter Sophie, panicked by the water and the threat of sharks, has run away. The story ends with John calling helplessly for Sophie, trying to assure her of his safety: “Nothing happened!” The motif of lost children on the beach is one ingrained in Australian popular culture (Ellison 2016) and, as such, provides a chilling image with which to end the narrative. Drewe’s stories also regularly use the beach as a way of revealing family dynamics. In the titular story of his 1983 collection, ‘The Bodysurfers’, the protagonist David is embarking on a new relationship in the wake of his marriage breaking down. With his two children, David and his new partner take a seaside holiday which is, as he identifies this as a return to his childhood, initially uplifting. Squinting against the glare, David was relieved and gladdened to see his children and Lydia frolicking together in the sea. It wasn’t a familiar scene from his marriage, more like one from his own early childhood, a link to it, a summer holiday at the seaside, a rare time when adults dropped their guard and pretentions and acted the goat. He was aware of the sting of the sun on his neck and this too made him happy; the clean buff-coloured sand, the fringe of gum trees, the dusty blue labiate hills, the turquoise vista of the Pacific all uplifted him. (1983, 122–123)

For Drewe, beach visits are often opportunities to examine family relationships perhaps because of the unplugged nature of the landscape. Unlike, for example, playgrounds, the beach is primarily natural and additional equipment—umbrellas, buckets, boards and so on—is often required. As such, for David, the beach is a site for consideration and thought. The role of the landscape in shaping Drewe as an author and a human is displayed in his memoirs (Ellison 2018), and his fictional writings are

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clearly inspired by this as well. The beach, for Drewe, is often very ordinary or a part of everyday life. It is beautiful, but also quite comfortable. His work is often quite domestic in scale and content; however, his tendency to reveal the darker side of the beach often dovetails with the way he exposes insecurities and flaws in his male characters. Consider, for instance, ‘Masculine Shoes’ from The Rip, in which American location scout Tyler Foss is forced to surrender his shoes to escape from wily dingoes. Foss, yearning for wealth and recognition, ends up in cheap rubber thongs (sandals) for the remainder of his trip. Drewe is not alone in featuring male voices on the Australian beach. Tim Winton is quite open about his interest in exploring complex, flawed male characters (see Winton 2018) and has also documented his love of the environment and the coastal landscape in his fiction as well as his memoirs. His writing has received significant national and international attention, revealing the power of the beach image to be inherently Australian. Winton’s works are not solely focused on the beach; however, Breath (2008) is one example that centres on surfing culture and the ocean. As Fiske et al. (1987) suggest, surfing culture can be considered a type of counterculture and certainly has anti-authoritarian sentiments. This is clear in the case of the surf gang, the Bra Boys of Maroubra, Sydney, which is captured in the documentary of the same name (Abberton 2007) (see also chapter “Screenwriting the Beach: Conflict, Catharsis and the Character Arc in Australian Film”). Bra Boys revealed the intense challenges between the local surfers and the police force in the area. While Breath does not engage with such explicit counterculture ideas, it is notable that its protagonist Bruce Pike is introduced through surfing to a life less bound by the traditional norms of his parents. Sando, a local surfer with some years on Bruce and his friend Loonie, and their surfing mentor, pushes the boys to surf tougher, rougher waves and demand more of themselves, with the result that Bruce begins to question his abilities and identity: I’d already begun to pose those questions to myself and feel the undertow of their logic. Was I serious? Could I do something gnarly, or was I just ordinary? I’ll bet my life that despite his scorn Loonie was doing likewise. We didn’t know it yet, but we’d already imagined ourselves into a different life, another society, a state for which no raw boy has either words or experience to describe. (2008, 94)

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This fear of being ordinary seems to stick with Bruce throughout his life, and the events of his growing up described in the novel have longlasting effects. Teenage Bruce has an affair with Eva, an older woman who is Sando’s partner. Eva introduces him to sex, in particular, erotic asphyxiation, and this has a lasting impact on Bruce’s life. The relationship shakes his bravado at a young age, but it is hearing years later about her death that causes him to lose control over his life. His wife divorces him, and he loses custody of his children. The novel ends with Bruce describing his return to his parents’ home, back at the beach, with the intention of fixing it up. He still surfs the same waves he did as a boy although, as an older man, with less elegance and sophistication. The beach, once such a source of disappointment and despair, becomes a place of confidence: “My favourite time is when we’re all at the Point, because when they [his daughters] see me out on the water I don’t have to be cautious and I’m never ashamed. Out there I’m free. I don’t require management” (2008, 265). Bruce achieves a feeling of confidence and beauty on the waves. He enjoys surfing purely for the sake of enjoyment, stripped from his negative experiences and the expectations of both Sando and himself. The beach in this story, then, is a constant, but a space that creates an eventual safe haven for Bruce, although this is a lifetime in the making, and involves casualties along the way. Winton’s focus outside of his fiction writing is on conservation, and as such, it is perhaps no surprise that landscape—frequently the beach landscape—plays such an active role in his narratives. His beaches are often spaces that reveal truths about his characters, while simultaneously remaining constant, natural and usually untamed by humanity. Winton’s writing cannot be separated from the landscape of his narratives, and his descriptive prose is evocative of the coast. This section, from early in Breath, captures the beach landscape and the innocent frivolity of the boys before their lives became more complicated: On a still morning in late September, in a lull between cold fronts, Loonie and I pedalled with our boards to the Point where the waves were small and clean and the cold water was as clear as the sky. We sat inside at the mellow edge of the rip and paddled into waist-high rollers that carried us hooting and howling into the beach. We had the place to ourselves. The sandbanks ripped underfoot, schools of herring swerved and morphed as one in the channel, and across in the bay the breaths of breaching dolphins hung in the air. (39–40)

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The beach in Breath is responsive to Bruce and his story. When Bruce and Loonie are young, the beach is like a playground; however, as he ages, it shifts into a site of respite. Despite the way the beach never changes, its presentation within the narrative is more malleable. Fiona Capp’s Night Surfing (1996) pre-dates Breath, and it too features disaffected youth—although Capp includes leading female characters. Set in a small, coastal Australian town, Hannah and Jake are two of the novel’s key protagonists. Jake, although older than Bruce in Breath, also finds solace in the ocean, but seems consumed by the idea of doing something significant, striving to be more than what he thinks he is—in Jake’s case, this is the night surf of the title. Hannah, an outsider in the town, asks Jake to teach her to surf. Hannah is inspired by Judith Wright’s poem, discussed earlier in this chapter: Almost nostalgically she adds, ‘Do you know what made me want to do it? I read this poem when I was about ten years old. It was called ‘The Surfer’. I always loved going down the beach but I hadn’t taken much notice of surfers. They were just boys on boards. Then I read this poem. There was something about them after that.’ She begins to recite then stops to explain. ‘I guess it’s about a showdown. Between the surfer and the sea. But only the sea can win’. (Capp 1996, 79)

Hannah and Jake’s relationship throughout the novel is difficult; Hannah is in transit, on summer holiday between university semesters, and Jake feels unmoored, directionless. Hannah struggles learning to surf, nervous in the water and aware of the gender divisions visible all round the town. Her reading of the beach echoes the scenes of Puberty Blues: “Further up towards the Sphinx, away from the rest, the surfers gather. Or more precisely, their girlfriends, left lying on the sand, their bodies shifting under the naked sun. Hannah knows the story. It’s an old one and not about to change overnight” (92–93). Her relationship with Jake is inherently linked to the beach, and yet it is also the beach that reveals some of their challenges, most notably when Hannah begins socialising with lifeguards—figures clearly in opposition to the surfers. Capp’s work, like that of Drewe and Winton, reveals the cracks behind otherwise ordinary, everyday stories. The coastal towns in these stories are concerned with the private, domestic sphere of life and the challenges of relationships, desire and growing up. They are also mostly white stories.

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In comparison, Kim Scott’s True Country (1993) illustrates the different relationship his Indigenous Australian characters have with the beach. The beach in True Country is the setting of a key struggle throughout the narrative: the introduction of white tourists into an Indigenous community. Set in the remote mission town of Karnama in Western Australia, initially in the narrative, the Aboriginal inhabitants of the community struggle with its white members, such as the Sisters who run the church and Father Paul. The narrative follows Billy, a young part-Aboriginal school teacher, and his wife Liz, who are new arrivals to Karnama. Billy initially aligns himself with these white outsiders; however, as time progresses, his presence is slowly accepted with a guarded tolerance. One sequence in the novel highlights the way the beach is framed so differently to the other works discussed in this chapter. White tourists are allowed to visit the mission town for a corroboree, an Aboriginal event usually incorporating theatrical and dance elements. Before the timeframe of the novel, these events took place on the beach, outside of the community’s main living area. This appeared to be a safer venue, more removed from where community life was lived. Later, the event is moved inside the community township at the insistence of the tourism company operator, Gerrard. His view is that the monetary value of the corroboree (for both the company and the community) make these events worthwhile. However, this opinion is not mirrored by all of characters in the novel, as the introduction of these tourists into the community’s more private spaces is unwelcome. The visit is challenging from the beginning. The tourist group emerges onto the beach from a futuristic-looking catamaran: “It looked so out of place, so pristine, and so, well, advanced that it could have been a spaceship” (1993, 138). In general, the tourists (and the benefits of their tourism) to the community and the area are received with some scepticism in the narrative. But the tourists that drive in, ha! You go to a beach and you can’t be alone with your own. We tell you, it’s not so good if there’s strangers on the beach with you. One mob stole an outboard from a big boat the government gave us. That was the only outboard we had then. They take all our oysters. Sometimes they make more rubbish than us, and some of our mob had enough, for sure. (165)

The beach in Scott’s text—while initially acting as a type of safe, somewhat remote location for the tourists to encounter specific, curated

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components of Aboriginal culture—becomes merely the gateway through which these alien interlopers enter, a recurrence of the colonial invasion of Australia. Two more contemporary examples of texts that are located in beachside locations are both by female authors: Romy Ash’s Floundering (2012) and Belinda Castle’s Bluebottle (2018). Both feature elements of the narrative through a child’s eyes, and both highlight eccentric, difficult parental figures. Floundering follows brothers Tom and Jordy as their mother, Loretta, returns for them after leaving them to live with their grandmother. She takes the boys without notice at the end of the school year, and they drive across the country to a beachside caravan park. The haunting story is minimalistic and features many flawed and damaged characters. The beach in this novel is unsettling because of its uncomfortable complexity: “a place of refuge, a place of isolation, and also a place of lost innocence, fear, and death” (Ellison 2017, 12). It is a location that purposefully removes the boys from their support network of grandparents and school and instead places them in the isolated, insular care of their flawed mother—a character facing challenges that are interfering with her capacity to raise her two young children. Loretta’s youthful naïvety is most evident in her uncomplicated love for the ocean. The first time the family sees the ocean on their long drive, she is excited and slightly reckless: The ocean, she squeals. I adjust the seatbelt and start to laugh because I can’t help it. She drives into a carpark that’s right on the beach. The sale in the air smells nice. Holy shit, look at that, she says. She jumps out of the car giggling and leans over the wooden railing. The wind blows her dress up. Come on. Let’s go for a swim. Do you wanna? (Ash 2012, 51)

Floundering and Bluebottle are concerned with family and with the complicated relationships between parents and children. While, however, Floundering is told solely through the eyes of the young protagonist, Tom, Castle’s Bluebottle shifts between the three siblings: Louisa, Jack and Phoebe Bright. It also presents two interwoven narratives: one set on the Boxing Day that the Bright family moved into a beachside home and the other set twenty years later. The novel revolves around the complicated figure of Charlie Bright, the eccentric father, and the ramifications of one day in the Bright history: the day when Charlie died. For the children, and for Charlie, the beach is a complicated setting

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to their lives. It provides relief, entertainment and opportunity, but is certainly a more unsettling, frightening place at night or in the rain. Danger also frequently lurks unseen beneath the surface, as in an early scene when Louisa leaps into the ocean and is too close to the rocks: He took a step towards the lowest edge of the platform and a small patch of foam bloomed pink as her bleeding thigh broke the surface. […] Lou’s eyes were closing. Jack started at her thigh, thinking, shark, a space in his chest flaring open. For a panicky second he saw through her leg, grey rocks and bubbling sea foam where there should be skin and muscle. But it was a line drawn down her, black-red and jagged, thin and deep, not a bite taken out. (Castle 2018, 18–19, original emphasis)

Of course, the beach also features bluebottles, the sea animal from the title of Castle’s novel. Adolescent Phoebe loves bluebottles and jellyfish, despite knowing the danger they can inflict: Still, if you could touch them, you would, just to feel, and see what it was like. She’d like to throw herself into a wading pool filled with them, to squeeze and pop them by rolling around hard on their bodies. She had jumped on a bluebottle one trip to the South Coast when she was seven. It was dead, one of hundreds lining the beach. How could anything dead hurt you? She still remembered the feeling, like someone was pressing a blade against her foot and moving it, just enough to maintain the pain. (53)

Charlie Bright is the bluebottle of the novel, causing pain even after death—particularly for Jack, whose life is haunted by his role in Charlie’s drowning. And yet, in Bluebottle, the beach is also a beautiful location for a house, something worth protecting and investing in even after the family unit has changed so fundamentally.

Conclusion While there are differences in the way the beach has been represented in Australian writing, it is possible to identify some commonalities: in particular, the tendency of beach stories to respond to, and capture, everyday and domestic life. While, perhaps, Gordon and Wright’s poets focus more on the spectacular—and even the sublime—in their depiction of the ocean, many of the narratives discussed here include a beach that draws

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on the familiar and the ordinary, albeit the uncomfortable aspects of this, in Australian culture. Many of these stories are male dominated, although it is possible to see some shift in contemporary representations. Works by Lette and Carey, Capp, Ash and Castle somewhat counteract the dominance of the masculine voice, although Drewe and Winton remain the most popular and widely recognised authors who write about the beach in the modern era of Australian literature. Indigenous or more multicultural stories about the beach are few and far between, meaning that writing focused on the Australian beach is still predominantly telling white stories. This speaks to the broader whiteness of the beach location in Australia— one proven to be fraught during the riots in Cronulla in 2005 and since. The two-character types introduced earlier in this chapter, the surfer and the lifeguard, are stereotypically white men, and (despite some notable exceptions) this appears mostly unchanged and unchallenged throughout the history of Australian beach writing. In these poems, novels and memoirs, the beach and the ocean it rims range in the way they advance, or otherwise contribute to, the narrative. In some, the beach is integral in a key scene, like On the Beach; in others, it is embedded throughout the story in ways that drive the narrative forward as in Puberty Blues, Breath, Floundering or Bluebottle. What links all this storytelling, however, is the power that the beach appears to have in breaking through the narrative as more than a location or a setting and acting rather as a catalyst for the plot or as a means of revealing the complexities of the narrative’s characters. The beach, in these written texts, is more than a visually aesthetic backdrop: it is active and consistent. Its constancy is at times despairing, a reminder of humanity’s limits in On the Beach; yet it is also hopeful, a constant reminder of rebirth and a way of moving beyond the past, as in Night Surfing or Bluebottle. There is complexity in the Australian beach landscape that pushes it beyond a tourist icon on a postcard, and—as the world’s climate continues to change—it is important to embrace and celebrate these more nuanced interpretations of this cultural site.

References Abberton, S. (dir.). 2007. Bra Boys. Australia: WEA Corp. Ash, R. 2012. Floundering. Melbourne: Text. Bateman, A. (creator). 1988–ongoing. Home and Away. Australia: Seven Network.

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Beresford, B. (dir.). 1981. Puberty Blues. Australia: Umbrella Entertainment. Booth, D. 2001. Australian beach cultures: The history of sun, sand, and surf. London: F. Cass. Capp, F. 1996. Night surfing. St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin. Castle, B. 2018. Bluebottle. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin. Castle, D. (dir.). 2008. Newcastle. Australia: Australian Film France Corporation. Davies, B. (creator). 2006–ongoing. Bondi Rescue. Australia: Network Ten. Davis, S. 2019. Hidden women of history: Kathleen McArthur, the wildflower woman who took on Joh Bjelke-Petersen. The Conversation, 31 January. https://theconversation.com/hidden-women-of-history-kathleen-mcarthurthe-wildflower-woman-who-took-on-joh-bjelke-petersen-110269. Accessed 31 January 2019. Drew, P. 1994. The coast dwellers: Australians living on the edge. Ringwood: Penguin. Drewe, R. 1983. The bodysurfers. Camberwell: Penguin. Drewe, R. 2005. Australia’s cultural identity now. New Literatures Review 44 (October): 23–31. Drewe, R. 2008. The rip. Camberwell, VIC: Penguin. Drewe, R. 2018. The true colour of the sea. Australia: Penguin Random House Australia. Dutton, G. 1985. Sun, sea, surf and sand: The myth of the beach. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Edwards, J., and I. Banks. (creators). 2014–2016. Puberty Blues. Australia: Network Ten. Elder, C. 2007. Being Australian: Narratives of national identity. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin. Ellison, E. 2016. Badland beach: The Australian beach as a site of cultural remembering. International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics 12 (1): 115–127. Ellison, E. 2017. Facing death on the Australian beach: Examining fear and transcendence. TEXT Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, special issue no. 45. http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue45/Ellison.pdf. Accessed 31 January 2019. Ellison, E. 2018. The coastal memoir: An investigation of landscape in the nonfiction of Robert Drewe and Tim Winton. Axon: Creative Explorations 8 (2). http://axonjournal.com.au/issue-15/coastal-memoir. Accessed 31 January 2019. Fiske, J., B. Hodge, and G. Turner. 1987. Myths of Oz: Reading Australian popular culture. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Game, A. 1990. Nation and identity: Bondi. New Formations (11): 105–120. https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/new-formations/11/nation-and-identity-bondi. Accessed 31 January 2019.

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Gordon, A.L. 1870. The swimmer. In Bush ballads and galloping rhymes, 18–22. Melbourne: Clarson, Massina & Co. Huntsman, L. 2001. Sand in our souls: The beach in Australian history. Carlton South: Melbourne University Press. Kramer, S. (dir.). 1959. On the Beach. United States: Lomitas Productions, Inc. Lawrence, D.H. 1923. Kangaroo. Camberwell: Penguin Group. Lette, K., and G. Carey. 1979. Puberty blues. Sydney: Picador. Matthews, B. 1997. The nation needs new urban myths. The Australian, 8 October. May, J. 2008. Puberty Blues and the representation of an Australian comprehensive high school. History of Education Review 37 (2): 61–67. McCalman, I. 2013. Great Barrier Reef decision is a U-turn to an inglorious past. The Conversation, 13 December. https://theconversation.com/greatbarrier-reef-decision-is-a-u-turn-to-an-inglorious-past-21427. Accessed 31 January 2019. Moreton-Robinson, A. 2011. Bodies that matter: Performing white possession on the beach. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 35 (4): 57–72. Accessed 31 January 2019. Moreton-Robinson, A., and F. Nicoll. 2006. We shall fight them on the beaches: Protesting cultures of white possession. Journal of Australian Studies 30 (89): 149–160. Nicoll, F. 2001. From diggers to drag queens: Configurations of Australian national identity. Sydney: Pluto Press. Rickard, J. 1996. Australia: A cultural history, 2nd ed. New York: Longman. Saunders, K. 1998. ‘Specimens of superb manhood’: The lifesaver as a national icon. Journal of Australian Studies 22 (56): 96–105. Scott, K. 1993. True country, 2nd ed. North Fremantle: Fremantle Press. Shute, N. 1957. On the beach. New York: Ballantine Books. Taylor, A. 2009. Australian bodies, Australian sands. In Lines in the sand: The Cronulla riots, multiculturalism and national belonging, ed. Greg Noble, 111–126. Sydney: Institute of Criminology Press. Turner, G. 1993. National fictions: Literature, film, and the construction of Australian narrative. St Leonards: Allen & Unwin. Winnett, F. 2003. Myths of the beach: A coastal sense of place in Australian film and television. PhD thesis, Monash University. Winton, T. 2008. Breath. Camberwell: Penguin Group. Winton, T. 2018. About the boys: Tim Winton on how toxic masculinity is shackling men to misogyny. The Guardian, 9 April. https://www. theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/09/about-the-boys-tim-winton-on-howtoxic-masculinity-is-shackling-men-to-misogyny. Accessed 31 January 2019. Wright, J. 1945. The surfer. The Bulletin 66 (3397): 4. https://www.austlit. edu.au/austlit/page/C14851. Accessed 31 January 2019.

Screenwriting the Beach: Conflict, Catharsis and the Character Arc in Australian Film Craig Batty, Philippa Burne and Stephen Gaunson

Introduction Australia ends at the beach. Quite literally. Its shoreline is the end of the nation: there is no exit to another country via road or train. Australia remains an isolated space, cut off from the rest of the world, and it is through this lens that the beach is often portrayed as an ominous place in the films in which it features as a core location. As the dramatic final scene of Romper Stomper (Wright 1992) depicts, the beach remains a common ground for death, rebirth and new horizons. Romper Stomper, however, might seem like an odd choice of discussion in a chapter on Australian beach films, for the cold monochromatic Melbourne beach it depicts seems kilometres away from the sunny climes of leisure and

C. Batty (B) University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] P. Burne Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] S. Gaunson RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Ellison and D. L. Brien (eds.), Writing the Australian Beach, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35264-6_3

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relaxation typical of other ‘beach culture’ movies. While numerous documentaries fetishise and celebrate Australia’s beach culture, with Bra Boys (Abberton 2007) being just one example, Australian cinema has continued to have an antagonistic relationship with the ‘beach culture’ that it seems to produce. Puberty Blues (Beresford 1981) is a strong example of this, as it both celebrates and rejects Australia’s relationship with this coastal arena. In Puberty Blues, the surfing subculture serves as a hub for hedonistic behaviour among suburban, tanned, white middle-class male youths. The film, as with its literary source of adaptation, casts women through the hierarchical categories of ‘top chick’ to ‘moll’, stripping them of their own worth and agency. As written in the novel by authors Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey: “All our attempts at romance failed miserably and the only time we ever got close to our boyfriends was when they were on top of us panting. It was hopeless from the beginning but we kept trying. We lived for those boys” (1979, 69). By the film’s end, protagonists Debbie and Sue must choose the beach over the beach culture, for the culture itself will deny them of any chance to have their own voice and live beyond the expectations of, and designated sexual roles given to them by, the surfer boys. This tension between the possibilities of the beach and/or belonging to the culture seems central to the conflicting responses that Australian cinema has to this location, standing equally as a scenic yet isolating space. The Australian beach continues to pose a selection of creative and textual scenarios that ask its characters to draw a line in the sand and choose between the binaries of accepting or rejecting the culture. Typically related to emotional growth brought about by the plot, the beach functions as a world of change where characters encounter conflicts, confront their demons and experience catharsis. In Romper Stomper, for example, it is at the beach that Davey finds the courage to battle and kill his urban tormentor Hando. At no other point in the film does Davey show such courage, and at no other point is he able to reflect on himself so philosophically, than while at the beach. Puberty Blues builds to a similar epiphany, wherein Debbie and Sue reject their own gender roles of sexually subservient ‘beach molls’ by becoming surfers themselves. It is in this spirit that we interrogate the Australian beach in this chapter. In it, we take as our central concern the practice of filmic storytelling, in particular the use of screenwriting craft to structure stories of

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character change on, at and with the beach. As screenwriters and screenwriting scholars, we focus specifically on the creators’ perspectives in order to celebrate the role played by the writers and their stories in creating compelling narratives that feature potent worlds—in this case, the world of the beach. As Tony Birch (2014) has stated: Writing place and landscape, whether in fiction or non-fiction, is a vital component to any piece of writing. Writers need to consider whether a story utilises the characteristics of place as a ‘backdrop’ to the writing or whether place is a character itself.

Here, then, we examine the beach as an arena for character change in screen stories, one that extends far beyond being a mere film setting or location. As a liminal space in which characters can look into themselves and face their greatest fears, all the while being both protected and exposed by nature, the beach plays a powerful role in the arc of the journeying protagonist. Through case studies of three classic films—Storm Boy (Safran 1976), Puberty Blues and The Coolangatta Gold (Auzins 1984)— this chapter explores how the beach is used to call the protagonist to adventure, expose them to a series of conflicts, provide a place for confrontation and, ultimately, facilitate the dramatic catharsis that is central to most screenwriting practice.

Combing the Australian Film Beach Leone Huntsman’s Sand in Our Souls (2001) posits that the Australian beach has been ignored in serious research, asking: “Have Australian intellectuals decided that the beach is too trivial a subject to warrant serious consideration?” (2). Given the centrality of the beach to Australian life and culture, why is there an absence of scholarship on Australian beach films? Is it because of the muddled distinction between the beach film and surf film? The problem here is the problem of defining genre, with such films falling into other genres or between the cracks considering that many films of this type are not entirely set at, or about, the beach (see the chapter “Beaches in Australian Horror Films: Sites of Fear and Retreat”). They’re a Weird Mob (Powell 1966) is one such an example: a significant beach sequence takes place, and the film ends at the sea, but that does not classify it as a ‘beach film’. More has been written on the ‘surf film’, but less in terms of academic scholarship and more as popular writing. Albie

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Thoms’ Surfmovies: The History of the Surf Film in Australia (2000) is probably the most comprehensive example. While the Australian beach is not ignored in publications attempting to give an overview of the local film industry, the beach is often only referenced rather than focussed on as a topic deserving of its own comprehensive study. Publications such as Tom O’Regan’s Australian National Cinema (1996) and Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner’s Cinema and Landscape (2010) support this, while others such as Diasporas of Australian Cinema (Simpson et al. 2009) tend to weave references to the beach within chapters, rather than offering anything comprehensive. A significant reason for this dearth of scholarship possibly corresponds to lack of public interest in beach films. Puberty Blues is now considered a classic and has garnered its own comprehensive collection of literature, and according to Screen Australia (2019) ranks 76 in the Top 100 box office, but few other beach films could be cited to join this list or receive its level of critical writing or publications. Postgraduate research has arguably provided the most focus on the Australian beach film. Francine Winnett’s doctoral thesis, Myths of the Beach: A Coastal Sense of Place in Australian Film and Television (2003), focuses on the beach as a marginal or liminal space, an edge bathed against competing agendas of social and political identities. Winnett claims that, “notwithstanding the dominant image of the beach as a playground for holidaymakers, the coastal edge should be viewed as ‘contested terrain’ around which a number of competing discourses and mythic projections circulate” (2003, 6). Primarily an exploration of film and television, Winnett’s thesis comprehensively explores the “oppositional and resistive space” of the Australian beach space and culture (2003, 13). Earlier scholarship on the beach has established it to be based on a set of binaries, as Elizabeth Ellison argues in her PhD thesis, The Australian Beachspace: Flagging the Spaces of Australian Beach Texts (2013)—and this is an approach this chapter will continue. In their seminal book, Myths of Oz, John Fiske, Bob Hodge and Graeme Turner posit the beach as distinct from, but not dissimilar to, the bush and thus encompassing the Australian tropes of being “classless, matey, basic [and] natural” (1987, 58). As such, the beach is a space of Australian ugliness, stereotypes and expectations of utopian egalitarianism, all of which are presented on film. In films, the beach is widely depicted as a “privileged space for defending notions of Australian culture” (Johns 2008, 9), which is why many confrontation scenes take place

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at the beach: the ultimate battle of right versus wrong. While this might seem binary to the myth of sunny Australian beach culture, it identifies how, from the very early settler days, the beach has never been as peaceful or passive a site of Australian belonging and identity as might be thought (see Featherstone 1986). Many films portray the beach as a dangerous space that is always on the cusp of disaster. The beach on film thus continues as a testing ground not only where characters find themselves located, but also where their identity can be re-formed, for them to glean a true, sometimes raw, sense of their worth to, and belonging within, society. Death, violence and colonisation arrive in many forms on the Australian beach and with this come character arcs and epiphanies that, thematically, accept or reject a culture to which they belonged or aspired.

The Beach as Arena for Character Change Creating a compelling and convincing world is one of the most important elements of screenwriting. As Craig Batty writes: “A world is infectious – it affects all other elements of your screenplay, from story to character to dialogue. It doesn’t just hold your screenplay together, it pulls and pushes it into shape” (2012, 45). A well-chosen and well-crafted world can create a specific audience experience, possessing innate dramatic potential that can accentuate how the story is told (Batty 2012, 45–58). A world can belong to a particular character, too, and by imposing a new world on that character, or by bringing into the world characters that do not belong, the screenwriter creates dramatic challenges for the character to overcome. “Structuring the world” means finding the specific ways in which the world operates and how these might dictate the structure of a story (Batty 2012, 47). “Theming the world” is about understanding how the world demands, or denies, that certain themes be explored (Batty 2012, 50). These ideas will be explored further in the case studies below. In screenwriting, worlds within worlds also exist and are used to create dramatic texture, hierarchies and relationships. One such world in beach films is that of surfers and surfing culture. With examples as wide ranging as Puberty Blues, Newcastle (Castle 2008), Drift (O’Neill and Nott 2013) and Breath (Baker 2017), surfing functions as a strong visual trope and sequence of action that emphasises the emotional (inner) struggles of the protagonist. As the case study of Puberty Blues below demonstrates, in

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relation to the coming of age story, surfing has remained an act of youthful rebellion. For Paul Byrnes (2015), this is about “youngsters doing what they shouldn’t, breaking the rules, searching for a different sense of identity and involvement”. This aspect of identity is of most importance in terms of what surfing represents as both a tremendously cinematic and physical act. Surfing on the screen also looks good, and those doing it are able to perform aspects of their body that are simultaneously erotic, sexual, powerful and empowering. Thematically speaking, as demonstrated in Puberty Blues (1981), Drift (2013) and Breath (2017), surfing is also a performance of rebellion against Australian national identity and pride. Unlike the beach, the surf is an open, wide and unbiased space, and this provides a powerful narrative arena for testing—if not exploding—ideas and ideologies contained to the shore. That said, one cannot enter the Australian surf without passing through the beach and its culture and, in this way, the beach becomes a liminal space where characters tread, run, fall, escape and, ultimately, return from the open waters—transformed or otherwise. The case studies below trace how the beach arena holds the narrative potential for dynamic character arcs that are visually stimulating and emotionally resonating. This chapter details how beach films can be written to represent the unease of Australian masculinity; the conflicted coming of age of white Australia; and the breaking away from idealisation (sunshine, leisure, the ‘land of the long weekend’, mateship and youthful happiness) to harsh reality (violence, sexism, racism, adulthood). From the first white Australian settlers onwards, the beach has been a site for the acceptance or rejection of cultural norms, for testing the self and testing society, and this can be traced through Australian screenwriting practice.

Character Journeys On, and With, the Beach To consider the beach as a space in which themes can be explored through the character journey, it is first important to clarify what we mean by the character journey. Relatedly, we need to emphasise how this is shaped by the particular discourse of screenwriting—a discipline and practice that the authors of this chapter work in and contribute to, theoretically and practically—which gives a grounding for the film case studies to come. As Patrick Cattrysse proposes, the craft of character development is of interest not only to creative practitioners, but also to academic researchers (2009, 83–97).

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Notions of the character journey in drama, particularly fiction, can be traced back to Aristotle, who argued in Poetics that action is the primary element of drama: characters should act out their personalities, views, beliefs and perspectives, not simply recall them through dialogue: “Wellbeing and ill-being reside in action, and the goal of life is an activity, not a quality” (Aristotle 1996, 11). Although “action”, “goal” and “activity” speak to notions of plot, “well-being” and “ill-being” describe a character’s state within that plot. Hence, there is a sense from Aristotle that the character journey is enabled by plot events: as we do, we become. Lajos Egri, whose book, The Art of Dramatic Writing, was originally published in 1942, reinforces the importance of understanding how and why characters change internally and how this relates to action. For Egri, the fabric of character is intrinsically linked to the fabric of plot: “All emotion has physical effects” (2004, 41). The nature of character development requires a character to be in constant change and, for Egri, “The smallest disturbance of his well-ordered life will ruffle his placidity and create a mental upheaval, just as a stone which slides through the surface of a pond will create far-reaching rings of motion” (2004, 47). Egri advises that writers should not fabricate situations for their characters, but rather allow their characters to shape the plot: “we do not find it hard to think of situations. The situations are inherent in the character” (2004, 94, original emphasis). Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1993 [1949]), believes that although the surface may present itself in a multitude of ways (plot, action), the subterrain is always universal (emotion, theme): The unconscious sends all sorts of vapours, odd beings, terrors, and deluding images up into the mind – whether in dream, broad daylight, or insanity; for the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves. (1993, 8)

Much has been written on the character journey (or protagonist arc) in relation to screenwriting. This includes works by well-known ‘how to’ authors such as Robert McKee (1999), Syd Field (2003), Dara Marks (2009), Linda Aronson (2001) and, perhaps most famously, Christopher Vogler in his widely used book, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters (1999). Based on Joseph Campbell’s concept of ‘The Hero’s Journey’ (1993 [1949]), this book is dedicated

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almost exclusively to the structure of the character journey in a screenplay. Batty’s work on the character journey uses Vogler’s and Campbell’s work to understand this arc as combining both a literal, physical journey (the plot) and a more internal, emotional character journey (the story); the two elements brought together by the screenwriter to create the complete narrative. Protagonists undergo a journey of emotional development alongside one of physical action, where the combination leads to transformation. This concept of the physical journey in relation to the emotional journey helps to analyse how the filmic action that takes place on, and around, the beach serves the larger purpose of enabling (and showing) character transformation, which in turn allows the thematic concerns of a story to be explored, understood and—ideally—felt. As will be highlighted, the particular aspects of this journey focused on below are call (to adventure), conflict, confrontation and catharsis, representing as they do four of the major aspects of a (typical) screenplay that comprise the character arc. Combining the narrative models of Campbell and Vogler, Batty has mapped the following structure of the character journey, with an emphasis on the relationship between physicality and emotionality: 1. Ordinary World/Limited Awareness of a Problem 2. Call to Adventure/Increased Awareness 3. Refusal of the Call/Reluctance to Change 4. Meeting with the Mentor/Overcoming Reluctance 5. Crossing the First Threshold/Committing to Change 6. Tests, Allies, Enemies/Experimenting with First Change 7. Approach to the Inmost Cave/Preparing for Big Change 8. Ordeal/Attempting Big Change 9. Reward/Consequences of the Attempt (Improvements and Setbacks) 10. The Road Back/Rededication to Change 11. Resurrection/Final Attempt at Big Change 12. Return with Elixir/Final Mastery of the Problem (2010, 300– 306). Following a call to adventure (stage 2), conflict (tests, allies, enemies) occurs in the second act of the screenplay (stage 6). The major character

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confrontation takes place during the ordeal (stage 8) and is eventually resolved with a catharsis during the reward (stage 9) and, typically, a final test, or second catharsis, that the reward has been successful (stage 12).

Case Studies Storm Boy (1976) tells the story of ten-year-old Mike, also known as ‘Storm Boy’, who lives with his reclusive fisherman father, Tom, on the lonely South Australian coastline of the Coorong. After duck hunters shoot a pelican, Mike raises the three orphaned chicks. He meets another outsider, Fingerbone Bill, an Indigenous man who has been exiled by his tribe. Fingerbone teaches Mike some of the stories of the Tanganarin people, whose land covers the Coorong to Goolwa, the world of the film. Mike raises the chicks, and one, Mr. Percival, becomes his loyal companion. Fingerbone teaches Mike about the cycle of life and the value of knowledge, and Mike begins to realise what he is missing in terms of education by living such an isolated existence. Mike runs away to visit the Goolwa school, and, when the duck hunters return, they shoot Mr. Percival. Finally, Tom takes himself and Mike back to Goolwa, so that Mike can receive an education and be readied for the life he chooses for himself. Storm Boy is an iconic Australian film about the struggle of men to find their place and to live with the consequences of their emotions, and the beach setting is used to express aspects of Mike and Tom’s physical and emotional journeys. The film’s narrative is driven by the conflict between those who live on the beach—Mike and his father, and Fingerbone—and hunters who come to the beach to shoot. Thematically, this explores ideas of man versus nature, survival and respect for the land. One of the stories Fingerbone explains to Mike is that when a pelican is killed, as totem of this land, a storm will come. The first death of a pelican results in the storm, which gives Storm Boy his name. The second storm, during which Mr. Percival helps rescue shipwrecked fisherman, foretells the pelican’s own death, and, when the pelican is shot by hunters, Mike’s grief is echoed in the stormy weather raging outside the hut. The wide, sweeping landscape of the Coorong dunes and beaches underscore this pain and conflict, reflecting and expressing the theme of isolation, the emotional core of the film. The emotionality of the landscape helps to clarify the physical journeys that the characters go on, from Tom rejecting community and choosing

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isolation, to Fingerbone being rejected by his community and thus being isolated. During the opening sequence of the film, isolation in nature is shown to be a safe place, in contrast to the dangers of community (i.e. other people). Nature and the beach are nurturing of both body and soul: the outsiders have made a small paradise for themselves. That is, of course, until the world intrudes and disrupts, causing narrative rupture for the main characters (the call to adventure). Hunters and then beach buggy riders interrupt their paradise and both threaten Mike’s safety and life and, later, take Mr. Percival’s. Tom is conflicted about how best to raise his son: in the isolation of nature or in the complex world of people. Narratively, one has now invaded and disrupted the other—physical journey shaping emotional journey—and for Mike, who is maturing into a teenager, this conflict imposes on his sense of self. He is forced to question who he is and what he knows about the world. Equally important to this film’s narrative is Tom’s emotional journey, which is played out through Mike’s physical journey. As conflict mounts and tension builds, Mike’s changing needs and the disruption of the world force Tom into confronting his own wants and needs. Here, the core dramatic question for the audience becomes: Can Tom overcome his own pain in order to give his son what he needs? Confrontation and catharsis in this regard come face to face when Fingerbone shows Mike a newborn pelican chick and explains that a bird-like Mr. Percival does not die but lives on in a new life. While representing a physical low point in the story (the ordeal), this event allows Mike to move beyond grief and into his own new life, in Goolwa (the reward). The beach is thus an enabler of physical and emotional change—taking life, yet also giving it. With this catharsis for Mike comes catharsis for Tom, who, through Mike’s running away from the beach to Goolwa (his physical ordeal), provides a realisation that things must change (an emotional reward). In this way, the beach setting of Storm Boy is central to the film’s storytelling. Wild, wide-open expanses of coastline reflect isolation; the storms and tides express change and restlessness and the human inability to control and deny nature; and the invasion by hunters and dune buggy riders explores white Australia’s lack of connection to, and respect for, nature. Call, conflict, confrontation and catharsis are present in the story shape of the film, where physical and emotional journeys are reflected in the cycle of nature and the arena of the beach.

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Puberty Blues (1981) follows the story of Debbie and Sue, two teenagers attempting to break into the ‘cool’ gang who surf at Greenhill Beach, south Sydney. They gain acceptance by helping two of the gang’s boys to cheat in a school exam, but soon realise that the sunloving lifestyle they had admired from afar is far more complex than they had imagined. It is a world dominated by sex and sexism, drugs, racism, bullying and boredom, passively waiting for the guys to do something, the boys who the girls are expected to actively serve. Following the death of one of the boys from drugs, Debbie and Sue take action, buying themselves a surfboard and claiming the beach space for themselves. Clearly disrupting the social order of this world, they realise they will be dropped by their boyfriends—but they do not care. The film ends with the two young women claiming agency in the world of the beach and realising that true friendship means much more than wider social (and, in this case, largely male) acceptance. Nell Schofield, who played Debbie in the film, describes the film as “a bosom buddy flick” at its core, where “No matter what happens, these two have each other” (2005, 36). An iconic coming of age film, which was recently remade as a successful television series (2012–2014), Puberty Blues explores themes of gender expectations; innocence and knowledge; passivity and activity; acceptance and rejection; and the cultural rites of passage (coming of age) on the Australian beach. Lesley Speed, in her essay ‘You and me against the world’, considers the film through the eyes of somebody who grew up with the film, asking how it liberates feminist ideals through the rebellion and protest against the status quo. The 1970s and early 1980s were a time of seismic cultural shift in Australia, following the publication of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970), the abolition of the White Australia Policy in 1973 and the introduction of the ‘Multiculturalism’ policy in 1978, and Puberty Blues can be seen as symptomatic of this era of change and of the resistance to it by white masculinist culture. As Elizabeth McMahon writes: Puberty Blues depicts the lag or misalignment within sexual liberation and women’s liberation, which stranded women and girls (at least) in a place where the performance of old-fashioned gender civilities has ceased but new civilities were yet to be forged. Under-age girls became sexually available but not on their own terms. (2013, 380)

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The physical journey of this film follows Debbie and Sue joining the gang and accepting its rules, but then rejecting its rules and learning to surf. In doing so, they take control of the previously male-controlled beach world. The emotional journey of this narrative produces a story of girls craving acceptance and entry into the adult world but discovering that the adult world is violent and harsh and—as such—attempting to create a better world in which they take control of their own lives. Debbie and Sue do this by seizing control of the physical world of the beach and making it work for them, on their terms. The film’s narrative is driven by the conflict between the male surfers who feel they control the beach, the surf and who gains acceptance into the dominant group. Debbie and Sue enter the world (their call to adventure) thinking they want one thing, acceptance and boyfriends, but they slowly realise they need something else, respect and agency. Towards the end of the second act of the screenplay, Debbie’s boredom with the roles ascribed to her— observer, server and sex partner—peaks, and she disrupts the social order by saying “Lend us your board”. The guys scoff and reject her, valuing their surfboards over her and unwilling to let her into their sacred space and world (approach). The emotional line is not, however, simply one of divided genders. When one of the gang members, Gary, becomes increasingly absent as he falls deeper and deeper into the world of heroin, none of the boys do anything to intervene—an indictment of the Australian mythology of mateship, which historically involves equality, loyalty and friendship (see Haltof 1993). Debbie (then Gary’s girlfriend) also rejects him at that point, telling him he is selfish. Gary’s death provides the climax of the film. The gang members witness his body being taken away by an ambulance and then hold a funeral for him at the beach, launching his burning surfboard into the waves and declaring the beach closed for three days. With the ritual taking place out in the water, the girls are excluded, but this firms up Debbie’s understanding of the world and her outsider status in it, to which she responds both physically and emotionally with a plan for catharsis. In the final sequence of the film, a defiant Debbie and Sue buy their own surfboard and teach themselves to surf. The boys watch on, laughing, unwilling to help but disturbed by Debbie’s persistence, which is a threat to the order of their world. Debbie does indeed eventually succeed, catching waves and surfing, and this provides the major cathartic challenge and disruption to the boys’ world. The final image of the film, of Debbie and Sue in the sand dunes, looking back towards the beach as

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they leave the world they have known behind, thematically resonates with its audience: leaving behind sexism, exclusion, bullying, passivity and, ultimately, childhood. According to Schofield: “It’s widely thought that the final scene of the film has been responsible for a radical shift in Australian beach culture … This scene inspired girls and women to get out there and claim their right alongside blokes to surf, or, at the very least, gave them the option to do so” (2005, 42). In this film, Debbie (as protagonist) and Sue (as secondary protagonist) move from mythologising the beach, boys, surf culture and adulthood through their acceptance of the rules of those worlds, to doubting, challenging and failing in this world, and rejecting its ideologies. The low point of Gary’s death mirrors and highlights the death of their own innocence, naïvety and passivity, and enables them to take control and action, reclaiming the beach not only for their own sakes, but also for all other women. The beach arena is crucial to the thematic explorations of the film, being used to chart physical and emotional terrain. Herein, the beach represents: the tensions of freedom (for men) and imprisonment (for women); powerlessness (the ocean keeps going to the horizon and the surf rolls in day after day, no matter what happens to the people who use it); the violence and anger embodied in a proprietorial emotion (girls being passed around by the boys as possessions and the fight between the surfers and the lifeguards, which explores ideas of ownership of the beach place); and life and death and ritual (played out through the death of Gary and his ritualised memorial at sea). Puberty Blues opens with images of happy, sun-loving, relaxed holidaymakers on the beach—the mythologised, accepted, assumed world of the Australian shore. The film then moves quickly to disrupt and dismantle this through physical and emotional violence, exclusion, sexism, racism, death and, finally, the need of the protagonists to leave that world behind in order to take control of their futures. This is a film in which one of the most iconic spaces of Australian life is placed at the centre of the narrative in order to interrogate and disrupt the very iconic status it holds. For Schofield, “What Puberty Blues did was expose the realities of an Australian sub-culture that had hitherto been hidden” (2005, 37). In this way, the beach arena empowers the narrative by drawing on the power of the familiar to show a darker side of the world. Central to The Coolangatta Gold (1984) is another iconic Australian beach location, Queensland’s Gold Coast, telling the story of an Ironman race along the coastline. Adam Lucas is determined to be a champion

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and is coached and pushed by his father, Joe. Adam’s brother Steve, a music band manager, is his training partner but comes second in their father’s eyes. Encouraged by his girlfriend, Kerri, Steve decides to enter the race and it becomes a conflict of brother against brother. At the end of the film, Steve is leading and is about to win the race but, realising the importance of family and kinship, he chooses to stumble and allows Adam to pass him. While the physical journey of the film is of the Ironman race along the beach, the brother versus brother plot could be set anywhere and explore the same conflict and catharsis. However, in this film, the beach is central to the thematic core of the story in how it represents the cultural mythologising of the bronzed ‘Aussie’ hero: the man who can run, swim and paddle, overcoming the ocean and the land to triumph (see O’Connell 2007; McGregor 1994, 57). The essential conflict in this film is between man and his own human limits and endurance. In this regard, the beach (nature) is shown as an unrelenting enemy that effortlessly and endlessly endures, while humans are continually tested and unable to endure. Emotional conflict is played out narratively between brother and brother, and between father and sons: Joe clearly favours Adam and is unhappy that Steve is now competing against his brother. The race itself provides the major confrontation within the narrative— the physical Ordeal—with man pitting himself against himself and against nature. The race also frames conflict between brothers, and the emotional reward comes in the form of the personal sacrifice one brother makes for the other. In this film, then, brotherhood—and for Australian culture specifically, the idea of mateship—overcomes personal glory, representing an overcoming of, as opposed to giving into, the beach. While the beach arena provides clear cinematic visuality, which is particularly pertinent given the Gold Coast’s iconic status as an international as well as national tourist destination—Stephen Stockwell marks the film as the “shining moment” for the Queensland Film Corporation’s ‘boosterism’ approach to films set on the Gold Coast (2011, 285)—for story purposes, it also frames the masculine code of Australian mythology. In presenting the beach as a place of sport, work and endurance of the body, not purely rest and relaxation, The Coolangatta Gold celebrates the beach as a space in which identities and kinship can be explored and tested through choices and their consequences. As such, it is worth comparing this film with another of the same era, Gallipoli (Weir 1981), set on a beach on the other side of the world during World War I. Two young men, Frank and

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Archy, are both talented runners. Archy sacrifices himself to save Frank, who escapes battle by being the runner conveying messages between HQ and the soldiers. Frank’s final run fails by mere seconds to deliver the message that would have saved thousands of lives. The stakes are higher, the setting historical rather than familial, but there are parallels to be made between the testing of masculinities enacted in the liminal zones of these beaches (see McMahon 2013). Other Australian films that use the beach in significant narrative ways focus more on its threat and menace. Blackrock (1997), for instance, is the story of the rape and murder of a young girl at the beach and is again centred around a masculine surf culture (see Brien 2000). Here, central physical and emotional lines play out at night, when the beach becomes an isolating and dangerous space full of shadows, secrets and, ultimately, death (see Ellison 2017). Similarly, Bra Boys , a documentary about the infamous Maroubra Beach riots, shows the beach to be a place of conflict, a contested space from the first clashes between Indigenous inhabitants and the white colonialists, to the contemporary surfer gang, the Bra Boys. This film includes footage of the 2005 Cronulla riots, which were motivated by racial and ethnic tensions. More recently, independent low-budget feature, Is This the Real World (McKenna 2015), narratively transitions the beach from a place of innocent, trusting teen romance to a malevolent, dangerous place of struggle and possible death. The dual natures of the natural world—calm, sunny and to be trusted versus wild, untamed rage—are used to chart the emotional arc of a protective father and a wayward young man, eventually playing out violently in the setting of a stormy beach.

Conclusion The beach as a landscape is, by its nature, a place of conflict and catharsis and thus a compelling emotional world in which to tell stories. It is the beach where water clashes with earth, forces collide and erosions occur. The beach is eternal, but also a place of endless and unpredictable change. Tides turn twice a day, and water sweeps in, and then flows out, cleansing the sand, but depositing new debris and sometimes, even, treasure. Visually, it provides the drama and symbolism expected of screen stories. Thematically, it is a powerful arena for playing out deeply emotional stories. As can be seen from the case studies discussed, the beach provides a rich and varied canvas on which screenwriters can orchestrate a wide range of

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emotionally charged stories, commonly with themes of gender, belonging, loss and danger, and always taking into consideration the relationship between real, physical place and internal, character transformation.

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Haltof, M. 1993. In quest of self-identity: Gallipoli, mateship, and the construction of Australian national identity. Journal of Popular Film and Television 21 (1): 27–36. Harper, G., and J. Rayner (eds.). 2010. Cinema and landscape. Bristol: Intellect. Huntsman, L. 2001. Sand in our souls: The beach in Australian history. Melbourne, VIC: Melbourne University Press. Johns, A. 2008. White tribe: Echoes of the anzac myth in cronulla. Continuum, 22 (1), 3–16. Lette, K., and G. Carey. 1979. Puberty blues. Sydney: Picador. Marks, D. 2009. Inside story: The power of the transformational arc. London: A&C Black. McGregor, C. 1994. The Beach, the coast, the signifier, the feral transcendence and pumpin’ at Byron Bay. In The abundant culture: Meaning and significance in everyday Australia, ed. D. Headon, J. Hooton, and D. Horne, 50–60. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. McKee, R. 1999. Story: Substance, structure, style, and the principles of screenwriting. London: Methuen. McKenna, M. (dir.). 2015. Is This the Real World. Australia: Point of View Films. McMahon, E. 2013. On and off the beach: Puberty Blues on film. In Telling stories: Australian life and literature 1935–2012, ed. T. Dalziell and P. Genoni, 378–384. Melbourne: Monash University Publishing. O’Connell, S. 2007. How to value an Australian icon: The economic and social value of surf lifesaving in Australia. Australian Journal on Volunteering 11 (1): 76–79. O’Neill, M., and B. Nott (dir.). 2013. Drift. Australia: Hopscotch. O’Regan, T. 1996. Australian national cinema. London: Routledge. Safran, H. (dir.). 1976. Storm Boy. Australia: South Australian Film Corporation. Schofield, N. 2005. Australian beach culture: Puberty Blues revisited. The Sydney Papers 17 (2): 35–44. Screen Australia. 2019. Top 100 Australian feature films of all time. https:// www.screenaustralia.gov.au/fact-finders/cinema/australian-films/top-filmsat-the-box-office. Accessed 3 June 2018. Simpson, C., R. Murawska, and A. Lambert (eds.). 2009. Diasporas of Australian cinema. Bristol, UK: Intellect Books. Speed, L. 2004. You and me against the world: Revisiting Puberty Blues. Metro Magazine 140: 54–59. Stockwell, S. 2011. Crime capital of Australia: The Gold Coast on screen. Studies in Australasian Cinema 5 (3): 281–292. Thoms, A. 2000. Surfmovies: The history of the surf film in Australia. Noosa Heads: Shore Thing. Vogler, C. 1999. The writer’s journey: Mythic structure for storytellers and screenwriters, 2nd ed. London: Pan Books.

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Weir, P. (dir.). 1981. Gallipoli. Australia: Associated R&R Films. Winnett, F. 2003. Myths of the beach: A coastal sense of place in Australian film and television. PhD Thesis, Monash University. Wright, G. (dir.). 1992. Romper Stomper. Australia: Village Roadshow.

Instafamous: Social Media Influencers and Australian Beaches Marjorie Kibby

Introduction The beach has occupied a central place in Australian national mythology (Fiske et al. 1987, xi), functioning historically as the “epicenter of national cultural life” (Franklin et al. 2013, 2) and as a particular focus for various forms of vacation and recreation. As such, the beach has featured in diverse representations of Australia and Australianness, has had a special significance in the everyday lives of many Australians and has been a powerful drawcard for international tourists. The Australian beach of the popular imagination has tended to be urban, with Bondi, Manly, Cottesloe, St Kilda and Glenelg appealing to both locals and tourists as the interplay of nature and culture that bridges the mythology of a rugged outback lifestyle with the reality of a population that is 90% urban. Suburban-dwelling Australians use city beaches as a way of being in nature, without leaving culture completely behind (Hartley and Green 2006, 348). For locals, the beach is “ordinary, everyday” and a familiar urban space (Ellison 2010, 2), and the significance of the beach for locals has not been as a site of escape but as a place of ordinariness. Remote beaches were the province of hardcore surfers and not a holiday destination for Australians. When seeking beach-based vacations,

M. Kibby (B) University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW, Australia © The Author(s) 2020 E. Ellison and D. L. Brien (eds.), Writing the Australian Beach, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35264-6_4

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Australians have looked first at overseas destinations (Franklin et al. 2013, 2), rather than at remote Australian beaches. Tourism Australia marketing campaigns have reflected John Urry’s ideas of “the end of tourism” or the breakdown of the difference between tourism and everyday life. For example, the 2018 campaign premiered during the American Superbowl was made in partnership with the Wine Industry and highlighted dining and wine consumption. Urry wrote of the dissolving of “tourism’s specificity, when tourism becomes blurred with other forms of production, consumption and mobility” (1995, 148). He described tourism as “massively mediatised while everyday sites of activity get redesigned in ‘tourist’ mode” (2002, 161). While the most used vignettes in Australian tourism advertising have been “drinking beer in a pub and a beach-side barbeque” (Khamis 2012, 55), tourists seemed to be looking for a different version of that to which they were accustomed. Contemporary young tourists are looking for more than a better version of their everyday lives when travelling. The demographic nicknamed ‘millennials’ are travelling more than previous generations and looking for a wider variety of destinations. They are seeking out adventure, with new experiences, information backed choices of novel destinations and activities, and travel with a certain level of risk (Pendergast 2009, 11). For this group, tourist spaces are places that are both physically and metaphorically set apart from everyday life. Beaches are an example of marginal spaces, or zones of liminality, that perfectly reflect the “places of inbetweenness” (Meethan 2012, 85) sought by these travellers. Millennials want individualised experiences that explore local culture and points of difference, and beach holidays rate highly with them (YouGov 2017).

Tourism and Photography Photography and tourism have been associated since the late 1800s, when early photographers like Francis Bedford and James Ricalton produced exotic images for domestic consumption. These photographs fed the boom in mass tourism in the nineteenth century as people sought to visit the places depicted in the advertising cards and brochures. Photography remains a key factor in contemporary tourism. Photography’s links with tourism encompass several roles. The choice of destinations, as well as the locations, sights and activities within them, is influenced by exposure to images in advertising, fiction and other media

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representations. Recognisable images of the location provide evidence that travel was undertaken, places were visited, and the traveller has had some form of authentic or exotic experience (Chalfen 1979, 435). Travel can have as its purpose the collection of images and as such can structure the travel experience. Photographs can also be used to evaluate travel’s success, providing evidence that vacation goals were achieved, and they influence the construction of the vacation narrative post-holiday. They play a role in constructing an identity based in being a particular type of tourist through captured ‘this is me’ moments. Sharing images is an essential part of the tourism experience. The various functions of tourist photography are to an extent dependent on having a shared understanding of what photographs from the travel location should look like. This shared understanding is derived, in part, from official tourism sources such as postcards, advertising campaigns and tourist brochures and partly from other media sources, including popular fiction. However, the public perceptions of tourist destinations are increasingly based on photographs taken by other tourists. Tourism images are shared online on sites where travellers are likely to seek destination information, such as TripAdvisor, on specialist travel blogs like Dan Flying Solo and on social photo-sharing sites including Flickr, Facebook and Instagram. Tourists therefore see destinations in terms of the images with which they are familiar with and reproduce that vision in the photographs they themselves take and share. Urry described this phenomenon as “the tourist gaze” (2002, 1), explaining how tourists re-created images drawn from the popular imaginary and inserted themselves into pre-existing narratives of place. In this “closed circle of representation”, the images of a tourist destination were reproduced in tourists’ own holiday snaps and circulated and so increasingly authenticated those representations. Urry saw the end point of tourism as travellers demonstrating that they have visited a destination by sharing “their version of the images that they had seen before they set off” (2002, 140). Olivia Jenkins analysed Australian tourism brochures available to potential travellers in Vancouver, Canada, and determined that the key photographic images used to promote Australia were of Uluru, the Sydney Opera House and tropical beaches. Her interviews with Canadian backpackers in Australia and her analysis of the images they captured found a strong correlation between the brochure images and their personal photographs. Jenkins concluded that, in a closed circle of representation, the images from the tourist brochures were “tracked down and re-captured” (2003, 324).

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Photographs have long been used to assist in travel destination decisions; however, a recent survey revealed that 40% of millennials responding said they choose a travel spot based on its “Instagrammability” (Hayhurst 2017), their choice of travel destination based on whether it will provide enviable images to post on social media. Instagram has 800 million monthly users worldwide, who upload 52 million photographs every day, with 59% of users aged between 18 and 29 (Dogtiev 2018). Instagram is playing an increasingly important role in both official and informal destination marketing, and Instagram images therefore reveal the destination characteristics that resonate with young travellers in particular. A content analysis of Instagram images of Australian beaches and their hashtags can determine the existence of a closed circle of representation where tourists seek out the places they have seen in photographs and distribute their own photographs of those places, in a search for authenticity in their Australian beach experiences. This analysis can also uncover the proportional representation of urban and secluded beaches, allowing for an understanding of how promotion on Instagram can impact a beach and its local community and rewrite the mythology of the Australian beach.

Australian Beaches on Instagram What is depicted in Instagram images of Australian beaches allows an interpretation of the photographers’ perception of the beach, that is, their idea of how the beach should be represented determined by what they value in the beach as a destination. To determine the dominant representations of the Australian beach, the content of 150 Instagram images with the hashtag #australianbeach or #australianbeaches was coded using categories derived from the features valued by beachgoers described in tourism literature (Cervantes et al. 2008; Roca and Villares 2008). Images sampled for analysis comprised the nine ‘top images’ and the forty-one ‘most recent’ images on three different days and times. Most of the Instagram images depicted a sandy beach (132 out of 150, or 88%) with natural surroundings and no obvious landscaping (129 out of 150, or 86%) and clear, blue water (120 out of 150 or 80%). People were present in 49 (33%) of the images, engaged in sporting activities such as swimming or surfing, social activities including drinking and picnicking, and nature-based activities like walking and shell collecting, or simply being on the beach. More than two people were depicted in only 12 images (8%), and the crowded beach scenes associated with, for

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example, Bondi Beach were represented in just five images (3%). Lifesavers appeared in seven (5%) of the photographs, and houses, landscaping, restaurants and plated food, signage, facilities such as seating and showers, and other indicators of an urban environment were featured in another 42 of the images (28%). 104 of the images (69%) could be interpreted as being of non-urban beaches, and 93 of them (62%) were distant views that gave the impression of isolation or remoteness. This glance at Instagram suggests that the Australian beach imagined and imaged by the users of the platform is not the urban beach of national mythology and experience. The beach that Instagram users see as authentically Australian is undeveloped, remote, and unpopulated. Tourism magazine, Travel + Leisure, published a feature on the Instagram accounts of Australian beaches that would “have you booking your next trip to an Australian beach” (Plautz 2016). The feature did not include any city beaches on its list of recommendations, instead recommending Cape Arid in Western Australia, Wineglass Bay and Bruny Island in Tasmania, Emerald Beach in New South Wales and other beaches well away from the cities and traditional tourist destinations, echoing the destinations shared under the #australianbeach hashtag. The destinations captured by the Instagram accounts are reinforced, not only by other posts on the platform, but also by travel and tourism-related media. While the meanings of the images can be inferred, the hashtags used can reveal the meanings intended by the Instagrammers. A hashtag is a way of adding metadata in social networks such as Instagram, allowing users to apply dynamic, user-generated labels. Adding the hash symbol (#) to a word or words, as in #australianbeach, allows easy, informal annotation of posts without need of any formal taxonomy or markup language. While hashtags are used across many social media platforms, they have become a pervasive practice on Instagram. Hashtags are able to convey complex meanings through a range of communicative functions. In terms of Michael Halliday’s (1978) concept of linguistic metafunctions, hashtags can be described as marking experiential topics, organising text and enacting interpersonal relationships. These are not mutually exclusive, and a hashtag can have more than one function in an Instagram post. Hashtags are searchable and therefore can have an aggregating function marking posts on a topic. All the Instagram posts analysed used the hashtag #australianbeach or #australianbeaches, but most used additional categorising hashtags that identified place and time such as #noosa, #sunset and #spring. Eighteen of the images analysed used hashtags that

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named a city or an urban beach. These hashtags also alert communities of interest or “publics” (Bruns and Burgess 2011) as in #dogsofinstagram and #dronephotography which hail respectively dog lovers and photographers using drones and attract them to the beach images. Hashtags marking experiential topics are important in placing a post before a wider audience, as they are aggregated and displayed as ‘top posts’ and ‘recent posts’. The aggregation can be followed and is instrumental in acquiring comments, likes and personal followers and thereby achieving a level of ‘Instafame’ for the poster. Hashtags that organise text function as punctuation marking the difference between caption and comment or as a dependent clause working with other hashtags to complete a communicative event. In one Instagram post, the caption “Sunday Satisfaction” was followed by the hashtags #wavecheck, #surfconditions and #surfsearch, orienting the reader to the source of the satisfaction which was the primary meaning of the image. In another image with the caption, “The beach felt like another planet”, the hashtags #stormyskies, #beachstorm and #weirdweather complete the comment begun in the caption. Hashtags go beyond the descriptive to express attitudes and opinions on the posts, to make a judgement or evaluation and to create relationships with the perceived audience. These types of hashtags have interpersonal functions such as adopting value positions or negotiating affiliations (Zappavigna 2015). The most common interpersonal hashtags used with the images analysed commented on the scenery, indicated the realisation of a passion or dream or suggested adventure or travel off the established tourist routes. Hashtags such as #nofilterneeded and #natureunfiltered commented on the natural beauty of the image by explaining that none of the Instagram image enhancement filters were applied. Hashtags that implied the achievement of a travel goal included #travelbucketlist, #passionpassport and #dreamvacation. The hashtags that suggest exploration and adventure include #aswewander, #adventuredaily, #exploremore, #theroadlesstravelled, #secretsurf, #untouched, #pristine and #wildplaces. Without ignoring the fact that hashtags can be automatically generated and may, therefore, have little connection with the posters’ thoughts and feelings or can be used as a strategy to attract followers rather than reflect honest opinions, the hashtags used with the 150 Instagram images reinforce the images in representing Australian beaches as isolated and unspoiled, rather than urban.

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Place Branding and Destination Images Place branding is a practice of identifying the distinctive, positive attributes of a country, region or city to guide environmental and urban planning, attract investors, businesses and visitors and create an emotional attachment that enhances the cultural life of the place (Dickinger and Költringer 2015, 1837). Place branding is the province of different levels of government and official promotional bodies, including chambers of commerce and tourism boards, and generally involves symbol creation such as brand names, logos and slogans, and cohesive advertising campaigns that attach a specific identity to the place. The destination image is “the sum of beliefs, ideas, and impressions that a person has of a destination” (Crompton 1979, 18). It is the mental image that a person has of a potential destination which has been constructed from information rather than actual experience. For tourists, destination image formation is not solely derived from place branding but is an evaluative response to a range of information sources. While the place brand is intended to communicate a specific image of the destination, contemporary travellers have a range of destination information sources beyond the traditional tourism marketing organisations. Tourists, and particularly young travellers, use social media and online interactive tools to share their impressions and experiences and to obtain information potential travel and holiday destinations. This user-generated content is increasingly influencing destination awareness and image formation (Tussyadiah and Fesenmaier 2009). While tourists and holidaymakers have historically used the reports of family and friends as well as official and commercial tourism information, today travel consumers generate images, reports and commentary through social networks on a scale that enables a significant influence on destination image formation. The official place brand and the individual destination image can, and do, overlap. One example is the Norfolk Pine. In 1877, the newly formed Manly Town Council of New South Wales planted Norfolk Pine trees along the Manly beachfront, on the recommendation of the Director of the Botanic Gardens. The trees were given credit “for having made Manly Beach the most beautiful of the many silver beaches on a 500-mile coastline” (Redgum 1935, 8) and inspired coastal plantings not only on many other Australian beaches but also on surf beaches in Mexico, Portugal, South Africa, Northern California and Florida. The effect of the increasing association of Norfolk Pines with surf beaches includes the decision

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of the City of Newcastle, New South Wales, Coastal Revitalisation Program to use Norfolk Pines to “enhance the overall visual amenity” of the area through their connotations of a coastal environment (Newcastle City Council 2015). What was originally part of a place branding strategy has become a widespread component of surf beach destination imagery. Place branding is a process for the development and management of audience perceptions of the place with the objective of influencing consequent decisions, so place branding and destination images are inevitably linked. Marketer-generated place branding can leverage consumer-generated destination information, and tourist destination images draw upon official place branding. However, there is an increasing differentiation in tourist perceptions of market-generated and consumergenerated content, with travellers increasingly turning to consumergenerated depictions and reviews. This is particularly true in the case of young travellers, with several factors influencing millennials’ selection of travel information, and the decisions made on the basis of that information (Tourism Research Australia 2017).

Millennials and Destination Images The demographic that has been nicknamed ‘millennials’ are those born between 1982 and 2000 (Howe and Strauss 2009) now aged between 18 and 35. Research designed to assist in attracting this group to holiday in the Australian state of New South Wales identified a number of factors affecting their travel choices (Tourism Research Australia 2017). Millennials are “profoundly influenced” by technology and rely on immediacy of information. They are seeking authentic information as opposed to constructed promotions and value information based on personal experience. Millennials tend to rely on travel recommendations from friends, family and social media contacts. They are looking for genuine experiences and are not intimidated by travel distances if rewarded by new situations or activities. In choosing a destination, as well as criteria such as accessibility and affordability, millennials look for variety and choice, social acceptability, and ‘shareability’. It is important for them to visit places that were valued by their peers and that they would be proud to publish on social media (Tourism Research Australia 2017). A key concept for millennials in both information seeking and destination choice is authenticity. Writing in 1964, Daniel Boorstin argued that tourists of the time sought out pseudo-events and places that had

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been deliberately constructed for them, eliminating the inconvenience of the real. This “staged authenticity” (MacCannell 1973, title) is reflected in Australia’s urban beaches, which exhibit a naturalness, as opposed to nature. Urban beaches do not offer alternatives to culture, but a naturalised version of culture (Fiske 1983, 125). However, contemporary travellers are less likely to seek out tourist attractions, preferring to experience what they see as normal or everyday locations and events. Research undertaken by American travel technology company, Expedia, found that millennials from all over the world prioritise authenticity in their travel experience (2016). Authenticity can be an imprecise concept, dependent on the individual’s interaction with their environment and their personal responses to an experience; however, it is usually associated with things that are genuine, natural and original. A search for authenticity is seen not only in preferred holiday destinations and activities, but also in an appreciation of craftsmanship, local produce, traditional celebrations and interactions with local communities (Kasriel-Alexander 2017, 627). The authentic-travel trend has seen young tourists seeking the genuine experiences of remote and undeveloped beaches as an alternative to the urban Bondi, Manly, Cottesloe, St Kilda and Glenelg beaches. Perceptions of the authentic differ; however, visual evidence is seen as proof of authenticity (Kasriel-Alexander 2017, 627). While young tourists use various sources of information when planning travel, they place greater trust in user-generated content than in information from travel service providers. In a closed circle of representation, young tourists depict authenticity in capturing scenes based on previous images and see these constructed images as authentic. The co-creation of tourism information on social media is part of the prioritisation of the genuine, with photographs and information shared by fellow tourists seen as more trustworthy than official campaigns (KasrielAlexander 2017, 629). It is believed that the providers of user-generated content have nothing to gain, or lose, by sharing their experiences and opinions, so there is a higher level of perceived reliability and authenticity. Being able to follow, like and comment on posts means that amateur Instagram posters can be perceived as friends rather than as travel marketers, for example, Chris and Freya of The Sandy Feet Instagram account (@thesandyfeet) document their travel with ‘no-filter’ photographs and personal anecdotes and engage in exchanges with viewers. It is not surprising, therefore, that tourism marketers have seen the potential of social

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media in enhancing brand awareness and customer engagement. The benefits of social media as a marketing tool, however, are dependent on tourism agencies providing content that meshes with current perceptions of authenticity. One way of ensuring authenticity is by using consumers’ own images and incorporating them into the marketing material, making it seem more genuine and thus relatable. Tourism Australia’s official Instagram account invites travellers to tag their images with @Australia, #SeeAustralia or #RestaurantAustralia to give permission to re-post their photograph. Tourism Australia credits the photographer and adds a friendly, even folksy, comment—“Come on down to ‘The Farm’! (Yes, we know it’s a beach, but that’s what the locals call it.)”. Of the 200 most recent images posted by the account, 41 were of beaches that appeared to be remote, while 13 were of apparently urban beaches. There were 9 images of beaches that featured animals (kangaroos, seals and turtles) increasing the sense of a remote beach and adding an Australian authenticity to the images. The type of beach most often depicted on the official Tourism Australia account paralleled that most often depicted on the tourist accounts from which they were drawn. Urry described a closed circle of representation where tourists seek out the places that they have seen in publicity photographs and then take their own photographs of those places to document a travel experience. Now tourism marketing organisations close the circle more tightly by feeding back to tourists their own, or their peers’, images as advertising. This tightly closed circle of representation is read as “authentic” as the advertising material meshes with the depicted experiences of their generation.

Conclusion This closed circuit of tourism images may not be, by itself, enough to change the way that travellers experience Australian beaches but combined with other factors may have a significant impact on beach tourism. Many of these factors are associated with the characteristics and preferences of millennial travellers. In addition to preferring destinations that are being discussed on social media and that have a high level of social acceptability amongst the peer group, preferred destinations are ‘Instagram-able’ or capable of being photographed in ways that generate likes and follows on Instagram. Beaches that appear pristine and remote provide cultural capital for the poster in excess of that to be gained from a more routine and easily accomplished visit to an urban beach.

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The share economy is also important to this group. While city beaches are well supported by hotels and motels, services that enable home shares such as Airbnb and Homestay are an important accommodation option at regional beaches, in some locations far exceeding the supply of traditional tourist accommodation. There has been a rapid growth in online holiday rental listings in Australia overall and in coastal Australia in particular. In the coastal town Byron Bay, for instance, almost one in five houses is listed on Airbnb (Gurran et al. 2018). The appeal to young travellers is not just that they may be cheaper than traditional tourist accommodation, but that they provide an opportunity to be part of the community, increasing the feeling of authenticity. The experience orientation that is seen as one of the characteristics of this generation leads them to non-traditional or non-corporate accommodation in destinations off the beaten track (Paris 2017). They have been generalised as “not risk-averse” when it comes to making travel decisions and as resilient in dealing with adverse experiences (Paris 2017). These characteristics are valued amongst the peer group and may contribute to their seeking more remote beach-side locations, rather than taking the easy option of urban beaches within a cab ride of the international airport. While young Australians have still sought beach-based vacations, in past years, they have predominantly travelled to overseas destinations (Franklin et al. 2013). Recently, there has been a positive response to ‘localisation’ as an adaptation to climate change. Just as the local food movement with its connotations of authenticity, community and experiential living appeals to the millennial generation, it is possible that the travellers visiting Australia’s non-urban beaches are not just international tourists, but also young Australians localising their vacations as an alternative to high-carbon travel. Tourist photographs in the Instagram era are less a matter of “consuming places” (Urry 1995, 259) and more an identity performance through which travellers create ongoing personal narratives of place by inserting themselves into pre-existing stories about the destination and circulating the new narratives. These narratives are neither constant nor universal, but, in general, they can be described as placing beach visitors within a story of authentic adventure that values a natural environment. These stories increasingly unfold on a remote, or at least unspoiled, Australian beach with implications for not just tourism marketing, but also environmental and infrastructure management.

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Food Writing and the Australian Beach: From Leisure to Labour Donna Lee Brien

Introduction The idea of the beach as a location for eating and drinking seems such an ordinary, commonplace and normalised part of contemporary culture as to seem unworthy of any deeper consideration. In historical terms, Australian beaches have been Indigenous sites of feasting for thousands of years (Hall and McNiven 1999; Dyson 2006). There is, however, merit in exploring the beach in culinary terms, as understanding the beach in this way illuminates ideas about contemporary labour. This discussion takes as its main texts for analysis Australian food writing in its broadest sense. In this definition, food writing encompasses not just cookbooks and recipes in magazines and newspapers, but also food-related advertising, as well as scriptwriting for culinary television. Children’s picture books and memoirs are also mentioned as sources. Beginning by looking at how the beach has been portrayed, and understood, as a site of egalitarian leisure, this chapter then charts how the beach has also been imaged as a workplace on television in both local fictional representations, together

D. L. Brien (B) Creative Industries, Central Queensland University, Noosaville, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Ellison and D. L. Brien (eds.), Writing the Australian Beach, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35264-6_5

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with more factually based informational, lifestyle and reality programming. Prominent in this latter form of televisual imaging today is culinary programming—whether informational or competitive—featuring episodes with chefs, celebrities, contestants and others cooking at the beach. How Australian cookbooks have also utilised the beach as setting and subject, as well as most recently, imaged the beach as the actual site of culinary production, is then discussed. In doing so, this chapter investigates what these contemporary food writing and other popular texts reveal about ideas of both the beach and culinary labour. In this consideration, the intersectionality of class and gender, together with the phenomenon of branding, will be used to examine the representation of contemporary culinary labour and how evolving conceptualisations of the Australian beach have been co-opted into and, in turn, formed by, its representation in popular culture.

Working at the Australian Beach Popular images of the beach have long been used to symbolise, or stand for, Australia more generally. Extensively reproduced images such as Percy Trompf’s (1929) advertising poster, Australia, and Max Dupain’s (1937) photograph, Sunbaker, have become iconic art objects as well as widely recognised memes in popular culture. These images, together with many others, portray the beach as a site of leisure, repeatedly featuring figures either in repose, sunbaking or undertaking such recreational activities as swimming, surfing or strolling. This enduring idea of the beach as a site of outdoor leisure is discussed in John Fiske, Bob Hodge and Graeme Turner’s landmark study of the beach in popular culture (1987). In 1993, author Robert Drewe identified how at least three past generations of Australians have understood the beach as a place of egalitarian pleasure and relaxation which caters for everyone—from early childhood to later life (6–7). This idea of outdoor leisure is confirmed in later related investigations (Booth 2001; Huntsman 2001; Hosking et al. 2009; Ellison 2014; Brien 2018). An idea of the therapeutic value of spending time at the beach commonly underlines this imaging (Wheeler et al. 2012), with research on coastal environments finding that the participants in this study “expressed particularly strong and often enduring connections” (Bell et al. 2015, 56) to their local coastlines and suggesting, moreover, a need “for greater acknowledgement of people’s emotional, deeply embodied and often shared connections to the coast” (56). Terri Waddell observes one

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reason for this: that busy beaches promise “anonymity, equality and stress deferral … [an] a-temporal haven for the urban fatigued” (2003, 40); that is, a break from work. Richard White’s study of the ‘typical’ Australian beach holiday (2009) charts its power—and coherence—as a persistent idea in popular imagination, despite its relatively short-lived history as a major form of vacation from the 1950s to 1970s. Underscoring the beach as a site of leisure, this inexpensive and sensuous escape from work and its routines—perhaps camping, in a seaside caravan, or in a simple coastal rental shack—is powerful in memory and nostalgia, if not in current practice (White 2009; see also White 2005), as many peoples’ working schedules or other commitments and budgetary restrictions today preclude lengthy Summer holidays. White charts the increasing consumerism associated with Australian beach holidays (2005, 2009), which also alludes to the work involved for those who ‘service’ those on holidays (White 2005). In line with this, it is also interesting to chart how, in many recent examples of popular culture, the Australian beach has moved from being imaged as the site of outdoor leisure to a site of work. Some of the most vivid images of work on—and at—the beach can be found on television. Both the longlived Home and Away (Bateman 1988–current) and the more fleeting Paradise Beach (Doyle 1993–1994)—the latter of which was conceived as both competition for long-running Australian drama serials Neighbours (Watson 1985–current) and Home and Away, and a vehicle with which to break into the American market—are soap operas set in (fictional) beachside suburbs. Home and Away’s exterior ‘Summer Bay’ scenes are filmed on Sydney’s Palm Beach, some 40 kilometres north of the city, and Paradise Beach was filmed largely on location on Queensland’s Gold Coast. As such, both offer the expected sunny scenes on golden beaches washed with azure surf. But, as principally relationship-driven dramas, the characters in these narratives are shown at work as well as play. Despite a strong focus on romance and a number of dramatic plotlines, characters in Home and Away, for instance, work—or have worked—in a wide range of professional capacities. These include school teacher and principal, lecturer, student, doctor, builder, garage owner, mechanic, hairdresser, childminder, retail assistant, gym manager, barman, chef, waitstaff, event coordinator, bus driver, guidance counsellor, police officer, secretary and owners of a range of small businesses. A number of these jobs involve working at the beach: lifeguard, President of the surf club, pier owner, boat owner, and those who work in, manage and/or own the bait and surf shops.

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This portrayal of the beach as worksite can, however, be problematic. The Australian television rom-com series, Wonderland, was filmed on location in Sydney (Porter and Walker 2013–2015). Set in a Coogee beachside apartment building (Chancellor 2013) named Wonderland, this series focuses on the lives of four couples whose occupations include teacher, defamation lawyer and public relations agent. While praising the beauty of the beachside setting, some critics were lukewarm about the series’ storylines and any authentic connection between these and the beach. The Guardian’s Vicky Frost, for instance, quipped “Wonderland ticks all the usual boxes and adds a bit of ocean glamour; Coogee has never looked so beautiful. But it’s not yet clear what lies beneath the gloss. Is there any substance?” (2013). The Strip (Horsburgh 2008) was a Channel 9 police drama that ran for a single season of thirteen episodes. Inspired (at least in part) by the success of the Underbelly crime series (Monaghan and Silk 2008–current), The Strip followed a series of fictional CIB detectives as they investigated crimes on the Gold Coast’s Main Beach, although—like Wonderland—one critic wrote that “its storylines didn’t match the scenery” (Potts 2016). The representation of work in the drama series Breakers (Coleman 1998–1999) offers a counterpoint to these examples. Like Wonderland, the action revolved around a single low-rise apartment building, The Breakers , which overlooked the beach, in this case Bondi Beach. In Breakers, all the storylines were built around the lives of the people who worked (and lived) in the building, which housed three businesses: Breaker’s Modelling School, The Breaker local newspaper and Kate’s Cafe. The series also dealt with personal issues that aroused considerable controversy at the time the show was aired, such as teenage suicide and homosexuality, with most of these plotlines played out at least as much in the workplace as out of it (see, Groves 2004). In terms of more factual Australian work-focused beachside television programmes, one of the most prominent of these is the long-running reality show Bondi Rescue (Davies 2006–current), which, at the time of writing, is in its thirteenth series. This follows the work of a group of Bondi Beach lifeguards as they patrol the beaches and rescue swimmers and others who get into trouble in the surf. Like Bondi Rescue, Beach Cops (Marks 2015–2016) follows an actual group of professionals who work on the beach, this time the New South Wales Police Force, filmed on location on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. Other vocationally focused shows, the successful Bondi Vet (Williams 2009–current) and more niche Bondi Ink Tattoo Crew (Spillane and Lawrence 2015, 2017) harness the

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power of the beach as an iconic location in their titles and prominently feature the beach in their opening title scenes, advertising and promotion, but the work that is central to these shows largely occurs off the beach.

Eating at the Beach A prominent form of what can be called ‘beach work’ can be seen in the representation of the culinary at the beach. An Australian children’s picture book of the mid- to late 1940s, Holiday at the Seaside, by Penelope Malcolm with illustrations by Ellen Jay, relates the story a pair of children’s action-packed holiday at the beach. Their stay is bookended by two delicious teas. The first is at the young protagonists’ aunt’s house, a meal that has involved considerable culinary labour, featuring filled trianglecut sandwiches, fruit scones, iced cupcakes, ice cream parfaits and toffee apples. Even their little dog has a specially made treat to enjoy. After a busy day sailing and swimming among seals and mermaids, the children’s next similarly handcrafted meal of scones, biscuits and cream-filled sponge cake is served by friendly fairies and fluffy bunnies, who also provide dog biscuits for their canine companion. Despite being obviously somewhat fantastical, the representation of these meals closely reflects the type of handcrafted teas which would have been available at this time in the dining rooms of beachside hotels and smart tearooms for those with the finances to afford them. A decade later, The Happy Family Little Golden Book (‘Nicole’ and Malvern 1955) portrays a much less elaborate picnic laid out on a blanket on the sand as a key part of a family day out at the beach. Illustrated advertisements in Australian newspapers and magazines from the 1950s show similar beach picnic meals, comprising sandwiches, whole fruits and flasks of drinks being consumed on the sand. Memoirs and oral histories from this period characterise such picnics as comprising soggy tomato sandwiches, oranges and warm sweet cordial, devoured hurriedly before waiting the requisite thirty minutes (for digestion) before going swimming again (Pecket 1976, 9; Irwin 2013, 263). Deirdre Macken describes how, at the close of the twentieth century “beach culture changed” (1997), describing how what had up until that time been a usual day at the beach—with activities which revolved around relaxing on the sand, swimming and the scratch picnic lunch—had morphed into a wide range of different activities performed on different beachside locations, “from yoga poses on seaside verges to chardonnay

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picnics under pines, from an endless café crawl to roller blading”. Peter Spearritt classifies these activities as “eating and retail therapy”, noting how today “invariably more people [are] to be found in [beachside] shops, restaurants, cafes and bars than on the beach” (2003, 38).

Beach-Influenced Food The beach as a culinary location can be traced in a series of Australian cookbooks, all which have utilised the beach as inspiration, setting and subject. An early post-war example can be found in the work of Anne Mason from the mid-twentieth century. Mason was a prolific food, wine and travel writer who was well known to readers both in Australia and abroad during her long career. Mason was The Age newspaper’s deputy women’s page editor during the Second World War, for which publication she penned a longstanding weekly column from February 1949 (Mason 1949, 5). She was also the writer and presenter of a cookery segment on radio and, then, a live weekly television programme, Anne Mason’s Hometested Recipes , which aired on ABV-2 (the channel which later became ABC-2) from 1957 (Mason 2006). Penning a number of popular cookery books in Australia, once she relocated to England in 1958, Mason collected a number of her recipes from her column in The Age into her compendium, A Treasury of Australian Cookery, published in London in 1962. This text included a number of recipes inspired by, and using produce from, the seaside (fish and molluscs), but the resulting dishes were definitely designed to be cooked in a kitchen and eaten at a table, rather than prepared or consumed at the beach. This volume was recognised as such a key resource on Australian cuisine that it was republished as Flavour of Australia by the Hutchinson Group in Australia in 1981, and again for the European market in 1991, when Mason was aged 80. Di Waite’s Palm Beach Cookery Book: A Collection of Simply Exquisite Recipes (1983) is a rare example of a cookery book that uses the name of an actual beach in its title, referencing the exclusive peninsular Sydney suburb where, as mentioned above, the exterior scenes of Home and Away are filmed. Palm Beach includes grand estates and many celebrities holiday there in Summer (Stegge 1988; Huntsman 2001; Macleod 2008). Waite worked as a high-class caterer for both residents and holiday makers, with her cookbook a collection of her most “popular recipes … [from] many summers spent preparing goodies for my Palm Beach

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customers” (1983, 12). Illustrated by the author with a series of charming line drawings, including a number of the beach and its surrounds, this collection features elegant and at times quite complex recipes like that for Vegetable Roulades (24), which are mostly suited for serving at cocktail and other parties or relatively formal ‘at table’ dining. This volume and the style of its featured dishes allude powerfully to class distinctions at, and on, the beach, with those at Palm Beach and other such exclusive coastal areas of Sydney partaking of such refined dining, which is unavailable—or unaffordable—to many. This is in sharp contrast to the myth of the beach as an egalitarian space (Ellison 2014). This example, as many others, is also sharply gendered, with this delicious and expensive food all being made by women cooks, for whom the beach is certainly not a site of leisure. Richard White’s discussion of beach holidays (2009) also points to the many women who continue to provide domestic labour to their families while on such holidays. A number of recent cookbooks include a more casual version of beachside eating, although the production and serving of the food itself is still a labour-intensive task. This is vividly portrayed in Katy Holder’s A Moveable Feast: Delicious Picnic Food (2016), which includes a small selection of foods to prepare and then transport to, and serve at, the beach. These are organised into a structured ‘A Day by the Water Menu’, about which Holder writes, “After a quick dip at the beach … there’s nothing better than relaxing under a shady tree, waiting for hungry swimmers to descend. Enjoying a water view and eating delicious food is great for the mind and soul” (61). Although thus positioned as a relaxing and reviving repast, the dishes listed for this elaborate picnic involve considerable preparation. These include prawn cocktails (transported and served in jars), spiced roasted potatoes, a Spanish-influenced manchego and olive tortilla, and individual honeycomb cheesecake slices—a menu providing a stark contrast to the simple sandwiches-and-cordial beach picnics of the 1950s. Unlike Mason’s cookbook, where the focus is on the produce used—principally fish and shellfish—and its obvious connection to the beach, and thus its suitability for seaside dining, the emphasis in Holder’s book is on how the dishes are served and their appearance in the projected setting. Holder agrees, “As a stylist and recipe writer I always think about how the finished dish will look when I am writing the recipe” (ix). In this case, the culinary labour involved extends beyond the production of the components of the picnic to their plating and presentation in situ.

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Here, the beach provides a key component of that presentation, a spectacular backdrop that adds to the perceived value of the meal. The beach as spectacle in this example illustrates the continued relevance of Guy Debord’s (1967) ideas about the commodification of all the elements of contemporary life. Other contemporary cookbooks commodify the beach, and the coast, in this way, using it as their organising theme. In compiling Coast: Seaside Recipes from Australia’s Leading Chefs (2003), Kendall Hill states that he drew his “inspiration from our coastal lifestyles” (i). Hill posits this is important as “more than four out of every five Australians live by the sea” and live lifestyles that “are tempered by [this location] … the way we work, the way we relax, the way we eat” (5). While this ‘by the sea’ can be debated, as most Australians live in very large cities which do lie along a coastline, but spread significantly inland, ‘the beach’ as represented in this volume is a locale that stretches beyond local and national boundaries. The chefs in this collection thus draw not only on local seafood as well as produce from the hinterland stretching away from the coast, but also the diverse culinary cultures of the Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Americas, alongside fusion creations like “Lemongrass and palm sugar pannacotta with orange and chilli caramel” (152–153). The chefs themselves included in this collection are also from diverse backgrounds. Hill notes the inclusion of “French, Italian, Greek, Spanish, Turkish, Chinese, Malaysian, Cambodian and Indian” chefs (5). Again referring to what could be called the ‘egalitarian utopia’ of the Australian beach, in this embrace of diversity, this collection not only thus includes a series of Anglo-Australian summer recipes such as “Simple salmon with cucumber and asparagus” (13) but also a number of dishes clearly inspired by other global cuisines such as the Italian-influenced “Pan-seared calamari with chili, tomato, basil and risotto cake” (14). This global mix of cuisines is nonetheless claimed to “capture the essence of Australia – fresh, often surprising, but always down to earth” (5). Alongside luscious photographs of featured dishes, a series of images of the beach have nothing to do with the food, but are perhaps employed to bolster this notion of ‘downto-earthness’, as the dishes are rather elegant and gourmet rather than quotidian. Among the many atmospheric images of coastal landscapes, it is also notable that almost all are remarkably uncrowded and most are entirely devoid of people. Rather confusingly in terms of the rhetoric of everydayness, these images may instead suggest the luxury of solitude that

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can be purchased on exclusive beach holidays or via expensive real estate purchases. Pamela Clark’s more egalitarianly pitched Aussie Food: Great Australian Flavours from the City, Coast and Country (2014a), produced for popular magazine The Australian Women’s Weekly (and also published under the slightly more refined title, Modern Australian Food: Delicious Classic & Contemporary Food from the City, Country & Coast (2014b) that same year), dedicates a discrete section to dishes that are, supposedly, eminently suitable for coastal cooking and consumption. These dishes are, moreover, mooted to be pointedly different to those in the city and the country sections. This distinctiveness is revealed not only by the text’s division into three specific locations of the volume’s subtitle, but is also reflected in the title page which shows a busy urban restaurant and cafélined laneway (the city), a corrugated shed set in idyllic rural hills (the country), and a pair of lifeguards patrolling the sea from a beach’s golden sands (the coast). The recipes in the city section of the book include a wide range of internationally flavoured dishes that have become Australian favourites. These range from Asian wontons, rice paper rolls and curries, to Spanish tapas and Greek and French dishes. The country recipes begin with scrambled eggs and bacon and other hearty Anglo-Australian dishes such as burgers, pies, roast chicken, lamb and pork, and traditional Australian cakes and desserts such as lamingtons, pavlova and a chocolate self-saucing pudding. Each of these two locations is not only also distinguished by different dishes, but also where these are created and consumed. In this schema, the city is characterised by foods and meals sourced outside the home in “cafés … internationally renowned restaurants … growers markets … trendy food-focused bars … [with] excellence [found] at even the most humble eateries” (4). The country’s domesticfocused “hospitality and a home-cooked meal” expands to also include the regional towns which are “brimming with fresh produce and artisan products” (46). In contrast, coastal eating is characterised as being directly determined by the influence of the location, as—together—the local produce (“Bountiful seafood”), supposed outdoor lifestyle (“sunbleached decks”) and landscape features (“white sandy beaches”) “set the tone for coastal eating” (76). Eating at the beach, this section’s introduction states, is typified by an overwhelming sense of leisure, as in the description of “exceptional ingredients prepared simply, enjoyed in the sunshine at a casually set table” (76). Here, ‘coastal food’ includes the expected—the ubiquitous fish and chips, and barbequed or grilled

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seafoods and meats, salads, ice creams and ice blocks—as well as seafood pastas and tarts. Promoting a holiday mood, a selection of cocktails is included, with the direction that these are to be enjoyed on the deck at sunset. Again, not unexpectedly, images of the beach are used alongside, as well as the background for, illustrations of the recipes in this section. There are, moreover, more images of the beach (seven) in the book than those of the city (six) or country (four), although the length of each section is equal. In Matt Moran’s Australian Food: Coast + Country (2017), beachside recipes are similarly separated from those identified as being from, and for, rural dining. Imaging the coast on the front cover and the country on the back—the coastal food section features the seafood, salads, grills, fruits and other types of lighter meals that appear in the coastal section of Clark’s Aussie Food, while the country section again focuses on a heartier style of meat-based meals, cakes and desserts. This book translates Moran’s exclusive restaurant cuisine for home cooks, with a clear demarcation between the more hearty country dishes which would be suitable after a day of outside work, while coastal dishes allude to holiday leisure. This dual focus reflects the author’s professional biography which stresses how, in his work as a celebrity chef, cookbook author and restauranteur, Moran both draws on his family background as a fourthgeneration farmer, but has situated a number of his restaurants, including North Bondi Fish, Aria and Bea Restaurant by the seaside or overlooking Sydney Harbour.

The Beach and Occupational Identity Moran’s synthesis of location and occupational identity can be seen in the series Surfing the Menu (Reisz 2003–2006). Featuring restaurant chefs Ben O’Donoghue and Curtis Stone, three of these annual series used Australian locations, with the final set in New Zealand and featuring New Zealand chef Mark Gardner in place of Stone. Each series follows the pair of chefs on tour as they visit beautiful beaches and beachside localities, purchase fresh local ingredients and cook them, in between also pursuing their allegedly favourite activity of surfing. In most of these locations, the local specialties include various fish, shellfish and other seafoods, although not exclusively. In many cases, the dishes are prepared and cooked in makeshift ‘kitchens’ erected on, or in front of, a beautiful beach backdrop. This concept was revived in 2016 in Surfing the Menu Next

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Generation with popular Masterchef Australia contestants, Dan Churchill and Hayden Quinn who, somewhat confusingly, also visited a number of outback locations alongside beaches. A series of cookbooks (O’Donoghue and Stone 2004, 2005; Churchill and Quinn 2016) were produced and released to tie-in with the series. These volumes echo the television series in featuring lesser-known locations alongside those more famed in touristic terms, with the books lavishly illustrated with gorgeous and seductive photos of the beaches featured. In the books and the series, as well as in the advertising for them, as much was made of the chefs’ surfing abilities, passion for the pastime and love of the beach as was of their dedication to culinary matters. The chefs are also imaged as always wanting to be at the beach, and—wearing boardshorts and tee shirts—ready to go surfing. Throughout Surfing the Menu, the chefs are filmed travelling from location to location in a vintage van with boards attached, evoking the nomadic trope of the typical surfer’s lifestyle (Booth 2001) and choosing the locations where they film as much for the quality of the surf as the ingredients available there. The representation of the coast is typical of Australian television programmes set on, or about, the beach, such as Home and Away or Bondi Rescue, evoking the common beach iconography of a beautiful site of leisure—although this jars somewhat with the hard work involved in actually being a restaurant chef and, although not represented, in setting up those makeshift kitchens. David Conradson (2005) finds that interaction with landscape not only provides physical and psychological distance from everyday routines and domestic demands (whether in solitude or with others), and the opportunity to be close to the natural environment, with this interaction— and how it is understood—also shaping individual identity. By extension, beaches can also be used to construct, and market, an occupational identity. Gary Alan Fine, indeed, posits that occupational identity is not only “socially [and] temporarily” determined, it is also “spatially situated” (1996, 90). As Joanne Hollows and Steve Jones describe, with reference to Jamie Oliver, the advent of the celebrity chef transformed how the hard labour of the blue-collar cook was transmuted into an idea of a much more glamorous profession. In such a conceptualisation of cookery, the chef prepares meals for either customers or his or her family based on quality ingredients and concerns for their health (Hollows and Jones 2010). Such an identity draws on, and promotes, a culinary culture and philosophy based on seasonality and local ingredients (Cardwell 2017). In this, ethical behaviour and a recognition of the value of locally

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produced foods and their producers are identified as driving forces, even though there are many contradictions, such as those chefs who identify with such conceptualisations also being paid to promote major supermarkets. Despite such contradictions, these chefs are normative in their judgements, displaying what can be identified as a “missionary approach to food, nature and ingredients” (Steno and Friche 2015, 53). Jean-Paul Aron summed this up in his description of the contemporary chef as a member of the creative class: “not an employee in the common meaning of the word, but a practitioner, an artist, a fabricator” (1975, 150). A number of recent cookbooks not only demonstrate this, but employ the beach locale as central to this rhetorical framing. Clear examples are located in two recent cookbooks which feature Sydney beaches as the locale for on-trend food preparation. In Joanna Cooper and Vanessa Rowe’s Our Tamarama Kitchen (2015), the exclusive beachside suburb between Bondi and Bronte Beach that has been dubbed ‘glamorama’ is imaged as the inspiration for the authors’ culinary philosophy. As they describe, they are “grateful to live in this part of the world where the surf, salty air and sensational views are the perfect backdrop for the food we love” (Cooper and Rowe 2018). The cookbook features many beautiful images of the beach, which are used to underscore the description of the recipes, and overall message of the book—clean, healthy and healthgiving. The colour scheme of the book’s imagery, both of beach landscapes and dishes, is overwhelmingly green, blue and white, echoing and evoking the coastal landscape and reinforcing this message. Guy Turland and Mark Alston’s multi-media, multi-modal, multilocation Bondi Harvest business venture perhaps best represents this trend in the contemporary food provision industry, and how this can harness the power of the beach as not only backdrop but powerful symbol. Turland is a chef who trained at some of Sydney’s best restaurants, including the renowned Icebergs Dining Room and Bar that looks directly down onto Bondi Beach. Alston is a film and videomaker with a background in photography and design. The Bondi Harvest business began as a YouTube channel of travel and cooking videos, and related Facebook and Instagram sites, and then expanded to a café also called Bondi Harvest. Despite the recurring imaging of Bondi Beach in the media promotion for this venture, the café was located some four kilometres inland from the beach in a multi-level shopping mall. This jarring spatial disjunction was addressed openly in media coverage: “The cafe is located on the first floor of the Bondi Junction Westfield shopping centre but Bondi

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Harvest’s food will transport you straight to Bondi Beach … Bondi Harvest is a food reflection of the Bondi lifestyle” (Sharp 2015). A beautiful eponymous cookbook was also published at this time (Turland and Alston 2015), and again, this drew heavily on the glamour and beauty of Bondi Beach, with more photographs of the iconic beach than the volume’s recipes. So strong is this idea of Bondi Beach that, although the café has since been successfully relocated to Santa Monica in Los Angeles (some 12,000 kilometres from Sydney) and some 35 streets back from the beach, it still successfully mobilises the Bondi Beach brand. Located in a light industrial area, the café is also again named Bondi Harvest, is decorated with photographs of Bondi Beach, and is marketed as possessing “Aussie beach vibes”. This Santa Monica Bondi Harvest café is described as “an explosive celebration of fresh, local and seasonal food paired with a laid-back, healthy and aspirational Bondi lifestyle” (Bondi Harvest 2019). While the great majority of the café’s foodstuffs are sourced from America or other global locations, many of the dishes that made the Sydney cafe so popular appear on its menu. Another Bondi Harvest cookbook was published in 2017, again drawing on a connection to Bondi Beach (Turland and Alston 2017) which by then existed in name only, making this a clear example of how the image of the Australian beach had become a powerful branding tool for an American-based business (Bastos and Levy 2012; Brien 2018).

Conclusion This chapter has investigated how the representation of the Australian beach in contemporary popular culture has influenced evolving understandings of the beach as a physical site and prominent idea in popular imagination. These examples have underscored that there are many commonly accepted beliefs about the Australian beach which are open to challenge. As Elizabeth Ellison writes, the “mythically egalitarian space of the Australian beach is a fragmented concept that cannot be accepted unequivocally” (2014, 232). While the texts discussed in this chapter reveal shifts in the style and focus of Australian food writing, the kind of cookery and dining that such narrative practice promotes, and changing attitudes to culinary labour, this exploration also contributes to this questioning of the beach as an egalitarian space. Although there are some for whom the beach is undoubtedly a place of rest and relaxation, it needs to be acknowledged that this rejuvenating leisure is serviced by

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others’ labour, and that this labour is classed and gendered. This chapter also demonstrates that an inquiry focusing on a specific genre of writing (in this case, food writing) about a particular type of locale (such as the beach) can reveal significant information; here about the nature of work and how certain kinds of work are themselves brandable commodities in the twenty-first century (Bastos and Levy 2012). In this way, the idea of the beach can be seen to feed into the appeal of cookery as a profession for, although working as a professional cook is an onerous and demanding physical occupation, its appeal is increased when it is allied to a gorgeous location that has strong and enduring associations with health, well-being, pleasure, glamour and even hedonism.

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Churchill, D., and H. Quinn. 2016. Surfing the menu: Next generation. Cammeray: Simon & Schuster Australia. Clark, P. 2014a. Aussie food: Great Australian flavours from the city, coast and country. Sydney: Bauer Media Books. Clark, P. 2014b. Modern Australian food: Delicious classic & contemporary food from the city, country & coast. Sydney: Bauer Media Books. Coleman, A. (dir). 1998–1999. Breakers. Australia: Network Ten. Conradson, D. 2005. Landscape, care and the relational self: Therapeutic encounters in rural England. Health & Place 11 (4): 337–348. Cooper, J., and V. Rowe. 2015. Our Tamarama kitchen. Tamarama: Joanna Cooper. Cooper, J., and V. Rowe. 2018. About us. Our Tamarama Kitchen. https:// ourtamaramakitchen.com/pages/about-us. Accessed 31 January 2019. Davies, B. (creator). 2006–current. Bondi Rescue. Chippendale: Cordell Jigsaw Productions. Debord, G. 1967. La société du spectacle. Paris: Buchet-Chastel. Doyle, W. (creator). 1993–1994. Paradise Beach. South Yarra: Village Roadshow Pictures. Drewe, R. (ed.). 1993. The Pan book of the beach. Sydney: Pan Macmillan. Dupain, M. 1937. Sunbaker. Sydney: State Library of New South Wales. Dyson, L.E. 2006. Indigenous Australian cookery, past and present. Journal of Australian Studies 30 (87): 5–18. Ellison, E. 2014. On the beach: Exploring the complex egalitarianism of the Australian beach. In Navigating cultural spaces: Maritime places, eds. A.-M. Horatschek, Y. Rosenberg, and D. Schaebler, 221–236. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Fine, G.A. 1996. Justifying work: Occupational rhetorics as resources in restaurant kitchens. Administrative Science Quarterly 41 (1): 90–115. Fiske, J., B. Hodge, and G. Turner. 1987. Myths of Oz: Reading Australian popular culture. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Frost, V. 2013. Wonderland: TV review. The Guardian (London), 22 August. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/australia-culture-blog/2013/ aug/22/australian-tv-review-wonderland-wedding. Accessed 31 January 2019. Groves, T. 2004. Night surfing: On telephilia. Senses of Cinema 30. http:// sensesofcinema.com/2004/feature-articles/telephilia. Accessed 31 January 2019. Hall, J., and I.J. McNiven (eds.). 1999. Australian coastal archaeology. Research Papers in Archaeology and Natural History No. 31, 157–168. Canberra: ANH Publications. Hill, K. 2003. Coast: Seaside recipes from Australia’s leading chefs. Camberwell: Viking.

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Holder, K. 2016. A moveable feast: Delicious picnic food. Richmond: Hardie Grant. Hollows, J., and S. Jones. 2010. ‘At least he’s doing something’: Moral entrepreneurship and individual responsibility in Jamie’s Ministry of Food. European Journal of Cultural Studies 13 (3): 307–322. Horsburgh, J. (ex. prod.). 2008. The Strip. Paddington: Knapman-Wyld Productions. Hosking, S., R. Hosking, R. Pannell, and N. Bierbaum (eds.). 2009. Something rich and strange: Sea changes, beaches and the littoral in the Antipodes. Kent Town: Wakefield Press. Huntsman, L. 2001. Sand in our souls: The beach in Australian history. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Irwin, J.J. 2013. Once a boy. Houston: Strategic Book Publishing. Macken, D. 1997. Shifting sands. Sydney Morning Herald, 6 December. Macleod, V. 2008. Palm Beach. Dictionary of Sydney. https://dictionaryofsydney. org/place/palm_beach. Accessed 31 January 2019. Malcolm, P., and E. Jay. c.1940. A holiday at the seaside. Melbourne: Valentine Publishing Co. Marks, L. (ex. prod.). 2015–2016. Beach Cops. Australia: Seven Productions. Mason, A. 1949. Variety and flavour. The Age (Melbourne), 8 February. Mason, A. 1962. A treasury of Australian cooking. London: Andre Deutsch. Mason, A. 1981. Flavour of Australia. Richmond: Hutchinson Group. Mason, P. 2006. Anne Mason. The Guardian (London), 20 October. http:// www.guardian.co.uk/news/2006/oct/20/obituaries.mainsection. Accessed 31 January 2019. Monaghan, D., and Z.R. Silk., (ex. prods.). 2008–current. Underbelly. Sydney: Screentime Australia. Moran, M. 2017. Matt Moran’s Australian food: Coast + country. Crows Nest: Murdoch Books. ‘Nicole’ and C. Malvern. 1955. The happy family. Little Golden Book, 216. New York: Simon & Schuster. O’Donoghue, B., and C. Stone. 2004. Surfing the menu: Two chefs, one journey—A fresh food adventure. Sydney: ABC Books for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. O’Donoghue, B., and C. Stone. 2005. Surfing the menu again: With more than eighty exciting fresh-food recipes. Sydney: ABC Books for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Pecket, C.A. 1976. Some facets of my life. Hyde Park, SA: Peacock Publications. Porter, J., and S. Walker. 2013–2015. Wonderland. Sydney: FremantleMedia Australia. Potts, A. 2016. Flashback feature: The Gold Coast’s many appearances in film, television and comic books. Gold Coast Bulletin, 8 October. http://

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Multiplicities of Australian Beach Writing

Exploring Australian Coastal Gothic: Poetry and Place Lynda Hawryluk

Introduction The Australian coast is a site of “nervous duality” (Baldacchino 2005, 248). While a place of boundless beauty, its isolation, lack of facilities and proximity to the forces of nature creates a duality, with a potential for experiencing great terror alongside the beauty. This chapter examines the genesis and development of the Gothic coastal tradition in Australian fiction, particularly in narratives set on the islands bordering the Australian coastline. By reading the work of established Australian writers, a case will be made to show how Australian coastal Gothic fiction extends Ross Gibson’s concept of the “Australian Badlands” (2002) to the shoreline and beyond, to wild and untamed coastal spaces. A growing body of contemporary creative writing set on the Australian coast can be compared with traditional Gothic writing as, in such works, the themes, depictions of landscapes and characters seem taken straight from the pages of a classic Gothic novel, even if the sun shines more brightly and the skin tone of the inhabitants is significantly more tanned. One of the key concerns is to show how Australian coastal Gothic fiction depicts the coastal borderlands of islands and the shoreline as the “locus of our greatest fears”

L. Hawryluk (B) Southern Cross University, Lismore, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Ellison and D. L. Brien (eds.), Writing the Australian Beach, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35264-6_6

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(Gillis 2009, 3). In this discussion, I am drawing on Ken Gelder’s influential definition of the Australian Gothic (2007) and positioning some Australian narrative texts and original prose poetry my own original prose poetry as a demonstration of Australian coastal Gothic writing in action. To set the parameters of this exploration, it is important to determine the position of the entity called ‘the coast’, as this is the place where Australian coastal Gothic fiction is located. Scholars use the terms ‘beach’ and ‘coast’ almost interchangeably and for the purposes of this discussion I also include the shoreline of islands. The Macquarie Dictionary determines that the ‘coast’ is the land next to the sea (Delbridge et al. 1995, 345) and, in this way, I additionally read the coast as the region adjoining it. Elizabeth Ellison rationalises the terms ‘coast’ and ‘beach’, stating that the “beach refers to the coastline of a country” (2013, 2), and this is where the chapter takes its lead from. Even if a coastline does not determine the border of a country, it does provide a boundary between the non-coastal landscape and the ocean, and this can include the coastlines around islands. In this way, the coastline can be seen to function much like Ellison’s definition of a beach. It is in these spaces that Australian coastal Gothic fiction is set.

Australian Badlands Ross Gibson linked the Australian landscape to the notion of unruliness in his seminal text, Seven Versions of an Australian Badlands (2002). He took his lead from the North American term “badlands”, which is used to describe “a tract of country that would not succumb to colonial ambition” (Gibson 2002, 14); that is, land that resisted being subdued. This was wild country, or a “bad land to cross” (14). In Australia, we are subject to seemingly endless and worsening inclement weather. The effect of this is that the Australian experience of our landscape is one of a ‘bad land’, where “violence begins to seem natural” (Gibson 2002, 13). Gibson begins with a description of destructive storms on the Queensland coast—and, with the Australian population hugging the coastline and in the path of cyclonic and destructive weather patterns—coastal life is fraught with danger: tropical lows flood entire cities, and cyclones can submerge whole island communities. For east coastal dwellers, blustery Northerlies provide a backdrop to daily life, while tempests and king tides conspire to inhibit the safe passage of watercraft and aircraft between the coastline and the inland.

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Gibson maintains that landscapes not only induce emotive responses but also contain memories of past activities that happened in them. He writes about the Queensland coastal badlands: “there is some spirit of place here, something made by nature and culture scratching a distressed landscape together” (2002, 49). These factors combine to mark the Australian coastline as a type of, and specific, badlands (Ellison 2016). This is a place where disaster occurs, and is a space prone to, or inducing, rash behaviour. Badlands are also spaces where narrative and character are built through the repeating of mythologies and stories. In Australian literature, Gothic characteristics have been previously applied to this landscape. Australian narratives in films like Wake in Fright (Kotcheff 1971), The Cars That Ate Paris (Weir 1974), Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir 1975), Mad Max (Miller 1979), Kiss or Kill (Bennett 1997), The Monkey’s Mask (Lang 2000), Lantana (Lawrence 2001), Dead Calm (Noyce 1989), Wolf Creek (McLean 2005) and Jindabyne (Lawrence 2006) are reflective of this in how they depict the landscape as embodying the essential elements of the Gothic: uncanny, haunted, and filled with history and memories. Recent Australian films such as The Reef (Traucki 2010), Uninhabited (Bennett 2010), Breath (Baker 2017) and Storm Boy (Seet 2019) demonstrate how the harsh Australian landscape, and particularly the coastline, can be complicit in establishing a place of lawlessness. These four films position their narratives in isolated locations on the coastline of Australia. This isolation contributes to the sense of lawlessness that is a crucial aspect of the mise en scène of the films, especially via encounters with nature; the roiling surf (Breath), sharks (The Reef ), dangerous coastlines and natural predators (Storm Boy, Uninhabited). It is as if the Gothic coast depicted conspires against the protagonists and leads them to danger and disharmony. This is also the case in Gibson’s discussion of badlands, where legal and social boundaries cease to exist. Such places are locations where recognised laws are altered or somehow non-existent. In the badlands, it is possible to see the landscape become instilled with temperament and personality. Like the Australian bush, the character of the coastline is one of malevolence. It is contemptuous of those who seek to traverse it. In literature, the landscape is often depicted as being complicit in the destruction and demise of the protagonists. This depiction has long been established in Australian writing, and this can now be applied to coastal narratives, using the hallmarks of Gothic writing.

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Australian Gothic Literature Stories about isolated landscapes inhabited by ghosts, spirits and creatures typify the Indigenous oral tradition in Australia, and Indigenous Australian writers have subverted the traditional Gothic to create a uniquely antipodean mode (Althans 2010; Mayr 2017). So too, in the early days of white settlement, the Gothic narrative at the heart of Australian literature was located firmly in the bush. Pioneering life as described in Henry Lawson’s story ‘The Drover’s Wife’ (1892) and Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies (1902) are often noted to have heralded an Australian colonial Gothic tradition (Turcotte 1998, 3). One of the very first Gothic Australian texts was, however, set much closer to the coast. Marcus Clarke’s novel, For the Term of his Natural Life (1870), is regarded as the quintessential Australian Gothic text. Gerry Turcotte proposes that the work shaped “a specifically Australian form of Gothic mode” (1998, 14) as Clarke depicts the landscapes using heavily Gothic imagery. A river making its way to the sea is, for instance, described as “gloomed by overhanging rocks, and shadowed by gigantic forests, the black sides of the basin narrow” (Clarke 1870, 76). This depicts the meeting point between the bush and the sea, where the coast snakes inland along the contours of a topographical Gothic map. Despite this beginning, most Australian colonial writers ‘went bush’ (physically or metaphorically) and located their work there, setting their stories in rural landscapes dominated by squatters, bushrangers and shearers. The imaginative backbone of Australia was cast during this time as rural, and this national narrative was heavily informed by the Gothic (Turcotte 1998, 3). Instead of gloomy castles and windswept moors, however, the setting was the impenetrable bush. Balladeer Henry Lawson wrote of this bush as comprised of “burning wastes of barren soil and sand” (1892, online), describing the vast hopelessness of life there. The landscape in these works conspired against the protagonists, who were isolated and at a disadvantage due to their naïvety and inexperience. The writing that resulted captured the sense of desperation that is prevalent in Gothic writing (Turcotte 1998, 4). That the landscape in Australian Gothic literature is characterised as malevolent and foreboding can be seen both in earlier works such as Lasseter’s Last Ride (Idriess 1931) about Harold Bell Lasseter’s doomed expedition to the heart of Australia in search of a gold reef, and more modern ones such as the contemporary classic Picnic at Hanging Rock (Lindsay 1975) in which a party of

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schoolgirls disappear into the Victorian bush on a St Valentine’s Day picnic. So too, Wake in Fright (Cook 1961) represents the hostility of the Australian landscape and the torment of a teacher, stranded in a small outback town, by both that land and the townspeople. These narratives speak to the fears colonisers experienced entering what was to them a new and hostile place. Overcoming their fears, the colonisers then became outliers themselves and are depicted as operating outside the law and society in narratives like Wolf Creek (McLean 2005) and Van Diemen’s Land (auf der Heide 2009).

Australian Gothic Undergoes a Seachange Varying factors contributed to Australians moving from the bush to the coast, and with this move came great change in all aspects of Australian life. Leone Huntsman explains that “while Australians are supposed to love the bush, more and more they prefer to live on the coast” (2001, 1). As a result, the mythologies associated with the bush, and that “natural and tough … existence became … anachronistic” and the “figure of the bronzed lifesaver filled the gap” (Fiske et al. 1987, 54). This sociological ‘sea change’ contributed to a change of scenery for Australian writing, and so the Gothic can be seen to have relocated to the coastline, with a number of modern and contemporary novels focusing on narratives set by, and around, the coast. Robert Drewe’s The Body Surfers (1983), Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish (2001), much of Tim Winton’s writing (2008, 2015), and Favel Parrett’s Past the Shallows (2011) represent a wide range of literature which focuses on the coast or beach. Christine Tondorf, writing about coastal fiction, signposts landscapes that share the hallmarks of Gothic literature: they are “vast, wild, stolen” (2016, 4). Turcotte called the Gothic “a literary form which emphasises the horror, uncertainty and desperation of the human experience” (1998, 10) and describes how, in Australian examples of the Gothic, nature can be seen as being “out of kilter” (1). Other scholars and writers of Australian Gothic narratives depict the landscape as a disquieting place, where the landscape reflects the experiences of the characters that inhabit it (Davidson in Polack 2006, 98). This tradition speaks back to established conventions in Gothic literature. These conventions are reflected in this first prose poem by the author, focusing on the thick undergrowth of the coastal scrub.

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Shadowy places Ankle turning undergrowth lies ahead creeping up from creek beds in the dark. A slipshod welcome to newcomers who land with a thud and cry out. The surrounding soundtrack is unfamiliar: the rootless growth of lichen grasping onto granite makes little sound. But dig deeper down to the world before your feet you’ll find there’s a kingdom in repose just waiting to be noticed. Bryophyta armies march across the rock ledges between the creek and the great scrub beyond like coral looking for an ocean to submerge itself in. The old guard has given up on the advance and lies like discarded cabbage after dinner. Late afternoon mist seeps through the lowlands adding a fine layer of humidity to the battlefield. The light sits differently down here; weaves its way through thick myrtle canopies to the shadowy places where nobody goes. (Hawryluk 2018b)

In Shadowy places, the undergrowth is depicted as a living, hostile entity (Steele 2010), commensurate with the traditional depiction of Gothic landscapes. Entrapment and claustrophobia pervade the poem, as does isolation; senses which thematically typify Australian Gothic works (Gelder 2007, 116). The military imagery of armies suggests humans and nature in conflict, both attempting to conquer the landscape, as can be seen in the Big Scrub in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales, where the poem is set (Big Scrub Landcare 2017). In this area, the coastal and hinterland areas contain the largest remaining evidence of the landscape known as the Big Scrub, an endangered subtropical rainforest remnant scattered across the Northern Rivers region (Ballina Council 2018). The poem expresses concern about ecological degradation, although it ends by referencing the resilience and usefulness of bryophytes, nutrient-providing, drought resistant “mossy things” (ANBG 2008) and local species such as lemon myrtle (AgriFutures 2017). It is an example of how Australian coastal Gothic writing can use tropes and imagery from traditional Gothic narratives to evoke uncertainty in the

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reader. Lichen growing on a stone wall bordering the Big Scrub in Lismore inspires “photographic ekphrasis” (Barry 2002, 155) to represent underlying Gothic elements of the far North Coast region. The poem refers to the littoral rainforest consuming humans in an overwhelming active ecosystem, the kind of space celebrated in Gothic narratives about hostile landscapes (Steele 2010). Australian coastal Gothic fiction features ominous narratives with the requisite characters in mourning, negotiating failed relationships, surreal circumstances and a raft of secrets, hidden in sand dunes and back beach dirt roads. The characters who inhabit this place negotiate their roles there while profoundly disturbed and haunted by their past. These hauntings are reflected in this next poem, where the focus is on memory and mourning. Blue berries Pearl sized, compact. Faded at the base. On a stalk so tender it hurts. Spider fingers support their weight with frail limbs like old lady arms grasping at air in palliative wards. Fearing death’s reach as it comes to them when night falls. I bring blue berries to your bedside press them into your fading hands your veins like spider-webs sending thin streams of blood ever outwards. Their flesh meets yours and splits open bleeding arterial spray. Siphoning life from the inside out connecting you to country again. Your tired eyes like blue berries blink back the memory of home. And a flicker of life shines bright just once then fades and goes out for good. (Hawryluk 2017)

In this poem, blue berries found only in subtropical coastal areas signpost the transition between life and death. In much the same way as an avicennia (mangrove) zone operates, the berries facilitate rebirth after death and growth in a nutrient cycle. These berries belong to the quondong

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tree and have been used as traditional medicine by Indigenous Australians (James Cook University 2017). The act of dying is one of “uncertainty and desperation” (Turcotte 1998, 10), and the poem speaks to the corporeal nature of the process of dying, death and decay, suggesting the progression as one of bittersweet, yet necessary, renewal. Fear and longing are at the heart of this next poem, set on the far North Coast of New South Wales, Australia. In the avicennia zone In these shimmering early morning waters reflections of sunlight dapple their way through the cool shade of the avicennia zone. Oyster beds dotted across the channels rise up to meet the hollow ting of a slow motoring tinny sending rippling wake into the mangroves. It’s a place teeming with a community of midges and snakes that’ll consume you if you dare stop for a second. The rotten footbridge to here crumbled into the mangroves last year vandalized into uselessness leaving no way out but by water best keep upright and hope you can swim. These murky back creeks can swallow people whole or tempt a long-forgotten longing to disappear To be submerged into spongy tissue in the shallows and never come back. (Hawryluk 2018a)

This poem reflects narratives about the dangerous Australian coast, recalling what fishermen call “the true dark” (Dalton 2018). Set on an island, the poem juxtaposes the avicennia zone against morning sunlight, weaving its rays into the space between mangroves, bringing light to otherwise darkened waterways. Mangroves are active spaces known as ‘communities’ (Department of Environment and Science 2013), the purpose of which is growth through consumption. The classic Gothic trope of a haunted house covered by vines (Jackson 1959) is echoed in the creeping darkness encountered when entering mangrove areas. The imagery of organic matter and decomposition speaks to the role of humans in the larger nutrient cycle. Despite the inherent beauty of the location, there is an undercurrent of malevolence and danger.

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Islomania Islands have been portrayed in texts as badlands, as in the film Uninhabited (2010) and Michael Veitch’s history of the Bass Strait Islands, The Forgotten Islands (2011). In these texts, these islands’ isolation, lack of a sense of law and order and the behaviour of people who populate them saw these locales regarded as complicit in the disintegration of the social order. This reaffirms the stories told about the Australian landscape more generally in early Australian literature. In this literature, as well as in stories told about islands more particularly, characters often live in rough, unforgiving locations that have darkness at their heart. When focusing specifically on islands represented in both fiction and non-fiction, islands can also be seen to be evocative of badlands, being “haunted by fear and tragedy” (2002, 1), with the coastlines of islands also lending themselves to being considered Gothic locales. John Gillis reads islands through a cosmological lens, describing how “water stands for chaos, [and] land for order” (2009, 4). He finds islands are “a third kind of place, partaking in both earth and water, something betwixt and in between” (4). The island, then, exists on the fringe, and this can be seen to be a place where lawlessness—both psychological and legal—abounds. Islands as places of mystery and chaos have figured in Australian literature historically and contemporarily, recently in Favel Parrett’s Past the Shallows (2011) and earlier in Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide (1994). These novels are set in Tasmania’s rough wilderness areas where the landscape seems to conspire against the protagonists. These novels describe Tasmania as an island, and islands—therefore—as isolated and fraught with the potential for danger, both from the natural world and the humans who reside therein. As an island and a state, and despite its far from idyllic history as convict prison, Tasmania is also nevertheless regarded as Eden-like and has long been described as such in newspaper articles (J. O. H. 1897) and referenced in tourism and gastronomy—as in Eden Foods (2019), Eden Farmstay (2019), and Island Eden (2019)— and in cinematic depictions (Scott 2001). Tasmania’s isolation as an island and agricultural Eden works in both positive and negative ways in its portrayals. Continuing Gillis’ work, Godfrey Baldacchino describes islands in this way as “nervous dualities” (2005, 248) and places of cultural convergence where “outsiders – rather than insiders – discover, investigate and proclaim [an island’s innate cultural] endemism and diversity to the rest

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of the world” (2008, 38). On islands, states Homi Bhabha, “the celebration of locality … becomes a viable strategy for subverting the narratives and representation promulgated and imposed by external dominant powers and cultures … hybridity is the outcome” (1995, quoted in Baldacchino 2008, 42). In Tasmania, this hybridity can be seen in the ongoing history of Port Arthur (White 2016). The now World Heritage-listed property was a brutal colonial-era island asylum and gaol and, in more modern history, was the site of one of the world’s worst shooting massacres in 1996. Described as “a machine to grind rogues honest”, the Port Arthur Historic Site offers an Isle of the Dead Cemetery and Port Arthur Ghost Tour, while reminding visitors that staff find discussing the events of the 28 April 1996 massacre “difficult and painful to talk about” (PAHS 2019). Yet, this history is juxtaposed on travel websites with descriptions extolling the beauty and serenity of the location. Islands also contain within them several binary undercurrents: they are at once paradise and hell and can represent places of connection and isolation, as well as recovery and loss (Amoamo 2016). Islands are also locations where there exists a sense of wholeness and yet fragmentation, as in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927). They are places of tranquillity amid chaos. As Baldacchino has noted, in Woolf’s example the Isle of Skye provides a summer home and a place of respite, as well as a site of fear and isolation and as a source of disharmony in a family. Used historically as sites of both freedom and confinement, islands have been both home and the location of exile. As one of Australia’s external territories, Norfolk Island captures these binaries historically and physically, as detailed in Robert Macklin’s Dark Paradise (2016), which provides a rich account of a place of penal colonisation, mutiny and murder. Gillis notes this duality of islands as a source of imagination and feeling: “we project onto [them] our most intense desires, [but they are] also the locus of our greatest fears” (2009, 3). Still, islands internationally remain at the centre of narratives of tourism and entertainment (see, for instance, long-running radio show, Desert Island Discs [BBC 2019]), their narrative power mobilised in their attractiveness as a holiday destination drawing on visitors’ innate desire to get away from their ordinary life, ignoring the dangers they pose. Philip Conkling states that islands can be defined by “the presence of often frightening and occasionally impassable bodies of water that create a sense of place closer to the natural world” (2007, 200). The oftendangerous waters along coastlines provide conflicting imagery, being both

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“serene and sinister” (Huntsman 2001, 146). In Past the Shallows , the sea becomes the essence of this: Below in murky darkness, in the swirling kelp all you had to guide you was one hand touching the rock wall while your legs kicked you down blind. And that’s where they were, the abalone. Down where the algae grew thick and the continental shelf dropped away … there were caves and crevices, places to get stuck. Places where the air hoses could get snagged. (Parrett 2011, 33)

In this description, the ocean is a place of both fear and longing for the narrator. Descending from a family of abalone divers, the narrator recognises both the benefits and terrible consequences of a life at sea. Australian waterways as Gothic coast is suggested in the “horror, uncertainty and desperation” (Turcotte 1998, 10) of darkness, lawlessness, unsolved disappearances and eventual decomposition (Farrow 2018) that takes place in this zone. There are, of course, exceptions to any rule, and island narratives abound with depictions of tranquil atmosphere and enviable lifestyles. E. J. Banfield’s classic account of his life on Queensland’s Dunk Island, Confessions of a Beachcomber (1908), says much about the sense of timelessness endemic to island life. Banfield made famous the idea of the happily isolated explorer wiling away days, weeks and even months on the coastline of a tropical island paradise. Banfield’s purpose was to describe his solitude and reflect upon the benefits of island living (1908); however, on many islands along the Australian coast, the effects of isolation and solitude are anything but positive. Thea Astley’s Multiple Effects of Rainshadow (1996) is a fictional retelling of a true tale of murder and madness on Queensland’s Palm Island. Astley apportions blame to “the unmoored behaviour of humans” on the island for the events depicted in the book. A character in the novel describes islands as “moated by loneliness” (Astley 1996, 143), and the tragedy in the book can certainly be read as a result of this seclusion. Isolation resulting in what can be called “islomania” (Durrell 1953) is a consistent narrative trope in stories of islands. Islomania can refer to an intense feeling of joy deriving from inhabiting islands (Clarke 2002); however, there is also a darker side to island life. Where islomania becomes problematic is when the ‘mania’ in the term proliferates: where the isolation of life leads to a descent into obsession, madness and eventually

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lawlessness. Recognising such effects and events add to our understanding of islands and coastlines, and how they evoke a Gothic sensibility in stories about them, particularly in the Australian context. In Cloudstreet (1991), his epic novel about two families’ lives through the 1940s to 1960s in Perth, Australia, Tim Winton refers to the Abrolhos Islands off the coast of Western Australia (13). These islands are infamous for the mutiny and mayhem befalling the survivors of the shipwreck of the Batavia, a narrative told amongst islanders time and again. Elizabeth Ellison suggests that for a badlands to take form, “the power of memory must become collective” (2013, 84), and that this memory operates in a “closed space where evil is consigned that remains separate from the rest of the country” (84) known as a quarantine zone. The margins of this space can undoubtedly be created by the coastline around islands. For the Abrolhos Islands where the Batavia’s crew struck a reef and mutiny followed, the landscape contains the memory of that event. Gibson describes the imprint of this creating an “immense historical crime-scene” (2002, 1). In Winton’s novel, the landscape is imbued with character, leading a narrator to proclaim, “there’d been madness out on these sea rocks ever since whitefellas had first run into them” (1991, 13). The memory of tumultuous past storms on the human inhabitants, and the landscape of a small island is highlighted through the experience of rapidly changing meteorological conditions in the final poem featured in this chapter. Ballina Island storm approaching The fizz and pop of atmospheric pressure Building up between ears and blood vessels Tension with no clear sense of relief A deep clap of thunder echoes from out of the blue Heralding the arrival of a late afternoon squall There’s just enough time to pause and consider closing windows Before this drencher descends The pressure builds, cumulonimbus gather In the corner like bullies at a school disco Better avert your eyes and get on home now Grim grey blue thunderheads from the South Turning green with envy and the promise of hail A heaped cloudburst is coming to pock mark our hearts From the force of this battering ram rain storm. (Hawryluk 2018c)

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Onomatopoeia and alliteration used in the poem characterise the approaching storm as a living entity, menacing and a threat to the peaceful afternoon. In Gothic texts, the landscape is an unsettling, disturbing place, which reflects the experiences of the characters inhabiting it (Davidson in Polack 2006). In the poem, this extends to the weather affecting this landscape. The duality of the island environment is encapsulated in the suddenness of the squall and the knowledge islanders have of the potential for harm from the climactic conditions. The atmospheric pressure is characterised here as provoking an uncanny reaction, a frisson of the senses only alleviated by the release of a great downpouring of rain. The Gothic landscape holds the memory of this violent event, the storm leaving evidence of this on the land and inhabitants.

Conclusion Australian coastal Gothic writing focuses on isolated seaside regions. Subtropical regions especially lend themselves to such depictions of the Gothic, with the competing hazards of isolation and islomania creating a sense of mystery and the uncanny. Extending discussions about Australian Gothic writing, the original poems in this chapter provide a demonstration of Australian coastal Gothic writing in action. In continuing the Gothic tradition, such contemporary Australian coastal Gothic fiction describes the landscape as a malignant force. This genre depicts the Australian landscape as sinister and remote and reveals how creative writing set on the Australian coast can be informed thematically and aesthetically by traditional Gothic writing, which in Australia is usually set in the inland bush. Additional contextual discussion of the development of Australian coastal Gothic writing, including of narratives set on islands bordering the Australian coastline, is utilised in this discussion in order to extend the Gibson’s concept of the Australian badlands (2002), to position this on the shoreline, a locale which is often portrayed as the site of hedonistic pleasure. Instead, the shoreline can be depicted as Gillis’ “locus of our greatest fears” (2009, 3).

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References AgriFutures Australia. 2017. Lemon myrtle. https://www.agrifutures.com.au/ farm-diversity/lemon-myrtle. Accessed 31 January 2019. Althans, K. 2010. Darkness subverted: Aboriginal Gothic in black Australian literature and film. Göttingen: V & R Unipress and Bonn University Press. Amoamo, M. 2016. Re-imaging Pitcairn Island: Examining dualities of conflict and collaboration between island/metropole through tourism. Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures 11: 80–101. Astley, T. 1996. The multiple effects of rainshadow. Hawthorn: Penguin. Australian National Botanic Gardens. 2008. What is a bryophyte? Australian National Botanic Gardens. https://www.anbg.gov.au/bryophyte/what-isbryophyte.html. Accessed 31 January 2019. Baker, S. (dir.). 2017. Breath. Australia: FilmRise. Baldacchino, G. 2005. Editorial: Islands—Objects of representation. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 87 (4): 247–251. Baldacchino, G. 2008. Studying islands: On whose terms? Some epistemological and methodological challenges to the pursuit of island studies. Island Studies Journal 3 (1): 37–56. Ballina Council. 2018. Big Scrub Rainforest. https://www.ballina.nsw.gov.au/ cp_themes/default/page.asp?p=DOC-NIJ-65-85-37. Accessed 31 January 2019. Banfield, E.J. 1908. Confessions of a beachcomber. London: T. F. Unwin. Barry, P. 2002. Contemporary poetry and ekphrasis. The Cambridge Quarterly 31 (2): 155–165. Baynton, B. 2012 [1902]. Bush studies: Text classics. Melbourne: Text Publishing. BBC. 2019. The history of Desert Island Discs. BBC Radio 4. https://www. bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qnmr. Accessed 31 January 2019. Bennett, B. (dir.). 1997. Kiss or Kill. USA: Universal. Bennett, B. (dir.). 2010. Uninhabited. Australia: Screen Australia. Big Scrub Landcare. 2017. About the Big Scrub. https://www. bigscrubrainforest.org/about-the-big-scrub. Accessed 31 January 2019. Clarke, M. 1982 [1870]. For the term of his natural life. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. Clarke, T. 2002. Islomania. Boston: Little, Brown Books. Conkling, P. 2007. On islanders and islandness. Geographical Review 97 (2): 191–201. Cook, K. 1961. Wake in Fright. London: Michael Joseph. Dalton, T. 2018. The true dark of Dianne. The Australian Magazine. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/weekend-australian-magazine/ tragedy-of-the-dianne-could-six-fishermen-have-been-saved/news-story/ 04d40e317872e1b642031cf26180b603. Accessed 31 January 2019.

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Writing Noosa’s Beach: Travellers’ Narratives and Modernity Nick Osbaldiston

Introduction One of the major features of Australian culture is the underpinning of the coast to our identity with a sense of place. As Douglas Booth (2001, 3) argues, the beach has become somewhat a “national preoccupation”. Despite dwindling domestic tourism in recent times towards the coastline (Franklin et al. 2013), the beach itself remains a powerful symbol of Australian identity. This is evident especially in how Australian coastal places like Surfers Paradise, Noosa and Cairns in Queensland, Seal Bay and Cape Jarvis in South Australia, the Coral Coast in Western Australia, the Surf Coast in Victoria, and many other locations are marketed to international audiences through imagery of open beaches, leisurely pursuits and culinary delights. However, the valorisation or ‘ascent’ of the beach to this status within our culture has a deep history (Booth 2001; Lenˇcek and Bosker 1998; Osbaldiston 2018; see also Olive 2015). The Australian colonial past represented the coast through words, paintings and photographs and these images have constructed present-day ideas about the beach (Dutton 1985). As Booth states, “these images, symbols, artefacts and words are neither passive nor neutral. Individually and collectively

N. Osbaldiston (B) James Cook University, Cairns, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Ellison and D. L. Brien (eds.), Writing the Australian Beach, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35264-6_7

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they constitute lore, knowledge and systems of belief that shape values and behaviours” (2001, 3). It is argued here, as within this volume as a whole, that text has contributed significantly to this collective imagination of the beach. Fictional accounts such as D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo (1923 [1970]) and Adam Lindsay Gordon’s poem The Swimmer (1870 [1985]) paint pictures of the Australian coastline as sublime, imbuing feelings of both inspiration and dread. Within the Australian psyche, there is a tendency to see the beach in similar fashion as both somewhere to play but also somewhere dangerous where people can, and do, lose lives. Contemporary volumes such as Robert Drewe’s The Bodysurfers (1983) and more recent collection The True Colour of the Sea (2018) have played on these narratives further. In the case of the latter for instance, in his first short story ‘Dr Pacific’, Drewe provides a tale of a woman who sees the beach as a place for healing and health, but juxtaposes this against another darker tale of death and woe. In some respects, the latter plays out in the Australian psyche with our arguably dark tourist pilgrimages to the shores of Gallipoli where experiences range from horror through to collective reverie and patriotism (Osbaldiston and Petray 2011). Fiction, however, has been complemented by non-fictional accounts of Australia’s love affair with the beach. This chapter will demonstrate how the beach at Noosa in south-east Queensland was understood as a spot for relaxation, calm and, more importantly, restoration. This theme is apparent in the collected works of Ann Game and Andrew Metcalfe (2011; Metcalfe and Game 2014; Game et al. 2014) who recount the experiences of patrons of Bondi Beach (New South Wales). Within these accounts, there is a sense of connection through the senses, both affective and emotional, between the individual and natural surrounds of the beach. Participants in these studies talk eloquently about the beach as a place for “energy”, “comfort”, “meditation” and “rhythm” (Game and Metcalfe 2011, 46–47). There is a belief in the power of the beach to provoke rejuvenation and restoration. This becomes almost ritualistic where “transformation is brought about by the very practices of coming down” to the beach (Metcalfe and Game 2014, 301). Similar narratives are found in writings about people who opt for a ‘sea change’ (migrate for a better way of life to the beach/bush) to the coast where the beach is seen as a fundamental element in redefining life goals and ambitions (Dowling 2004). This chapter argues that the foundations for these ideals are not new; rather, they are found throughout the history of European settlement, specifically with the romanticism towards the beach.

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It is important to remember, however, as Elizabeth Ellison (2014) demonstrates in her work, that Australian beach spaces, even within text, are not necessarily equal places. Rather, these are tiered hierarchically, which is demonstrable in other locales such as Brighton in the UK (Shields 1991). Of course, when it comes to place as a concept, the “institutionalisation of place myths” as “uneven or fractured along social cleavages” (Smith 1999, 16) cannot be avoided. As Philip Smith writes, “the same place (text) may embody differing meanings for differing social groups (readers)” (1999, 16). Subsequently, disputes across these groups can emerge which is evident in our contemporary history where conflicting ideas on what the beach should be used for define certain places (Osbaldiston 2012, 2018). For instance, across Australia there are numbers of campaigns against development, mining and even certain leisure activities like fishing which are seen as degrading to local place value (Osbaldiston 2012). This unevenness in reading what the beach looks like and the types of activities it should encourage is illustrated in the different types of coastal places in Australia. The focal point of this chapter, Noosa, is a place that has a unique history which is defined by a sense of slowness, authenticity and the beauty of natural environment. It is often held in distinction with Surfers Paradise (Gold Coast, Queensland) which is seen by many as ugly and manufactured. This is evident especially in Noosa’s anti-high rise building ethos that is written into planning law today to protect the perceived ‘natural’ authenticity of the place (Edwards 1998; O’Hare 1999). Noosa is seen as “quieter, softer, more in tune with nature” against the idea of the “ritzy, fast and furious atmosphere” of the Gold Coast (Bowen in O’Hare 1999, 89). This alignment with nature, and the rejection of the modern city, is written into Noosa’s past. This chapter explores Noosa textually and, using Northrop Frye (1957) and Philip Smith (1999), argues that, as a place, this highlights how a “theme of ascent” has occurred which places Noosa on a quasi-sacral level against modernity more generally. This can especially can be seen in the ways visitors and locals describe Noosa through text. Here, words paint pictures of a place defined by natural beauty and a site for ritualistic escape. I conclude by arguing that this cultural value can be diminished by the very factors that attract people to the area. Furthermore, as Australia, and the world, moves into a climate changed future, the cultural values that underpin our coastal spaces are increasingly under threat.

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Reading Place Understanding place and placelessness has been well discussed and theorised in the human and social sciences (Lipovac 1997; Seamon and Sowers 2008). In general, the former relates to the ability of the human consciousness to develop a deeper association with certain spaces over others (Lipovac 1997). Conversely, placelessness refers to the breaking down of social attachments to a place through the standardising influence of modernity. For instance, a coastal place may lose its emotional significance to people as development takes over dislocating it from the previous ideals and values by which individuals understood it. Doing justice to the breadth and depth of work on place/placelessness within the space afforded here would be impossible, therefore, two specific areas of thought will be introduced to help conceptualise this chapter. Firstly, to unpack place, it is important to introduce the sociological work of Smith (1999) and his cultural approach to understanding space/place. Smith’s (1999) approach reflects both a Durkheimian hermeneutical frame where cultural life is narrated by the sacred/profane binary, and structuration theory where action from participants reinforces or challenges the status quo. Places are therefore sites of participation and ritual, but which are underpinned by some structure. For Smith, place myths in particular form a large part of this: The action/setting dialectic can be understood as mediated by overarching, place identifying cultural structures … which inform the actions of ego in context … That is to say interpersonal actions are attuned to symbolic meanings attached to a locale, and, indeed, that ego’s action within a place will be influenced by the myths and narratives even in the absence of alter. (1999, 15)

In short, the narratives that make up our locales (not simply spaces) are adopted into the psyche unreflexively and then impact even on microbehaviour. Smith notes that this is most evident when moving through an area that might be deemed as a ‘sacred place’: Nearing the sacred place a penumbra of solemnity imposes itself on human behaviour, inviting, for example, the hushed tones, the straightened back, silent footsteps, slow breathing which in turn invoke physiological changes and direct memory towards the sacred and away from the mundane. (1999, 19)

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Contemporary equivalents of this may well include both religious and secular sites like war memorials, the burial places of charismatic leaders and dark tourism sites like Auschwitz. For instance, as noted earlier, the cultural weight of Gallipoli has a heavy influence on the psychological and bodily responses of individuals visiting there from Australia (Osbaldiston and Petray 2011). However, these locales only achieve this significance through a structural element that hardens it as distinct within culture. Smith (1999) turns to Frye (1957) to help him unpack this further. Here, place can be read like text and thus subjected to textual analysis. For Frye, much literature, especially that of mythology, involves a movement between ‘themes of ascent’ and ‘themes of descent’. In the case of the former, there is a glorious renewal of the self and social solidarity involved in the narrative which often promotes unification and freedom from individualism. Themes of descent, on the other hand, which often occur during the beginning phrases and sections of stories, involve restrictions, loss of freedoms and a misplaced identity. The general theme of descent … was that of growing confusion of identity and of restrictions on action. There is a break in consciousness at the beginning, with analogies to falling asleep, followed by a descent to a lower world which is sometimes a world of cruelty and imprisonment … In the descent theme there is a growing isolation and immobility … The narrative themes and images of ascent are much the same in reverse, and the chief conceptions are those of escape, remembrance, or discovery of one’s real identity, growing freedom and the breaking of enchantment. Again there are two major narrative divisions; the ascent from a lower world and the ascent to a higher world. (Frye 1976, 129, emphasis added)

Within texts themselves, there are no doubt several examples that could be drawn from. However, when applying this to place, it is important to dig into the earth of culture and uncover what narratives define locations. These emerge no doubt from multiple sources and artefacts within our culture; however, in the early modern period, one of the major contributors to how society understand coasts in the west is text (see also Shields 1991). Important here, of course, are the Romantics such as Wordsworth who helped to reinvigorate and transform the sea from a force invoking fear to one of reverie (Lenˇcek and Bosker 1998; Osbaldiston 2018). However, in the early defining period of Australia’s modernity, I argue that the contributions from popular travel writers not only conveyed what

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Noosa looked like, but also cemented a type of ‘theme of ascent’ of the area from mundane to sacred-like.

Writing Noosa Located in the Sunshine Coast region of Queensland in Australia, the coastal locale known as Noosa is today a popular lifestyle destination not only for local and international tourists, but also for lifestyle migrants (Osbaldiston 2012). The place itself has a rather accidental history however and was largely unnoticed in Australia’s early colonial days. James Cook, who sailed past the present-day location in 1770, landed further up the coastline and found the area full “of green tree ants” and was “harried by clouds of mosquitoes” (Cato 1979, 7). The coastal explorer Matthew Flinders in his journeys on The Investigator in the early 1800s also failed to locate the entrance of the Noosa River, sailing past it with the observation that “no river of importance” existed in the region (qtd. in Estensen 2003, 107). Later, however, the area was the site for numerous accidental encounters. The most infamous is the rescue of Eliza Fraser (wife of Captain James Fraser of the shipwrecked Stirling Castle which landed aground on the now Fraser Island) in 1836 (Brown 1993; Schaffer 1991). Following this event, anecdotal and official reports of timber in the location were fed back to the struggling Queensland colony and eventually timber-getters found their way to the region in the 1860s, felling large trees for shipment back to England (Brown 1993; Edwards 1998). In the meantime, the discovery of gold in Gympie (an inland town north of Brisbane, the capital of Queensland) in 1867 by James Nash presented significant opportunities for industry to turn the township into a significant industrial centre. During this Gold Rush period, entrepreneurs within the Noosa and adjacent Tewantin area began to notice a need to produce a place for escape both from Brisbane and Gympie. It is very important to recognise that during the mid- to late 1800s, a combination of the Native Police and colonial land use laws effectively removed the local Gubbi Gubbi Indigenous peoples, thus transferring Noosa to European colonial interests (Adams 2004; Osbaldiston 2018). Unfortunately, there is no room to explore this in-depth within this chapter. This paved the way for boarding lodges such as Bay View (Halse Lodge today) and Laguna House which was constructed in the late 1800s on the same site where the famed Hastings Street exists today. These facilities, combined with the increases in transportation available to both Brisbane

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and Gympie residents, gave impetus to visitation to the area. It was during this period that reports of the natural beauty of the beach and coast were inked into newspapers in both Gympie and Brisbane through travel logs. In particular, early on, a comparative theme developed which situates Noosa’s value above other available beaches. For instance, a visitor to the area from Brisbane recounts his experience in the following excerpt: Noosa … is well sheltered from the south-east winds by the ‘South Head’ … a sand-spit which forms a natural breakwater, being a continuation of the magnificent sand beach stretching away to the north as far as the eye can follow it, with the blue Pacific rolling in right glorious style. Oh, tell me not of Sandgate, after this, and its monotonous expanse of muddy salt water which people are compelled to accept as the sea, forsooth! Nor of Cleveland, with its mean, desolate fore-shore and nothing else worth mentioning. (The Telegraph 1876, 5, emphasis added)

Embedded in this excerpt is evidence of the cultural coding of other beaches (found near Brisbane) as “mean”, “desolate”, “muddy” and “monotonous”, whereas Noosa is narrated as “magnificent” and “glorious”. The citing of this is not insignificant, as although the fledgling Brisbane colony existed on the coastline, the admiration of the natural beauty of Noosa’s beach in comparison with other places reflects a ‘theme of ascent’ on the one side and a ‘theme of descent’ on the other. In other words, a binary opposition is set up between Noosa and the rest, pitting magnificent against mundane, glorious against monotonous, and beautiful nature against a mean and desolate landscape. This coding of nature as serene and pristine carries through the other writing by travellers journeying to Noosa. A recurring theme is one of a world that is separate from modernity, time and place forgotten. Nature here in particular is pristine and full of colour and life, so much so that the writer finds it difficult to capture in words: Even the pens of the greatest word-painters in the language have failed to accurately transfer to paper the beauties of nature, so I am fully conscious of how miserably inadequate my pen is for its purpose. (Gympie Times and Mary River Gazette 1898, 8)

In this excerpt, the writer positions the natural surrounds of Noosa as surreal and exquisitely beautiful, continuing:

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A narrow strip of glistening sand that is delightfully smooth and firm walking stretches away on either hand. To the right it merges into a rocky point that runs out like the horn of a crescent. To the left it runs away in a wide semi-circle of several miles in length. From its extreme end a bold headland rises sheer out of the sea, and runs out and out until it seems to blend with the unfathomable blue, and is lost in a veil of shimmering haze. That is the outline: but to fill in the picture is well night impossible, because it is continually changing in sympathy with the light and the state of the atmosphere. (8)

The narrative presented here is one that positions the natural beauty colourfully but underneath this the text conveys a sense of emptiness. The author does not explicitly state so, but hidden in this text is the message of the area as an untouched paradise. This idea, of beach uncluttered by the artefacts of modernity, permeates cultural values of the coast to this day within the promotional material marketing some of Australia’s coastal townships (Osbaldiston 2012). It sets up the beach as a place of refuge, away from modernity’s stressful and cluttered lifestyles. For early moderns, the beach acted like a haven from the dirty and risky industrial/colonial modern period, a place of forgetting, albeit momentarily. This is evident in another travel writer’s experiences in the Noosa sunshine. They write; After an absence of some years I made up my mind to again renew acquaintance with the sanatorium, Noosa – the veritable queen of the Southern watering places—whose recuperative qualities, however, are not as widely known as they should be. In the ‘off’ season the inhabitants (of Noosa) lead an almost ideal life—the world forgetting, by the world forgot – this idealic stage being only broken in upon by sundry travelers at lengthy intervals. (Gympie Times and Mary River Gazette 1896a, 3, emphasis added)

From this perspective, Noosa appears as a place left behind in the modern push towards industrialisation. This extravagant writing does not, however, recognise that the area itself was widely depopulated of Indigenous peoples and trees. As noted above, the colonisation of the region removed these elements and created a pathway for a new type of Brighton on the coast for Europeans to escape to. Over time, this has led to the eventual commercialisation of the location built on these historical themes of ascent which, for some writers and other commentators, caused the demise of Noosa itself. However, the importance of the beach for these

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historical forebears—a “world” forgotten and an “idealic stage”—cannot be overstated. The virtues of sea-bathing and coastal visiting were, of course, well revered during this time period, especially in Europe and the UK (Lenˇcek and Bosker 1998). Visits to the coast, initially activities for the bourgeois, however, were rationalised events where one could participate in a range of activities to acquire all the health and well-being benefits the seaside offered. Lenˇcek and Bosker expand on this throughout their work, highlighting that the resort was “an idealised and sanitised microcosm of the world of leisured aristocracy … Eden was parceled out among the hours of the day with the pragmatic precision of a railroad timetable” (1998, 86). As the beach was opened up further to the masses, it became a focus for critique, in which ‘scorn and revulsion’ specifically around the middle classes and their activities, as well as the morality of female bathing, was abundant (Corbin 1994, 279; Shields 1991; Lenˇcek and Bosker 1998). This is what can be claimed as a ‘theme of descent’ specifically for the upper elites. Nonetheless, the beach and seaside were both romanticised, positioned as healthy and, importantly, as a site for refreshment from industrialisation (Corbin 1994; Shields 1991). While European coastal resorts required the elites to popularise the movement to the beach, the story of Australian beaches is less elitist, and this is also the case in Noosa. Here, it was the working class, especially those from the goldfields in Gympie, who defined the beach for the rest of society. Edwards makes this clear by suggesting that, at one point, locals were “agitating for a railway to Tewantin (near Noosa) so that the miners might go to the sea” (qtd. in Adams 2004, 180). In this case, the working and middle classes were mingled together. Both were seeking refreshment. As Smith (1999) notes in his work (discussed above), the impact of places with high cultural value is felt both cognitively and physiologically, producing micro-changes that reinforce the sacred. This can be seen in the following work of one of the writers above: If the pallid city man (sic) who tries a course of Noosa does not return with mind and body refreshed, and reinvigorated, and feeling physically, mentally, and morally better, then he can conclude that there is something wrong with the system, and he had better hie himself to a hospital without delay. (Gympie Times and Mary River Gazette 1898, 8, emphasis added)

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Written into the narratives of early visitors to the Noosa beach, therefore, is an implied belief in the benefits of quasi-ritualistic visitation as important for the body, mind and spirit. While seclusion was a significant drawcard, others write about the beauties of the crowd experiencing the beach collectively. The sacred beach is a place where all are welcome, all experience beauty and all are joyful (in contrast to this, see Ellison 2014). As another writer notes, the virtue of increasing opportunities for others to participate in visiting Noosa on weekends is found in the ability for the beach to “build them up for their toil as nothing else could do!” (Gympie Times and Mary River Gazette 1896b, 3). This author then cites Göethe in the following: From poor mean homes—from consuming toil, Laborious—from the work-yard and the shop From the imprisonment of walls and roofs And the oppression of confining streets All are abroad—all happy in the sun. Look, only look, with gaiety how active Both young and old disperse themselves! How the wide water, far as we can see Is joyous with innumerable boats! This is the people’s very heaven on earth Where high and low in pleasure all unite

(Gympie Times and Mary River Mining Gazette 1896b, 3). In such a view, access to the beach is not to be restricted or privatised, but opened up for all to enjoy. In doing so, the idea of social solidarity is also embedded in place. In this way, the Noosa beach can be read as producing both individual but also collective effervescence. This ‘theme of ascent’ is, therefore, coded around not only the natural beauty of the Noosa area, but also the associated moral and soulful virtues the place provokes. For Smith (1999), these sorts of locales are often associated with the ‘themes of descent’ of other places. Specifically in this setting, the city/townships where industrial modernity was accelerating were seen as more mundane and, therefore, escape from modernisation could be afforded by the beach. It stands to reason, then, that attempts to ensure the distinction between the two are important for the maintenance of these narratives. This is especially difficult in the case of Australian beaches, where modern progress such as transportation appeased demand for domestic tourism, and thus opened up the coast to the masses. What

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follows is a common theme of increased demand for services, development and eventually whole cities established behind, and even on, sand dunes. Noosa is not much different for some writers who see this once tranquil and undisturbed beach as now the site of significant development and tourist infrastructure. Of all those who write on Noosa, perhaps none has been more critical than Nancy Cato. Cato writes passionately about the rapid decline of Noosa’s cultural value, criticising especially property developers and local government. Evident within her writings is a type of ‘theme of descent’ as Noosa’s once natural beauty is overcome with the artefacts of modernity. Unlike the optimism of previous writers, Cato understood the increasing numbers of visitors and the ensuing development to have effectively destroyed what had been special about Noosa. Cato writes polemically about this: The increase in incomes and in private car and boat ownership, more leisure time, more caravans … mean that hundreds of thousands of city people set off for the coast by road each year. Picnickers unthinkingly trample down the sea-verge wildflowers and break the crests of dunes, scattering their glass and plastic rubbish, their milk cartons and newspapers. This once remote and beautiful area, populated by a few fisherman and farmers, has deteriorated visually and aesthetically. However it is not only tourism that is to blame. It is our own apathy, our selfishness and greed, our indifference to what is happening to our environment, that have led to the rape of Noosa … It is too late now to undo what has been done. (1979, 132, emphasis added)

Indeed, as can be seen in the above, there is a sense of a ‘theme of descent’ from Noosa’s high value, natural heritage and distinction from the city, into a confused place lost to capitalism and modern apathy. In short, what Cato reflects here is the ‘uglification’ of Noosa, the transferral from a sacred to a mundane place, and a blurring of the codes between city and beach. This is the bitter reality of our history where the very cultural foundations that drew people into areas for ritualistic escape are then regularly degraded through overdevelopment and population growth (Osbaldiston 2012). While not all would agree with Cato about the destruction of Noosa, a theme can be identified within her writing which ‘descends’ Noosa down into the swamp of a modernity which is seen as individualistic, greedy and destructive. As she concludes, “we can only look back and mourn the passing of that picturesque beach” (132). In addition to development as a theme of descent, there is also discussion of the environmental degradation of the area. Cato, for instance,

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highlights the impact of storm events on the local beach. In the 1967– 1968 Summer season in particular, a set of cyclonic events hit the Noosa area, “whipping up huge waves” (1979, 71). As a consequence, the beach was eroded significantly exposing some “dark, coffee coloured sandstone” which was unsightly in comparison with the once iconic golden beach (71). Unfortunately, local residents also saw this as a threat to the tourist infrastructure found just behind the dunes. In a panic, the local council and residents dumped rocks along the foreshore to protect their properties. The unintended consequence of doing so was that the beach was no longer able to successfully regenerate as sand sediment transport was hindered by the rock wall (Coughlan 1989). Following this, the beach suffered dramatically for some time impacting greatly on “the economic viability of the area through a reduction of tourists” (Coughlan 1989). Cato draws upon this theme further to demonstrate how human hand has degraded Noosa. Using another local writer’s thoughts that “Noosa beach was not destroyed by fire, flood, storm, tempest of other act of God”, she reminds us that Noosa’s beach was destroyed (in her eyes) by modern intervention and human hands. Since her writing, however, Noosa Shire has allocated significant resources to maintain the beach including a multimillion dollar submarine sand recycler, thus attempting to sustain the beach’s theme of ascent. Despite this, however, it is impossible to ignore the looming spectre of climate change and associated impacts. This includes the potential loss of space through sea level rise. In a place like Noosa, which is so close to the sea, the beach one day may well be reclaimed by the sea again via the unintentional actions of humans. Climate change indeed may well produce a different beach space, a new theme of descent.

Conclusion This chapter attempts to argue that through the writings of the early modern visitors to Noosa, a ‘theme of ascent’ rose where the beach in particular was seen as vital for the refreshment of people living in, and with, the harsh realities of modernity. Colonialism brought with it all the important industries of its time, including mining, and Noosa became seen as a place of refuge, a place to rejuvenate the soul and spend some time amongst pristine nature. Writers at this time who wrote travel logs for newspapers were keen to publicise the virtues of Noosa and provided some of the codes that began to make up our contemporary sense of this place. Noosa,

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narrated by its natural beauty and the impact this was understood to have on visitors’ souls, was set apart from other places including the relatively distasteful beaches of nearby Brisbane. Soon, both the lower and middle classes were clambering into the township on weekends to escape into, what was proposed to be, ‘another world’. Like any place in modernity, the seemingly ever-expansive nature of technology and population meant that Noosa was soon no longer a secluded island. This chapter argues that underpinning the desire of people to make their way to Noosa was, and is, the way it was constructed through ‘themes of ascent’ from a variety of sources including travel writers. Yet, as narratives from Cato (1979) highlight, this is perhaps changing with overdevelopment and other artefacts of modernity producing ‘themes of descent’ for the location. Writers of the beach need not shy away from these themes. Often within the social sciences, there is a tendency to rebuke such thinking as normative and aligned with humanist approaches that do not appreciate that the beach is socially constructed. While it is possible to admit, and this is clear in the story of Noosa, that the beach is the production of cultural coding through various mediums such as writing, this does not mean that those codes are meaningless for individuals. We make sense of our places through them, and they hold deep symbolic value collectively and individually (Smith 1999). As noted in this discussion, it is important to be mindful of one large theme of descent that looms over coastal places: climate change. Increasing knowledge about the future vulnerability of our beaches through sea level rise and the potential loss of the physical place means that society should be forward thinking in order to promote a deeper consideration about our beaches are for, and what our beaches should be. Our past cultural coding of the beach has led to present-day realities—significant chunks of our coasts are populated with not only people, but also expensive infrastructures. Opening up the public to imaginative templates and writings of future coastal impacts of climate change, fictional or nonfictional, could help us make decisions now that will mitigate future disaster loss.

References Adams, R. 2004. Noosa horizons: A history—Timber, tradition, tourism. Tewantin: Ultreya Publications.

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Booth, D. 2001. Australian beach cultures: The history of sun, sand, and surf. London: Frank Cass. Brown, E. 1993. The legend of Eliza Fraser: A survey of the sources. Royal Historical Society of Queensland Journal 15: 345–360. Cato, N. 1979. The Noosa story: A study in unplanned development. Milton: Jacaranda Press. Corbin, A. 1994. The lure of the sea: The discovery of the seaside in the western world 1750–1840. Cambridge: Polity Press. Coughlan, P. 1989. Noosa Beach: Coastal engineering works to mitigate the erosion problem. Paper presented at the Australasian Conference on Coastal and Ocean Engineering, Adelaide, SA. Dowling, C. 2004. Seachange: Australians in pursuit of the good life. Auckland: Exisle Publishing. Drewe, R. 1983. The bodysurfers. Sydney: James Fraser Publishing. Drewe, R. 2018. The true colour of the sea. Camberwell: Penguin. Dutton, G. 1985. Sun, sea, surf and sand: The myths of the beach. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edwards, D. 1998. Conflict and controversy: The changing development pattern of the Noosa Shire 1910–1980. Masters thesis, University of Queensland. Ellison, E. 2014. On the beach: Exploring the complex egalitarianism of the Australian beach. In Navigating cultural spaces: Maritime places, ed. A.-M. Horatschek, Y. Rosenberg, and D. Schaebler, 221–236. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Estensen, M. 2003. The life of Matthew Flinders. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin. Franklin, A., F. Picken, and N. Osbaldiston. 2013. Conceptualizing the changing nature of Australian beach tourism in a low carbon society. International Journal of Climate Change: Impacts and Responses 5: 1–10. Frye, N. 1957. Anatomy of criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Frye, N. 1976. The secular scripture: A study of the structure of romance. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Game, A., and A. Metcalfe. 2011. ‘My corner of the world’: Bachelard and Bondi Beach. Emotion, Space and Society 4: 42–50. Game, A., A. Metcalfe, and D. Marlin. 2014. On Bondi Beach. North Melbourne: Arcadia. Gordon, A., L. 1870 [1985]. The swimmer. In Sun, sea, surf and sand—The myths of the beach, ed. Geoffrey Dutton, 29. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gympie Times and Mary River Mining Gazette. 1896a. Noosa notes: By a Gympie visitor. Gympie Times and Mary River Mining Gazette, 27 February. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article171450299. Accessed 15 April 2016. Gympie Times and Mary River Mining Gazette. 1896b. Noosa notes: By a Gympie visitor. Gympie Times and Mary River Mining Gazette, 10 March. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article171448968. Accessed 15 April 2016.

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Gympie Times and Mary River Gazette. 1898. Around Noosa. Gympie Times and Mary River Gazette, 31 December. http://nla.gov.au/nla.newsarticle171528886. Accessed 12 January 2017. Lawrence, D.H. 1923 [1970]. Kangaroo. London: Redwood Publishing. Lenˇcek, L., and G. Bosker. 1998. The beach: The history of paradise on Earth. New York: Penguin. Lipovac, N. 1997. Space and place. Prostor 5: 1–34. Metcalfe, A., and A. Game. 2014. Ecological being. Space and Culture 17: 297– 307. O’Hare, D. 1999. Making heritage in an Australian coastal tourist resort. International Journal of Heritage Studies 5: 82–95. Olive, R. 2015. Reframing surfing: Physical culture in online spaces. Media International Australia 155: 99–107. Osbaldiston, N. 2012. Seeking authenticity in place, culture and self: The great urban escape. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Osbaldiston, N. 2018. Towards a sociology of the coast: Our past, present and future relationships to the shore. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Osbaldiston, N., and T. Petray. 2011. The role of horror and dread in the sacred experience. Tourist Studies 11: 175–189. Schaffer, K. 1991. Trial by media: The case of Eliza Fraser. Antipodes: A North American Journal of Australian Literature 5: 114–120. Seamon, D., and J. Sowers. 2008. Place and placelessness, Edward Relph. In Key texts in human geography, ed. P. Hubbard, R. Kitchin, and G. Valentine, 43–51. London: Sage. Shields, R. 1991. Places on the margin: Alternative geographies of modernity. London: Routledge. Smith, P. 1999. The elementary forms of place and their transformations: A Durkheimian model. Qualitative Sociology 22: 13–36. The Telegraph. 1876. A trip to Noosa. The Telegraph, 12 February. http://nla. gov.au/nla.news-article169493513. Accessed 12 December 2016.

Beaches in Australian Horror Films: Sites of Fear and Retreat Mark David Ryan and Elizabeth Ellison

Introduction Since the early 1970s, the majority of Australian horror movies with a distinct cultural accent have revolved around stories of terror in rural or ‘outback’ settings. For prominent horror movies, such as Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir 1975), Wolf Creek (McLean 2005) and Razorback (Mulcahy 1984), the outback has functioned as both a harsh natural setting and a participating character in these narratives. Comparatively, the popular and culturally significant landscape of the beach has played a curious, albeit marginal, role in Australian horror movies. At first glance, this is unsurprising. Beachscapes are far less common in Australian cinema (Ellison 2017, 80) either as a dominant narrative setting or as a subject in their own right, than stories about or set in actual or heterotopic outback landscapes. Storm Boy (Safran 1976) and Puberty Blues (Beresford 1981) are among a handful of Australian movies set on the beach that have

M. D. Ryan (B) Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] E. Ellison Creative Industries, Central Queensland University, Noosaville, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Ellison and D. L. Brien (eds.), Writing the Australian Beach, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35264-6_8

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achieved some degree of popularity at the domestic box office. Beach stories have, however, been far more popular on television: the long-running Home and Away (Bateman 1988–ongoing) is one example. At the same time, beachscapes occupy an important place in the national consciousness centred upon a complex dichotomy as both a mythic and ordinary everyday space (Morris 1998). The beach’s mythic connotations have been embraced globally as a national iconic landscape through tourism campaigns featuring idyllic natural scenes, bronzed lifesavers or beautiful bikini-clad women (Fiske et al. 1987). And yet, for most Australians, the beach is more meaningful, and recognisable, as a casual holiday or leisure destination rather than an idealised space of natural beauty, despite Australian cinema often representing the space in this romanticised way. Since the Australian feature film revival in the late 1960s, it is difficult to identify more than a small, and largely peripheral, grouping of local horror films that feature the beach in any significant way. Yet this marginality is significant in its own right and speaks to the dominance of outback mythology as the primary source and site of the nation’s greatest horrors. Some of the most significant historical filmic titles with beach settings include The Last Wave (Weir 1977), Long Weekend (Eggleston 1978), The Dreaming (Andreacchio 1988) and the transatlanticstyled ‘ozploitation’ movies Harlequin (Wincer 1980) and Turkey Shoot (Trenchard-Smith 1982). In terms of the acclaimed horror-thriller Dead Calm (Noyce 1989), set almost entirely on the ocean, the beach plays little to no significant narrative function in the film. In recent years, a handful of contemporary Australian horror films have been released with beach settings including Lost Things (Murphy 2003), Safety in Numbers (Douglas 2005), the Long Weekend (Blanks 2008) remake, The Reef (Traucki 2010), Uninhabited (Bennett 2010) and Bait (Rendall 2012). This chapter examines the representation of the beach in Long Weekend, Lost Things, The Last Wave, The Reef and Uninhabited. It also considers the outback horrors, Wolf Creek and Wake in Fright (Kotcheff 1971) and how the beach is thematically constructed in opposition to the isolated outback setting. This chapter identifies three key ways in which the beach functions and contributes to narrative in Australian horror films: the beach as dominant setting and/or a character; offshore beaches away from the mainland; and beaches that play a minor but symbolically important role in the narrative. In terms of the first category, the beach acts as a dominant setting for plot development or action within the narrative, and often includes films in

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which the beachscape serves as an active character. We include in this category movies that contain beach scenes that may occupy a relatively short amount of screen time but serve as an important catalyst for plot development. In the shark movie Bait, for example, even though the beach is, for the most part, off-screen, the narrative is set on Queensland’s Gold Coast and the beach is a formative setting that shapes character and plot development. In the second category, there are films that feature offshore beaches on islands, but the dramatic action occurs primarily in, or on, the ocean, as seen in The Reef, in which the characters are stranded when their boat overturns in the water. Thirdly, the beach may have a minor but symbolically important role in the narrative, and often functions as an idyllic safe haven off-screen. Although the beach may not be visible in such films, it is nonetheless important to consider the significance of the ‘adjacent beach’ or the ‘imagined beach’ that serves as a symbol of safety. This category also includes films set in the outback, such as Wolf Creek and Wake in Fright, in which the beach plays a less central, but symbolically important, narrative role. As these categories suggest, our focus is on films where the beach contributes thematically or symbolically to narrative, rather than only providing basic spatial-temporal information to anchor the plotting or action. This chapter argues that in terms of films featuring beaches on the Australian mainland, the generic conventions of the horror film tend to reduce the cultural and conceptual complexities of the Australian beach to a simple binary: a place of safety and civilisation or as a dangerous landscape that draws on the mythologies of an Australian landscape tradition in film. There is also an inverse relationship between remote beach settings and the idea of renewal and leisure: while beaches situated in more densely populated areas are associated with these ideas, these experiences are disrupted in isolated beach settings. For films set offshore on an island, such as in the case of Uninhabited, while a landscape tradition may still influence how the beach functions in aspects of the narrative, the beach in this example is influenced by the representation of the beach as a tropical paradise. The chapter establishes how the beach has been identified as a liminal space internationally and as a space of binaries in an Australian context. It examines the function of outback landscape in Australian horror cinema and the prominence of colonial mythology in shaping the function and anxieties associated with these representations. The analysis then turns to how the beach has featured and has been represented by filmmakers in a selection of horror films.

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Australian Beach Binaries The beach is a landform along the edge of an ocean or sea, the geography of which involves the ocean meeting land, and although bodies of water such as inland lakes, estuaries and rivers also have areas that are often described as beaches, this article is concerned with the ocean or seaside beach. The beach has been identified as a ‘liminal’ in-between space that is neither water nor land (Fiske 1989) and can be considered the land’s edge (Preston-Whyte 2004). Unlike cliffs jutting from ocean, rocky shores or muddy mangrove estuaries for instance, a beach is typically defined by some form of sand, often comprised of sand, gravel, rock and/or shells) depending on its geographic location. A beach is comprised of several constituent parts, from the near/fore/backshore and sand bars to flats and dunes, and can be a steep, narrow or wide sandy tract of land. In international cinema, the beach has long been depicted in terms of its liminal identity as a transformative space and as a site of death. As Brady Hammond and Sean Redmond argue, the cinematic beach “exists as a site where complex issues around identity, belonging, Otherness, nomadism, death and rebirth are played out” (2013, 601). On the one hand, the beach has been constructed as an idealised or utopian heterotopia “where capitalist time is unwound, and the sense of belonging, lost in the urban world, is newly found” (Hammond and Redmond 2013, 601). In other words, the beach offers possibilities that contrast to the pace and maddening crowds of city life or the banal everydayness of suburbs. It is a space that “offers idealized love, youthful romance and the gifted time of unfettered freedom, while the city and the suburban home have in some way failed to provide these” (Hammond and Redmond 2013, 601). The beach has also been argued to frequently display idealised representations of the youthful body (Pomerance 2013). Similarly in Australian popular culture, the beach has been constructed as a liminal space analogous to representations common in international cinema. However, Australia’s unique position as a continent and a single nation surrounded by oceans, reconfigures the concept of the beach in the national imaginary as it functions as both a national boundary and a physical barrier to be crossed before entering the country. Paradoxically, while the vast majority of the Australian population live along the coast, and the eastern seaboard in particular (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2014), the largely uninhabited inland centre has always been strongly associated

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with national identity and myths of belonging for non-Indigenous Australians. As Ross Gibson has famously argued, “the landscape becomes the projective screen for a persistent national neurosis deriving from fear and fascination of a preternatural continent” and “if you want the real Australia, look at the earth, not the people” (1993, 213). In his book The Coast Dwellers (1994), Philip Drew challenges this idea by suggesting that Australia’s cultural identity is instead “predominantly coastal with all that implies” (2). For Drew, Australians “are not an inland people who live in the interior of the continent, but a highly urban society living along the coastal fringes” (2). As this suggests, at the core of the liminal identity of the beach in Australia is the sense of it being an edge. However, to dismiss the beach as principally a fringe location overlooks the complexities of understanding the Australian beachscape. It is important to consider that the beach oscillates uncomfortably between its reality as an everyday space and the image of it as a mythic space. The local beach close to one’s home is, for instance, not necessarily the same ‘beach’ that comes to mind when thinking of iconic Australian beaches. International advertising campaigns, for example, showcase picturesque beaches often indistinguishable from each other. In advertising, well-known tourist locations, such as Surfers Paradise and Bondi Beach, are typically portrayed as idyllic havens, places of leisure and significant beauty. In this, they are depicted as holiday destinations designed to allow the body to recuperate and regenerate, and the significant urban development on their margins is often ignored. However, during the Summer holidays, Australian families tend to holiday at familiar beaches, returning to the same places time and again (White 2005). Consequently, for John Fiske, Bob Hodge and Graeme Turner, the beach is an example of a modern Australian myth, one that is perhaps somewhat removed from its ‘reality’: The fact that so many beaches differ from the myth shows, perhaps, how the myth is rooted in an ideal (that is, one not necessarily made material on any one beach) image of Australia – classless, matey, basic, natural – rather than a more realistic apprehension of our urban, artificially structured society. (1987, 57–58)

The beach is then a place of mythic ideals: an egalitarian space and a space of regeneration. For Fiske, Hodge and Turner, the beach’s tendency to encourage swimwear or casual wear means a type of equality can

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be achieved regardless of class. This is, of course, a fallacy, and Puberty Blues, both the 1979 book and its various screen adaptations, is a text which highlights inherent the class and gender-based assumptions made on the beach (Ellison 2014). Nevertheless, as a concept, the beach as an egalitarian space remains a pervasive one. When the complexity of cultural understanding and significance of the beach is considered, it is perhaps unsurprising that the beach functions awkwardly as a cinemascape in Australian films. Several contemporary Australian beach films, particularly surfing or coming-of-age films, such as Blackrock (Vidler 1997), December Boys (Hardy 2007), Newcastle (Castle 2008) and Drift (Nott and O’Neill 2013), have performed poorly at the domestic box office. There is a tension apparent in these films, which attempt to showcase the beach as an everyday space, integral to the protagonists’ lives but at the same time the beach is cinematically spectacular and has the potential to overshadow the significance of the film’s overarching narrative.

Outback Mythology, the Gothic and Horror Cinema Since the early 1970s, Australian cinema has produced an eclectic corpus of independent horror titles. Over the decades, Australian horror movies have been heavily influenced by colonial mythology and colonial anxieties regarding the landscape. A powerful idea at the core of this mythology is the representation of the Australian landscape as harsh, barren and dangerous. Many of the most culturally significant and iconic Australian horror films of all time, including Razorback, Picnic at Hanging Rock and Howling III: The Marsupials (Mora 1987) and more recent films like Wolf Creek, Rogue (McLean 2007), Black Water (Traucki and Nerlich 2008) and Primal (Reed 2009), have revolved around remote ‘outback’ settings and, thematically, an overarching leitmotif of Australian horror cinema has been the struggle for survival in a dangerous landscape. As John Scott and Dean Biron (2010) have argued, the further characters travel into the interior of the Australian continent and the drier the landscape becomes—echoing the experience of pioneering Australian explorers—the more dangerous and inhospitable the landscape becomes. A trope in Australian horror, closely tied to the depiction of the desert landscape as vast and remote, is entrapment in wide open spaces, as though the emptiness

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and isolation of the landscape exist to ensnare those who venture into its embrace. In Australian cinema, two important concepts for understanding the representation of communities in rural or remote outback landscapes, as distilled by Scott and Biron, are the “rural idyll” (a concept emanating from Romanticism) and “rural horror” (2010). The former represents rural landscapes in terms of ‘rural bliss’ and romantic ideals: landscape is portrayed as sublime, untouched by the corruption of civilisation, a place of purity with restorative qualities, and rural folk are viewed as pure and innocent. In terms of the latter, however, rural landscapes are represented as harsh and dangerous and rural communities are portrayed as insulated, degenerative backwaters where life is defined by violence and hardship (Scott and Biron 2010, 308–311). Perhaps unsurprisingly, rural landscapes in Australian horror films are typically portrayed in this vein. In Storm Warning (Blanks 2006), two middle-class urbanites become stranded on a remote island and are imprisoned and tortured by a violent ‘redneck’ family. Dying Breed (Dwyer 2008) is a backwoods horror playing on the stereotype of Tasmanians as Australia’s inbred hillbillies. Descendants of the notorious cannibal convict Alexander Pearce lure tourists into the wilds to feed on them. As in these examples, although the protagonists of horror films are typically from the city, a large number of Australian horror films are marked by the absence of cities (or beaches). A prominent theme in Australian cinema, and central to the horror film, is the idea that the landscape itself is a threat. Rather than a picturesque wilderness or countryside, or a serene natural world untainted by civilisation, the monstrous landscape is a dangerous, malevolent and threatening force. Drawing upon themes also common in Australian Gothic narratives such as entrapment in a hostile environment, isolation and fear of the unknown (Turcotte 1998), the monstrous landscape acts according to its own logic indecipherable to non-Indigenous Australians and is represented in terms of its alien-ness and inhuman horror. A key movie which popularised the idea of the monstrous landscape in terms of horror-specific themes—particularly in terms of anxieties towards the landscape and the negative forces it exudes—is the eerie classic Picnic at Hanging Rock released in 1975. The movie revolves around the disappearance of a group of schoolgirls and their teacher during a picnic at the eponymous rock on St. Valentine’s Day in 1900. An art-house movie shot like a horror film, the narrative suggests that an ancient supernatural force emanating from Hanging Rock abducts and consumes the girls.

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Throughout the narrative, tension arises from the alien-ness of the natural environment and the eerie portrayal of the rock as a force of nature. In a classic scene—the last time the girls are seen—they walk dreamlike, as though in a trance, into a wound-like cavity in the rock and disappear. In the horror film, the monstrous landscape is also reified in the form of killer animals. As Catherine Simpson (2010) has argued, ‘creature features’ in Australian cinema extend post-colonial anxieties towards landscape and belonging. From killer crocodiles (Rogue) and marsupial werewolves (Howling III: The Marsupials ) to packs of wild dogs (The Pack, Robertson 2015) and monstrous feral pigs (Razorback), animals in the Australian horror film have adapted to landscapes altered by modern progress and attack human protagonists for past injustices. As this suggests, in Australian horror, nature fights back. Protagonists from the city, with little understanding of the wilderness, trespass in native wildlife’s natural habitat and are attacked by monstrous animals or become victims of nature’s revenge. In Black Water, a fishing expedition becomes a harrowing fight for survival for three tourists when a rogue crocodile returns to a placid waterway previously purged of crocodiles by hunters. Other killer crocodile movies Rogue and Dark Age (Nicholson 1987) explore the key binaries, the clash of nature and civilisation and modern and primitive worlds. In these films, such issues are closely tied to Indigenous themes. In Rogue, a monster crocodile is the guardian of a sacred Indigenous waterway and attacks trespasses (poachers and tourists), and in Dark Age, attempts by park rangers to destroy a killer crocodile are complicated by Indigenous beliefs that the reptile is a dreamtime spirit.

Beachscapes and Australian Horror Movies Building on this analysis, it is possible to identify three main ways in which the beach landscape can be interpreted in horror films in Australia: as a dominant setting and monstrous; as offshore, isolated sites away from the mainland; and as symbolic locations of respite, even if portrayed offscreen. These will be identified and explored through textual analysis of a number of examples. Beach as Dominant Setting and Monstrous Landscape For the small number of Australian horror films set principally on the beach, the beach is represented as a monstrous landscape and a character

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in ways analogous to outback horror films influenced by the Australian landscape tradition. In Long Weekend and Lost Things, two of the most significant examples of beach-set horror films, characters from the city travel to remote beachscapes for holidays, only for the beach to become an antagonist that threatens their lives. In both films, the beach is initially depicted as a pristine natural haven before it becomes the setting of a nightmare, primarily using long-establishing shots to frame the purity and untouched state of the beachscape. Natural and isolated, the beach is, in each film, very different, and distant, from urban city beaches with their proximity to shops, cafés, transport and other services. In both films, access to the beach is difficult, there are no man-made amenities and the protagonists have to camp. Establishing the characters in isolation is, of course, a narrative convention of the horror genre. However, typical of the Australian landscape tradition in film, the landscape in these films is portrayed as both beautiful and dangerous (McFarlane 1988), and, in constructing the natural world in this way, heightens and juxtaposes the horror that unfolds. As the narrative conflict develops, the landscape remains physically beautiful regardless of the horror unfolding within it; this juxtaposition makes the beach a powerful and potentially terrifying landscape. As such, the beach has a power to reveal a truth in these narratives; characters are exposed as flawed and the landscape is exposed as layered and complicated. The supernatural horror, Lost Things, is a story about two teenaged couples, Emily and Brad, and Tracy and Garry, who travel to a secluded beach for a weekend of surfing and drinking. Not long into their getaway, Emily cannot shake the feeling that something is wrong with this stretch of beach. Soon the characters encounter doubles of themselves and they meet Zippo, a dishevelled beachcomber who is a demon in the guise of an Australian larrikin. Director Martin Murphy constructs a nightmarish beachscape in which the teens are trapped inside a time loop, or perpetual limbo, forcing them to relive the bizarre events that ultimately led to their deaths for all eternity. Unconventionally for a horror film, much of the action occurs during daylight. Murphy has also captured a beach that is almost unrecognisable in the cultural imaginary. Despite most of the plot unfolding on the foreshore, backshore and surrounding dunes, this is not a golden beach drenched in sunlight, but is, instead, sombre, bleak and uncanny. In addition, the initially familiar beach depicted in the first act, portrayed as a serene playground, becomes a hellish prison trapping the teenagers. Sand dunes hide dangerous snakes and a strange assortment

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of objects from decaying-mannequins to personal items from the victims, and the beach is itself eerily desolate and empty. The powerful contrast between the familiar and monstrous beach highlights the inherent duality of the beach and the transformational nature of the beach space. Murphy eventually reveals the characters’ fate in the film’s final sequence, but the ending is ambiguous. Throughout the plot, the beachscape reveals tantalising clues to the protagonists, and the lack of narrative resolution could be read as meaning that only the beach itself knows the full details of the characters’ disappearance. This film therefore enforces important binaries of the beach, starkly contrasting the initial beauty of the beach with the unfolding horror. In a similar vein, both versions of Long Weekend feature a beachscape with dangerous agency very much in an Australian landscape cinema tradition. The central characters, Marcia and Peter, a couple experiencing marriage difficulties, travel to the remote Moondah Beach in an undisclosed location in New South Wales in an effort to repair their failing relationship. In an explicit environmental message, the protagonists have a callous disregard for the environment and its animals (Buckmaster 2014), and their actions disrupt the ecosystem. The characters drop a cigarette out of the car window causing a fire, they contaminate streams, destroy plant life and kill wildlife in various ways from crushing ants underfoot and squashing sea hawks eggs to running over a kangaroo. The destruction of the ecosystem culminates in Peter shooting and killing a dugong. Ultimately, the premise of the movie is “what if nature decided enough was enough and fought back? What if the birds, the insects, the wind, water and breeds of animals big and small combined forces to exact revenge on humans for smiting them, or taking them for granted?” (Buckmaster 2014). Rather than a single, monstrous predator typical of Australian ‘creature features’, an entire ecosystem of threatening and benign animals—snakes, sea hawks, dugongs, spiders, ants and possums—‘fight back’ against humans for their destructiveness. The beach becomes a monstrous landscape and, in the violence that follows, neither Peter nor Marcia survive. The film’s opening sequence establishes a traditional, iconic image of the beach but immediately contrasts this with ominous music that ebbs and flows throughout the film. Long Weekend exploits its initial equilibrium with multiple wide shots of untouched beachscapes, swimming ducks, flying birds, Marcia lounging comfortably on the sand and Peter surfing in the pristine ocean water.

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Ultimately, Lost Things and Long Weekend feature the interruption of the natural order instigated by humanity and, in latter, offer the implication that Peter and Marcia are responsible for their destiny by disturbing nature. These films relegate the beach to either beautiful or terrifying; as the terror unfolds, the beauty of the beach becomes less apparent. The films capitalise on the juxtaposition and the subversion of what is considered a mythically beautiful space, falling back into the binary opposition of serene and sinister. By creating such a juxtaposition, it could be argued that both films create an imaginary beach that does not reflect the complexities of the beach space common in both national culture and lived experience. Peter Weir’s The Last Wave develops a more complex representation of the beach than is usual in Australian horror films. No stranger to mysterious landscapes, Weir’s film takes place almost entirely in the city of Sydney. However, the tense final scene sees the protagonist David Burton emerge out of the underground sacred Indigenous site through the sewers onto the beach in a symbolic intersection of human waste and the natural environment. David is almost overcome, sinking to his knees as though awaiting baptism in the small waves. The film’s final shot is of the giant ocean wave, the harbinger of doom, that speaks to David’s fears of the apocalypse as signified by the ongoing weather anomalies throughout the narrative. In this instance, the disruption of the natural order—especially of Indigenous beliefs—by careless white Australians is punished by the threat of this ‘last’ wave. This film uses the beach sparingly but in a way that illustrates the power of the beach’s image as a setting for disruption and disturbance. In this film, the beach is a dangerous location, and Weir capitalises on the natural dangers associated with the ocean in conjunction with the mystic or spiritual threats David uncovers, to develop a foreboding horror narrative. In all these films, the beach plays a significant role in the narrative and is portrayed as a character in each of the respective stories. In this way, the beach is not an innocent landscape that functions merely as a setting. Instead, the beach in these films acts more like interior landscapes have in films like Picnic at Hanging Rock—mysterious, untrustworthy and unsafe. Offshore Beaches and Islands Australian horror movies set predominantly in the ocean or on islands in national waters depict beaches in related but different ways. Andrew

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Traucki’s The Reef follows the story of Luke, who invites his friends Matt, Suzie and Kate, to join him while sailing a yacht to a customer in Indonesia, along with a fellow sailor, Warren. On the second day of their journey, their boat strikes a submerged reef off the Queensland coast and overturns, forcing the characters to choose between swimming through shark-infested water to the safety of Turtle Island, or waiting on the boat to be spotted in isolated water. A decision is eventually reached—Warren stays on the boat’s hull while Luke and his companions choose to swim for the island. The tension of the characters’ situation and their fear of the unknown drive the narrative as the characters are stalked and killed, one by one, by a Great White Shark. The film follows predictable patterns of shark horror and, like Jaws (Spielberg 1975), relies on minimal viewings of the shark itself. The shark, as they often are in monster films, is portrayed through its absence as often as its presence; it drives the suspense without appearing in the frame. The beach has an ambiguous function in this movie. Before the characters’ voyage, the story begins on a wharf in a small harbour. The beach itself is unseen. Within the diegesis, the beach is an ordinary space, a place of trade and a point of departure for the ocean. The beach, however, becomes a more featured setting at the end of the first act when the protagonists stop at a small island offshore for an afternoon of leisure—swimming, snorkelling, sunbaking and romance. The beach in these scenes is portrayed as a holiday destination and tropical paradise, a representation common to Queensland beach locations on screen (see Craven 2016). After the tide rapidly turns, risking the stranding of the yacht in treacherous shallows, the group is forced back into the ocean before striking the submerged reef during the night. The yacht overturns, leaving them stranded and drifting further into open water. From this point, the safety of the nearby island becomes an imagined destination and safe haven for the characters. However, although two characters come within sight of the safety of a rocky outcrop, there is no beach here—only waves crashing on rocks. In this film, the beach, although rarely on screen, is an important gateway. It represents the gateway to the adventure and danger of the ocean, but also the bridge to land and to safety. Unlike other examples discussed in this chapter, in The Reef, the beach is principally a safe haven. The supernatural thriller, Uninhabited directed by Bill Bennett, is set in both bushland and the beach of Masthead Island, “a coral cay off the Capricornia Coast of Queensland, although the narrative place is not

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named” (Craven 2016, 65). A marine biologist, Beth, and her boyfriend, Harry, travel to an uninhabited island in the Great Barrier Reef for a holiday. Other than a satellite phone, they are cut off from civilisation. Unbeknown to the protagonists, the island has a dark past. It was originally used for Trepang (sea cucumber) fishing in the 1920s, until Coral, a female islander working for a company to harvest the sea cucumbers, was poisoned by a highly toxic stonefish while on the reef. With hours to live, she returned to shore only to be raped by her fellow male employees until she died from the poison. The story revolves around Coral’s haunting of the island—specifically her haunting of Beth and Harry—and her desire to exact her revenge on all men who visit the island. The film opens with supertext on black: “The Great Barrier Reef stretches for over 1,600 miles off the northeast coast of Australia. It is the world’s largest coral reef and one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World. There are more than 600 islands … this is one of them”. The frame then fades into an aerial shot of a remote island surrounded by picturesque, blue waters. From the film’s opening, the island is represented as idyllic, remote and eponymously uninhabited (Craven 2016). As Allison Craven argues in her examination of the film, the representation of landscape here is influenced by several key sources. Uninhabited is set in the holiday tropics and is typical of its representation of Queensland as a paradise. The island is also portrayed very much within mythology of the dangerous continent, one filled with deadly animals, a myth discussed by Simpson (2010) and a trope common in Australian creature features. Swimming away from the safety of the remote and picturesque sands, for instance, Beth reminds Harry to be careful of reef sharks, eels, box-jelly fish and, later in the film, the toxic stonefish. While the movie is also, to an extent, influenced by the aforementioned landscape tradition in Australian film and landscapes in this film are portrayed as both beautiful and dangerous, the representation of the island is also influenced by Hollywood films that have depicted the South Seas, such as the trope of being marooned on a remote island, the theme of the underside of commerce in the South Seas and the impact on the native populations (Craven 2016, 65). However, in Uninhabited, the island is aligned with the ghost’s haunting, and therefore, the beach does not act with a sense of agency, and rather is the location for Coral’s haunting. In this instance, the landscape holds a memory but does not have the power to act on it. Rather, it is Coral’s ghost that has the agency to punish (male) trespassers. Yet as Craven argues, Uninhabited can also be

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read as a variation on the concept of Gaia’s revenge in the form of the attack of monstrous animals, as argued by Simpson (2010). Beth is killed and returns as a ghost after stepping on a stonefish, and so, in common with numerous Australian horror features, a tourist is ultimately killed by deadly wildlife. The Symbolic Beach Wake in Fright and Wolf Creek are two classic Australian films that, while depicting horrors in the desert interior, also feature minor but important beach scenes. Wake in Fright, directed by Canadian Ted Kotcheff, is a landmark film of the so-called Australian film renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s and has become a classic of Australian film for its representation of the outback as dangerous and dehumanising. The movie revolves around a refined English primary school teacher, John Grant (Gary Bond), who gambles away his savings in an attempt to escape his job at an outback school and the desert’s oppressive heat and isolation. As a result of this loss, he descends into a nightmare of alcohol-fuelled violence and madness, which ultimately leads to his attempted suicide in the small town of Bundanyabba. Wake in Fright is the film responsible for establishing a number of key themes explored obsessively by Australian cinema (and horror movies) over the next three decades. These include the representation of degenerate and insulated rural communities as sites of violence, the ability of the rough harshness of the outback to crush morality and civility, and the dangers of the interior. John’s original plan was to travel to Sydney to visit his girlfriend over the Christmas holidays, but after this plan goes horribly wrong, key scenes in the film depict John fantasying about being on an idyllic beach with her. This film suggests that, for John, trapped in the barren isolation of the outback, the beach—as an abstract or symbolic idea—is an idealised place of safety and civilisation in contrast to the dangers and debilitating dehumanisation of the empty interior. Before the young backpackers travel into the treacherous Australian outback in Wolf Creek, the film opens in an urbanised coastal location in Western Australia. As Scott and Biron observe, “The opening raucous beach party and subsequent spectacular sunrise highlight the friendly atmosphere of Australia’s coastal fringe” (2010, 312). In this scene, the beach is portrayed as safe place of hedonistic leisure. Yet “as the three venture further from the coastal fringe, the terrain is transformed into an alienating landscape of bullet ridden signs and dead wildlife” (Scott and

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Biron 2010, 312). As this suggests, in Wolf Creek (as in Wake in Fright ), the beach functions as a binary contrast to the ‘non-beach’ parts of Australia and is used in this way to highlight the horrors of what is to come.

Conclusion Overall, the beach has played an important, but somewhat marginal, role in Australian horror cinema. This chapter establishes some of the complexities of the Australian beach as a place that is not only liminal but also uncomfortably caught in a series of binaries, and outlines some of key ways the beach functions as setting and character in a selection of Australian horror movies. In this way, Australian fright films disrupt cultural understandings of the beach, which is, in both popular consciousness and public memory, typically a place of hedonistic leisure, relaxation and time away from the pressures of work. Most of the films analysed herein (with the exception of The Last Wave) feature uncivilised, wild and natural beaches, rather than iconic or recognisable ‘recreational’ beaches such as Bondi Beach or Surfers Paradise. Instead, beaches in these films are more usually remote, natural and untamed. They are also unnamed or, at least, unfamiliar. Rather than representing or doubling as a known beach entity, the beaches in these films thus become representative of all Australian beaches or ‘the Australian beach’. Similar to the way films represent the Australian outback as monolithic, these imagined beaches act as signifiers of the greater whole of the coastal landscape. Australian horror films that feature beach settings, with a handful of exceptions, have rarely been commercially successful at the domestic box office, and most of these films have reached audiences through video or television markets. While determining the exact factors that contribute to a film’s commercial performance is problematic, it is difficult to ignore that Australian horror movies set predominately on the beach revolve around binaries that Australian audiences do not generally associate with this location. Where Australians largely experience the beach as an ordinary space, horror films instead capitalise on extraordinary events. The authentic dangers of the beach, namely drowning, becoming caught in a rip, losing a child or contracting skin damage or cancer from sun exposure, are largely absent from local horror films. Instead, Australian horror films purposefully transform the familiar, almost benign, local beach and instead disrupt this site into a space filled with excessive dangers beyond the scope of our everyday lives.

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References Andreacchio, M. (dir.). 1988. The Dreaming. Australia: Genesis Films. Australian Bureau of Statistics. 2014. Australian population grid, 2011. http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats%[email protected]/0/ 0D1E2B7808F83D01CA257DB100161343?Opendocument. Accessed 9 January 2017. Bateman, A. (creator). 1988–ongoing. Home and Away. Australia: Seven Network. Bennett, B. (dir.). 2010. Uninhabited. Australia: Uninhabited Films Pty Ltd. Beresford, B. (dir.). 1981. Puberty Blues. Australia: Roadshow. Blanks, J. (dir.). 2006. Storm Warning. Australia: Resolution Independent. Blanks, J. (dir.). 2008. Long Weekend. Australia: Roadshow Home Entertainment. Buckmaster, L. 2014. Long Weekend re-watched: Mother nature toys with her callous human prey. The Guardian, 12 December. https://www.theguardia n.com/film/2014/dec/12/long-weekend-rewatched-mother-nature-toys-wi th-her-callous-human-prey. Accessed 9 January 2017. Castle, D. (dir.). 2008. Newcastle. Australia: Dragonfly Pictures. Craven, A. 2016. Finding Queensland in Australian cinema: Poetics and screen geographies. London: Anthem Press. Douglas, D. (dir.). 2005. Safety in Numbers. Australia: Multivision 235 Pty Ltd. Drew, P. 1994. The coast dwellers: Australians living on the edge. Ringwood: Penguin. Dwyer, J. (dir.). 2008. Dying Breed. Australia: Ambience Entertainment. Eggleston, C. (dir.). 1978. Long Weekend. Australia: Synapse. Ellison, E. 2014. On the beach: Exploring the complex egalitarianism of the Australian beach. In Navigating cultural spaces: Maritime places, ed. A. Horatschek, Y. Rosenberg, and D. Schaebler, 221–236. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Rodopi. Ellison, E. 2017. Facing death on the Australian beach: Examining fear and transcendence. TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, special issue no. 45. http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue45/Ellison.pdf. Accessed 9 January 2017. Fiske, J. 1989. Reading the popular. London: Unwin Hyman. Fiske, J., B. Hodge, and G. Turner. 1987. Myths of Oz: Reading Australian popular culture. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Gibson, R. 1993. Camera natura: Landscape in Australian films. In Australian cultural studies: A reader, ed. J. Frow and M. Morris, 209–222. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Hammond, B., and S. Redmond. 2013. This is the sea: Cinema at the shoreline. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 27 (5): 601–602. Hardy, R. (dir.). 2007. December Boys. Australia: Village Roadshow Entertainment.

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Kotcheff, T. (dir.). 1971. Wake in Fright. Australia: Group W Films. McFarlane, B. 1988. Australian cinema. New York: Columbia Press. McLean, G. (dir.). 2005. Wolf Creek. Australia: Roadshow Entertainment. McLean, G. (dir.). 2007. Rogue. Australia: Emu Creek Pictures. Mora, P. (dir.). 1987. Howling III: The Marsupials. Australia: Baccania Entertainment. Morris, M. 1998. Too soon too late: History in popular culture. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Mulcahy, R. (dir.). 1984. Razorback. Australia: Great Union Film Distributors. Murphy, M. (dir.). 2003. Lost Things. Australia: Maverick Entertainment. Nicholson, A. (dir.). 1987. Dark Age. Australia: FG Film Productions. Nott, B., and M. O’Neill. (dir.). 2013. Drift. Australia: World Wide Mind Films. Noyce, P. (dir.). 1989. Dead Calm. Australia: Kennedy Miller. Pomerance, M. 2013. Young body on the beach. Continuum 27 (5): 617–629. Preston-Whyte, R. 2004. The beach as a liminal space. In A companion to tourism, ed. A. Lew, C. M. Hall, and A. Williams, 349–359. Oxford: Blackwell. Reed, J. (dir.). 2009. Primal. Australia: Primal Films. Rendall, K. (dir.). 2012. Bait. Australia: Bait Productions. Robertson, N. (dir.). 2015. The Pack. Australia: Breakout Movies. Safran, H. (dir.). 1976. Storm Boy. Australia: South Australian Film Corporation. Scott, J., and D. Biron. 2010. Wolf Creek, rurality and the Australian Gothic. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 24 (2): 307–322. Simpson, C. 2010. Australian eco-horror and Gaia’s revenge: Animals, econationalism and the ‘new nature’. Studies in Australasian Cinema 4 (1): 43–54. Spielberg, S. (dir.). 1975. Jaws. USA: Zanuck/Brown Productions. Traucki, A. (dir.). 2010. The Reef. Australia: Pinnacle Films. Traucki, A., and D. Nerlich (dir.). 2008. Black Water. Australia: Black Water Films. Trenchard-Smith, B. (dir.). 1982. Turkey Shoot. Australia: Hemdale. Turcotte, G. 1998. Australian Gothic. In The handbook to Gothic literature, ed. M. M. Roberts, 10–19. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Vidler, S. (dir.). 1997. Blackrock. Australia: Universal Pictures. Weir, P. (dir.). 1975. Picnic at Hanging Rock. Australia: Australian Film Commission. Weir, P. (dir.). 1977. The Last Wave. Australia: Ayer Productions. White, R. 2005. On holidays: A history of getting away in Australia. North Melbourne: Pluto Press. Wincer, S. (dir.). 1980. Harlequin. Australia: Ace Productions.

Challenging the Beach as Paradise in Fiction and Memoir: The Gold Coast’s Bathing Beauties Kelly Palmer

Introduction With its transcendent natural landscape and exuberant party culture, Australia’s Gold Coast has certainly embraced its many ‘paradise’ namesakes: the beaches of the “sun-drenched sin city” (Breen 2018) flash through cultural imagination as liminal spaces for freedom, transitions and indulgence. Australia’s sixth-largest city, located in subtropical Southeast Queensland, forms in the postcolonial imagination as a tourist’s paradise. The Gold Coast is relatively new as a city, not just in the context of European imperialism, but also compared to other major Australian cities. The Gold Coast has been known by a few names, some official and some unofficial, including Elston, Surfers Paradise and South Coast Town, before it became The City of the Gold Coast in 1959 (Gold Coast Town Council 2016). The swamplands have been mostly cleared and drained as “the Nerang [R]iver and its wetlands were transformed into a network of islands and canals to appeal to those who prefer low-rise water-frontage with private jetties” (Wise 2006, 177). These suburbs are

K. Palmer (B) Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Ellison and D. L. Brien (eds.), Writing the Australian Beach, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35264-6_9

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built for luxurious living and are constructed around notions that paradise represents (re)constructed natural beauty and grandeur leaked into one’s backyard. The paradise of the beach and wetlands redirected into the suburbs ensures that paradise is not entirely natural and furthermore is unequally shared among different socioeconomic and gender demographics of locals and tourists. For the last half-century, state and local governments’ “supply-driven approach” to tourism in Queensland has certainly dressed the city for the tourist’s gaze (Dredge 2011, 154). The Gold Coast economy transitioned from “the home of the Kombumerri tribe, to a centre of the early timber, cotton and sugar industries” (Barcan 1995, 47) to being “heavily dependent on construction [and] retail trade” (Jones 1986, 116). However, since the 1980s, the city’s economy is predominantly dependent on “tourism and residential development” (Dedekorkut and Bosman 2011, 9), having arrived at “its apogee as” an Australian tourism capital (Barcan 1995, 47). Today the landscape homes a concentration of holiday accommodation, mostly in skyscrapers, as well as tourist attractions both constructed and natural, while many of the more upper-class suburban areas, including Paradise Island, also boast serviced apartments, tennis courts, pools and waterfront views: everyday life is, on some streets, modelled on that offered by hotels. It is thus uncontroversial to describe the entire city as a “turn-of-the-twentieth-century seaside resort” (Wise 2006, 177) despite its non-transient population of an estimated 580,000 residents (Population Australia 2018). The city is internationally renowned for its many theme parks and other tourist attractions scattered along 57 kilometres of coastline; indeed, the central suburb, Surfers Paradise is marketed as being the Gold Coast’s sixth theme park (Surfers Paradise Alliance 2017). As the setting for a series of major reality television productions, the Gold Coast is a stage for exhibitionism. However, images of the “contemporary tourist mecca” (Stimson and Minnery 1998, 194) that stand in for the Gold Coast privilege a consumerist and typically “masculine” interpretation of paradise. The image of a beach-going woman across Gold Coast media and advertising is one that is consistently sexualised, racialised and commodified: her staged posture invites male and tourist gazes to admire her as part of the coastal landscape. These women are also seen on the streets and are most recognisable in the bikini-clad metre-maids of Surfers Paradise or “promo girls” ringing up a crowd for the bar or club. While works of literary fiction and memoir set on the Gold Coast acknowledge that the

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city is mythologised as a kind of bridge to heaven, the gendered aspects of this are rarely touched upon. And yet, the notion of paradise on the Gold Coast is one that is inextricably tied to the sexualisation and objectification of women. Selected literature and memoir set on the Gold Coast communicate that the female body is a commercialised commodity on the beach landscape just as the coastline itself is constructed and for sale. In highlighting these place-specific representations, normalised through mainstream media texts, some fiction and memoir instead posit that paradise is not so for female characters, who reject their roles as props of paradise. As well as briefly engaging with Gold Coast media texts and culture including advertising, this chapter provides a textual analysis of selected fictions set on the Gold Coast. These include Matthew Condon’s A Night at the Pink Poodle (1995) and Helen Garner’s Postcards from Surfers (2010). The analysis also pays close attention to Georgia Savage’s novel, The House Tibet (1992), and Sally Breen’s memoir, The Casuals (2011). Both Savage and Breen’s texts present female-identifying characters who are aware of, and reject, the local spectacle of the bathing beauty. Instead of paradise, female narrators—Vicky (in Savage) and Sally (in Breen)— understand the ocean as a site for literal death and metaphorical rebirth in ways that transcend the spectacle on the shore. These texts reveal that Gold Coast beaches and connecting rivers are not features of paradise for women, but instead represent an insecure sanctuary from men and other dangers.

Postcard of Paradise Driving south from Queensland’s capital city of Brisbane towards the Gold Coast, the first vision of the city is not the beach or coastal landscape, but a six-metre by three-metre billboard of a bronzed woman in a corset holding a tray of cocktails. The advertisement for the Surfers Paradise nightclub, Sin City, looms over the motorway approximately 20 kilometres outside of the city limits. The model’s smile, her exposed cleavage and midriff, and the tray poised on her open palm all connote the promise of promiscuity and servitude. Since this image of a subservient, highly sexualised woman is framed within heterosexual (and Anglo/Western) ideals of feminine desirability, the advertisement confidently caters to the male gaze. The male gaze here “projects its fantasy onto the female figure”, which is “coded for strong visual and erotic

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impact” (Mulvey 1975, 4). The fantasy of erotic spectacle and service is thus also projected onto Sin City—and, by extension, Surfers Paradise is enshrined as a stage of erotic viaticum, in that death and desire permeate the Gold Coast’s wild personality. The beach is often associated with sex, with Hilary Winchester and Kathryn Everett finding that “for Australians”, the Gold Coast “most clearly epitomizes sun, surf and sex” (2000, 5). In this case, driving south towards the Gold Coast, as in much mainstream news and tourist media, the image of sex often precedes that of even the sun or surf of the beach. The image of the bikinied woman on the Australian beach, while familiar, is not an unproblematic one since the naturalisation of the white-yettanned, slim woman others that which deviates from her regulated and commodifiable symbolic worth. Douglas Booth argues that the bikini no longer strains “public decency” because “a narcissist consumer culture” as well as progress on women’s rights and the sexual revolution “paved the way in commodifying the naked body, that is, in manufacturing and extending the naked body as a legitimate site of fantasy and pleasure” (2009, 383). Here, Booth identifies the relationship between the male gaze and the tourist gaze as the bikinied female form is exploited (at least in marketing) as a visual feast for the heterosexual male or as an erotic stimulant accessed through beach imagery. Like the Gold Coast beach itself, the ideal femininity of the bikinied woman symbolises personal freedom/transitions, both sensual and material eroticism, ‘natural’ beauty and fun. Indeed, Susie Khamis recognises that Australia’s now decade-old $180 million advertising campaign—in which ‘beach babe’ model and reality television star Lara Bingle asks the people of the UK, “Where the bloody hell are ya?”—is responsible for sustaining Australia’s international appeal in terms of the half-naked female body on the beach (2010, 384). The Australian concept of paradise is unsurprisingly one that is visually linked to a woman who is commonly “blonde, blue-eyed and bikinied”, effectively representing what (female) “Australian beach goers look like, and how they dress, behave and interact” (Khamis 2010, 384). This familiar woman can be bought on postcards, she sells the city, and indeed, many women are encouraged to buy, and buy into, this look for themselves. This sexualised and commodified representation of Australian women demonstrates that female belonging on the beach is firstly determined through Anglo/Western heterosexual male desire.

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Because of these implicit codes and the racial tensions made clearly visible after the Cronulla riots, the burqini is one costume in particular not yet normalised on the Australian beachscape (Khamis 2010). Likewise, bodily maintenance, such as pubic hair removal, must be “regularly engaged in to produce a sexually-desirable – or just apparently normal – feminine body” on the beach (Braun et al. 2013, 480). These ‘body modifications’, though of course practised among both men and women for a variety of intrinsic and extrinsic reasons, stem pervasively from “heteronormative expectations around attractiveness, desirability, and ideal femininity” (Braun et al. 2013, 481). This racialised and sexualised image of the ‘beach babe’ is also coded around distinct class barriers, which a beach goer’s tan reveals. Although a smooth tan has become naturalised in the media, the time and often expensive products and services that “ensure a smooth and even all-over ‘natural tan’” are substantially more economically burdensome than “uneven colouration, deprecatingly called a ‘farmer’s tan’” (Booth 2001, 6). Thus, the ideal beach babe associated with paradise is not only white, slim, able-bodied and female, but also middle-class. The ideal female body on the beach is also sometimes a prerequisite for normality. On the Gold Coast especially, everyday life is inflated as paradise (Palmer 2018) and women are certainly caught up in these skyscraping expectations. While Lara Bingle personifies the ideal female form on the beach, her complaisant presentation is invisible, acceptable as it is naturalised on the beach, say, compared to alternative ways of visibly being on the sand in everyday life. Noting that exposed skin and the bikini’s suggestion of sex is no longer a threat to public decency, it seems that one threat to the Gold Coast’s reputation involves adult female bodies that do not cater to a highly specific male and tourist gaze. Bodies that do not conform to the idealised beach babe are othered, even if such bodies are modest, and are considered abnormal or offensive in, and on, a landscape rich with symbolic value—value that ultimately reinforces notions of the beach as a heterosexual male paradise. The male gaze intersects repeatedly with the tourist gaze in images of the Gold Coast in mainstream media and the cultural imagination. The leisured lifestyle of the Gold Coast is most visibly traced through marketing materials for its many tourist attractions, including, foremostly, the beach, but also through theme parks; hotels; night clubs; and sporting events, such as the 2018 Commonwealth Games and annual Gold Coast

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500 car race. The economic health of the city is almost entirely dependent on its twelve million visitors per year (City of Gold Coast 2017), and the profitable image of paradise depends upon these attractions that collectively consolidate the city’s allure as a pleasure centre. John Urry conceives that tourists “are looking for the extraordinary” (2005, 38), and what the Gold Coast puts forth as extraordinary consistently involves halfnaked women on the beach. Undoubtedly, there is an aura of hedonistic pleasure attached to the billboard of a young naked couple gazing from their rooftop pool over the city and the ocean, as well as to the bikini- and micro-mini skirt-wrapped hostesses of the Gold Coast 500 and the metremaids of Surfers Paradise. The metre-maids are tied to the beach as the most iconic image of the Gold Coast, as these women capture the glitz and glamour of the city as well as the beach palette in their gold swimsuits, high heels and beauty-pageant-style blue sashes. Perhaps befitting of a city criticised for being “hedonis[tic] … brash, trendy … overdeveloped” (Stimson and Minnery 1998, 195–196) and superficially “smothered with advertising” (Boyd 2010, 43), the metre-maids were once considered a cultural treasure for their public service of filling expired and expiring parking metres, but now, with the proliferation of electronic metres, the women today mostly serve as models for tourist photography. Public, legal and governmental debates in the last two decades have also seen ‘threats of physical violence’ between rival metre-maid groups over “which leaders of which groups had taken their clothes off … for commercial purposes” (Griffin 1998, 286). At least at a cursory glance, paradise on the Gold Coast is serviced with half-naked women, who at best are hard-working cultural icons and at worst sexy lamps. Comic book writer, Kelly Sue DeConnick proposes The Sexy Lamp Test as a means of determining whether female characters have agency; if a female character can be replaced with a sexy lamp without the narrative changing, then that text fails the test. When a female character is rendered dynamically equal to an inanimate object of desire, then those women are useful insofar as they are gazed upon, but they lack activity, and their worldviews are irrelevant. The Gold Coast is often read as if the city itself were a sexualised, and tacky, woman. Grahame Griffin (2003) collates newspaper headlines that depict women on the Gold Coast as dumb and beautiful—as manifestations of the shallow yet naturally splendid beachscape they are represented against. Griffin cites local and national newspaper headlines such as “Facelift vital for Surfers’ aged allure” (2003, 137) and other copy

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that implicitly parallels women and the beach as similarly shallow, including: “the beaches and breakers curve away. Lovely, thinks Gold Coast woman: lovely and without point or purpose – just a bit, in fact, like me” (137). This imaging of the beach with curves and the beautiful, yet pointless females on the shore degrade both landscape and women through a condescending heterosexual male (and postcolonial) gaze. Female immersion with the landscape is, in the case of the apparently shallow and liminal Gold Coast, as substantial as the women are decorative. Essentially, women on Gold Coast beaches are read as living postcards. Ruth Barcan, in her semiotic studies of the city, maps the derogatory comments made against women while the Gold Coast is simultaneously criticised for its materialism. Surfers Paradise in particular is “depicted (unsurprisingly) as a woman – a ‘tart’ whose virgin beauty has been exploited” (Barcan 1995, 49). The passive and abused woman, who here represents the overdeveloped Gold Coast landscape, functions as both a metonym for, and distraction away from, European settlers’ murder and dislocation of the local Kombumerri peoples. Her virginity, or innocence, thus represents the soul of the nation, which is spoiled through colonial atrocities and the unrestricted capitalism of the city’s tourism and property development industries. The figure of the woman on the Gold Coast so absorbs the subdued self-loathing of the media at the same time that she is moulded and reduced into a metonym for the landscape’s tourist-minded enhancements, as if she were a billboard herself. Accordingly, she is scorned just as she is desired. Barcan finds that because of the sexist metaphors used to describe the Gold Coast, “Surfers Paradise becomes a kind of Victorian ‘fallen woman’ figure, with words like ‘tainted’, ‘tarnished’, ‘shabby’, and ‘spoilt’ frequently being used by the media to describe and judge her” (1995, 49–50). Mainstream media thus paints female belonging on the beach as double-edged: on one side, she is the ideal ‘beach babe’ whose highly sculpted form is such that it captures a heterosexual male fantasy of ‘natural’ beauty, or she is over-determined in her appeal and a reminder of the postcolonial and capitalist failings of the Gold Coast’s modern empire. Either way, whether she is criticised as artificial or made into an exemplar of the beaches’ splendour, the commodifiable beauty of the Gold Coast woman is needed to uphold heterosexual male desire as an important underpinning of the Gold Coast’s paradise persona. Since Gold Coast females are supposed to embody both the constructed and

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natural beauty of the Gold Coast coastline, female characters of local literary fiction and memoir likewise sense their decorative role on the beach landscape. However, the role of female characters in female-authored texts is intrinsically different. In their stories, female characters are canny about, and reject, ancillary roles designed to appease male and tourist gazes.

A Man’s World In addition to consistent representations of women as sexually alluring props on the Gold Coast beach landscape, the city itself is mythologised as next-to-Godliness —as a bridge to heaven. However, this interpretation of the Gold Coast as paradise is dependent on consumerist, postcolonial and ‘masculine’ ideals of what constitutes power and pleasure. Especially considering the ways in which women are sexualised and objectified in the beachscape, it seems that mainstream representations of the Gold Coast as a paradise are actually representations of an Anglo/Western, heterosexual male paradise, which is at least partially built upon women’s degradation to mere decoration and service provider. Matthew Condon perhaps best captures the masculine branding of paradise in his novel, A Night at the Pink Poodle (1995). The story follows Icarus, a prophetically named real estate agent and aspiring politician who social climbs the Gold Coast skyline. Icarus glorifies in the light that reflects back and forth off the skyscrapers and the ocean and, in doing so, highlights the Gold Coast as a mythical space sitting at once on the ocean and in the sky. The “electric glow” of both the beach and buildings—which sanctifies and naturalises human development of the beach as beautiful—allows Icarus to feel protected (Condon 1995, 79). Indeed, Icarus is not afraid of the buildings’ precarious positions at the foot of the beach, and thus neither does he fear rising sea levels, corrosive salt or the precariousness of capitalism. The character argues: They said I was crazy for buying my penthouse suite off the plan at Parthenon Palace … What worried my colleagues was its position, on a thin finger of sand between Main Beach and Surfers Paradise. ‘She’ll tumble down in the first king tide, Ick,’ they harped. ‘Mother Nature’ll take that sand clean out from under you’ … But I had spoken to the engineers. I knew how deep they were sinking their foundations. Way, way down into the earth. Concrete and steel, right to the molten core of the planet. It

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would stand forever, reaching up endlessly into the sun. I had found my place in the world’. (Condon 1995, 23)

Noteworthy here is how the city and the landscape are gendered as a female (with the exception of the ‘king tide’) while the landscape’s abilities to take down the man-made constructions are disregarded. The landscape is Mother Nature while the building is a to-be-tumbling ‘she’—a woman upholding the male protagonist’s place in paradise. Reading this as a gendered binary construction, the capitalist and postcolonial work of the engineers to reshape the beachscape is a conspicuously masculine business. The highrise building is a phallic symbol that not only visibly represents masculine and Anglo/Western dominance over the landscape, but more mythically endows Icarus’ venture with a beyond-earthly majesty. Barcan also conceives the skyscrapers along the Gold Coast coastline as ideologically complicated: It is easy (perhaps too easy) to gender those phallic pillars that strive to outgrow each other along the coastal strip – monuments to an ideology of progress imaged in both linear and vertical fashion, marching further and further along the coastline and higher and higher into the sky. (2013, 48)

Barcan’s vivid descriptions, and in particular the word “marching”, evoke a kind of militant imperial or postcolonial dominance of modern capitalism over the feminised natural landscape. Further, Condon’s and Barcan’s noting of how the height of these structures colonise the sky alludes to the totality of postcolonial and corporate dominance. Icarus even associates acquiring a penthouse and a view with possessing that view as his ‘kingdom’ (Condon 1995, 9). Although Griffin gives examples for how the Gold Coast’s buildings can be interpreted as feminine or as masculine symbols, he also reasons that the skyscraper’s “capturing of expansive views of the city and phallic form all appeal symbolically to the corporate male, reinforcing his status, pride and power while upholding patriarchy in general” (2003, 130). Thus, the gendered aspects of the city’s coastline can be rearranged, but the corporate reign of the skyscrapers consistently uphold a sense of male dominance in constructed paradise. There are undeniably mythic connotations attached to male—which, in the case of Gold Coast development, is also Anglo/Western, heteronormative and capitalistic—semiotic dominance on the Gold Coast. “Paradise” is a ubiquitous epithet, used as a synonym for the city as a

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whole and also as names for suburbs, including Surfers Paradise, Paradise Point and Paradise Island. In the context of other Gold Coast place names, however, “paradise” is used in its religious and mythic meanings. The suburb, Mermaid Waters as well as buildings, “Apollo, Neptune’s Court, Venus Plaza” (Condon 1995, 3) evoke Greek and Roman myths, thus evoking the gods (and God) and the pursuit of heaven on earth. Condon’s Icarus considers these buildings “works of art” and the Gold Coast’s equivalents of the “pyramids” of Egypt (3). The mythic fantasies that Icarus projects onto the coastline continually assert the idea that the Gold Coast is reaching towards heaven through both its physical spread—climbing vertically into the sky and along the ocean like an Odyssean explorer—and its place names and iconography that pin heaven onto earth. The repeated image of the sun on the Gold Coast, as Condon’s Icarus perceives, is also mythic. Suns are “featured on all the logos down at Surfers, on milk cartons, tanning bottles, real estate signs, letterheads, the sides of buses, the sails of boats, pamphlets, hotel uniforms, menus, hats, keyrings, beach towels, wristwatches and balloons” (2). This image of the sun, Icarus perceives, is “worshipped” and is the reason “why we were all on the coast – the sun” (2). Gold Coast buildings, advertising and tourist-centred souvenirs thus become altars on which to admire the Gold Coast as heaven and, at the same time, to admire capitalism as a religion. On the Gold Coast, one might touch the sun. In his study of Gold Coast luxury hotel, Palazzo Versace, Griffin argues that the celebrity and decadence that the high-fashion hotel offers “bridg[es] the gap between the unattainable world of haute couture and the lives and pockets of the consuming masses” (2004, 81). Symbolically, therefore, the hotels and skyscrapers, which have also been criticised for overdeveloping and smothering the natural beauty of the Gold Coast landscape, function as a bridge between everyday life and commodified heaven. This representation of the Gold Coast as a bridge to heaven is compatible with its reputation as a liminal space and fantastical representations of locals’ everyday life as a perpetual holiday (Palmer 2018). Women, as metonyms for the landscape, thus also represent man’s pursuit of heaven. The idealised female figure is recognisable, graspable, just as the image of the sun becomes everyday through marketing materials. Consequently, women are criticised as denying the city heaven when she falls short of seraphic womanhood. These standards are complicated since

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her appearance must be at once angelic, virginal, subservient and sexualised. Nonetheless, when women fall short of the paradisal expectations, they are (like the city) criticised in the media. In Condon’s journalism, he indignantly describes that in Surfers Paradise, “Girls in short skirts and stilettos placate and coo over their warriors” (2008, para 7). Meanwhile, Alyssa Braithwaite interviews television actor, Frankie J. Holden who is scandalised with how a woman dressed for her receptionist job in a strip club could walk to work “in the midst of the sunshine and the sun tans” (2008, para 5). Condon and Holden seem to see female sexual subservience as incompatible with the ‘holy’ sun of the beach, yet simultaneously naturalise bodywork and male dominance as part of the landscape. With these contradictions in mind, there is still a heavy onus on women to maintain a specific, masculine version of paradise. There is little space in mainstream media that explores belonging, the everyday and paradise, on the Gold Coast from a female perspective. Women of the Gold Coast appear predominantly in relation to men or the male and tourist gaze: as postcards, bathing beauties, sex workers, entertainers and service workers or as victims of domestic violence. From 2014 to 2016, the Gold Coast saw a 14-fold increase in domestic violence cases (Moore 2017), most of this directed against women and girls. While the Gold Coast is often labelled inaccurately as the “crime capital” of Australia (ABC News 2017) for its homicide rates, the gendered aspects of violence on the Gold Coast remain underexplored in national news media and reporting. Booth muses that the beach is “a sanctuary at which to abandon cares—a place to let down one’s hair, remove one’s clothes— and of uninhibited social interaction; a paradise where one could laze in peace” (2001, 3–4). But what does paradise or sanctuary look like for women who are otherwise condemned to pose for someone else? Breen, Savage and Garner at least depict rebellion; their heroines are active agents on the landscape, embodying more than material worth.

Walking Out of Heaven While there are few female perspectives of the Gold Coast in mainstream media, some works of memoir and literary fiction by women writers set on the Gold Coast are suspiciously aware of the sexualisation and objectification inflicted on women in the interests of “paradise”. For women writers, the symbolic bikinis, highrise buildings and the beach do not entirely represent paradise or sanctuary: for their characters, safety and freedom are

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dependent on their agency as they navigate the beauties and dangers of the Gold Coast beachscape. The young female narrator of Helen Garner’s story collection, Postcards From Surfers , is a tourist on the Gold Coast and is bitterly amused as she rifles through postcards of “white beaches, duneless, palmless, on which half-naked people lie on their backs with their knees raised” (2010, 7). The postcards that she rifles through contain myths of paradise assigned to the Gold Coast, since the “mythic significance” of the beach is “linked to the natural beauty of the location – they type idealised on postcards and in tourist campaigns” (Ellison and Hawkes 2016, 3). The beach is therefore an imagined space, the product of texts such as these. Garner’s protagonist finds that: Most of the cards have greetings from the Gold Coast or Broadbeach or Surfers Paradise embossed in gold in one corner: I search for pictures without words. Another card, in several slightly differing versions, shows a graceful, big-breasted young girl lying in a seductive pose against some rocks: she is wearing a bikini and her whole head is covered by one of those latex masks that are sold in trick shops, the ones you pull on as a bandit pulls on a stocking. The mask represents the hideous, raddled, grinning face of an old woman, a witch … Is it simple or does it hide some more mysterious signs and symbols? (2010, 7–8)

While some of the postcards depict the glamour of the Gold Coast through gold-coloured place names, the images featuring women do not need place names to represent beauty and paradise. The image of the bathing beauty, the narrator finds, is synonymous for the Gold Coast itself and so stands alone as a representation. The postcard that captures the narrator’s attention, though, is more complicated in its depiction of female sexuality on the beach. The woman or “girl” in the postcard is young, “big-breasted” and bikinied and so personifies the ideal ‘beach babe’. Disturbingly, the mask of a witch that the woman is wearing draws even more attention to how this idealised beauty is faceless: her body holds all the symbolic value while her face, or mind, is comparatively meaningless. The frightening mask renders the image of the half-naked body uncanny and uncomfortable, as the voyeurism otherwise facilitated by the postcard is disrupted with this unexpected insertion of horror imagery into an otherwise sexually suggestive picture. Perhaps the mask is an ironic inversion and criticism of what lies beneath

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the Anglo/Western construction of beauty on the beach? The mask takes the less-angelic criminal underbelly and violent history of the Gold Coast and interposes these sometimes-mundane, sometimes-horrific realities visible onto the paradisal, constructed female form. Alternatively, the mask could be exaggerating the overdeveloped spectacle of the Gold Coast, which painted women are criticised for embodying. Both interpretations of the mask satirise the image of the bathing beauty and the Gold Coast for which she is a metonym. Especially noting witches’ association with female transgression, power and persecution, the image of the witch draws on the myth of the fallen, yet empowered, woman as a way to destabilise the simplicity of the half-naked female body under the male gaze. In her memoir The Casuals, Sally Breen is more explicitly critical of the paradisal representation of the Gold Coast at the expense of female agency. After moving to the Gold Coast, she describes her recognition of the mythological aura of living in a highrise apartment saturated with sea and sky, remarking that “All that blue feels like heaven” (2011, 307). High in the highrise building, the narrator Sally “spend[s] the day floating, in limbo – in paradise somewhere between the reality of the ground and the magic of the sky” (307). Thus, Sally embraces the liminality of the Gold Coast, but at the same time is wary of the gendered negotiations of this paradisal experience. At once wry and reflective, the narrator ponders, “shacking up with an interior decorator in a highrise is as close as I’m gonna get to god on the Gold Coast” (308). This analysis of her proximity to god suggests that the skyscrapers offer an access to heaven that is beyond that of everyday life on the ground, while she also condemns the earth as ungodly. Noteworthy too is that her male roommate is an interior designer: the space has been designed by, and is thus controlled by, him and so exists for him and his pleasure. Sally’s existence in the space is thus rendered suspect; she is another pretty thing in paradise. Proximity to this version of paradise, his version of paradise, she realises, is dependent on her possibly romantic relationship with a man, and—as a result—her “floating” is revealed as a passive, unfulfilling experiment. Her roommate’s cat, Missy, with its undeniably gender-specific name, further symbolises Sally’s divorce from everyday life while populating the sky. The roommate tells her how “Missy’s feet have never touched the ground … We’re all just creatures of the sky up here”, and—hearing this—Sally “shiver[s] because it’s true” (309). Realising what a poor fit serving as a beautiful decoration in heaven is for her, she packs up her things, narrating:

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The idea of Eve walking out of heaven makes me happy. I hit the button to exit, stronger now, and willing to concede that perhaps paradise wasn’t a lie. Maybe it was just a damn good story. (310)

Evoking Eve, who is mythologised as the first fallen woman, Sally’s journey down the lift to the ground reimagines a woman’s eviction from paradise as a refusal of a masculine heaven rather than as an inability to reach idealised femininity. The “damn good story” of paradise is, as she suggests, not entirely untrue: paradise does indeed exist on the Gold Coast for (white, heterosexual, middle-class) men, but this invention of paradise is one that is not equally shared and one which degrades women to a purely decorative status. Indeed, as Condon’s Icarus searches for God in a highrise penthouse, he finds instead, “a naked woman holding up a light globe” (1995, 235): Icarus finds a literal sexy lamp in lieu of grace or humanity. The fallen woman figure is also invoked ironically in The House Tibet . Savage’s novel follows thirteen-year-old Vicky who, after being raped by her father but not receiving any support from her family, runs away from her home in Victoria to the Gold Coast with her younger brother, James. The narrative is a response to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, a novel about a man who falls in love with a child, who later dies at seventeen in childbirth. As Savage herself explains, “I was appalled at the fate Nabokov had given [the girl called Lolita] … I wanted Lolita not only to survive but to make something creative out of the experience” (1990, 8). Vicky can be read as a fallen woman similar to Lolita: Lolita, in dying in childbirth, is punished for sexual activity and unjustly damned for the attention of a paedophile, while Vicky is raped by her father and abandoned by her closest female relatives, her mother and her aunt. However, in Savage’s novel, Vicky’s story does not end there: Vicky is laid low, but is not defeated, not only saving herself by running away and changing her name, but also saving and protecting her brother. The Gold Coast can thus be read as a place to escape, a site for transitions, although it is a combination of the Gold Coast environment and Vicky’s own agency that allows for these empowering transformations to take place. Vicky’s agency is present in all her descriptions of, and interactions with, the Gold Coast landscape. Her first impression of the city is similar to many others’; she spots a poster of “girls in bikinis” on the beach accompanying the caption, “Winter in Queensland – the Sunshine State”

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(1992, 36). Vicky does not, however, see herself in this picture. Rather, it is the warmth—emotional and environmental—that intrigues her: I’ll bet it’s Surfers Paradise … I could go there and no one would find me … Up there no one will know who I am and what I’ve done. I can get a job and find a little flat. Caroline Teasdale says it’s even warm enough to sleep on the beach. And later, when I’ve saved some money, I’ll get a dog, a big grey one like a wolf. Every night and morning we’ll walk by the sea. People will look at us and wonder who we are, but no one will come near us and no one will bother us. (36)

Immediately, Vicky associates the warmth of the landscape with an opportunity to be absolved of the abuse she has suffered. She imagines herself free on the Surfers Paradise beach, while the dog, ‘like a wolf’, suggests the myth of the wild woman, who roams free and strong. The femininity of the wild woman, as Clarissa Pinkola Estes (1992) describes, is associated with natural beauty and strength, which counters the idealised femininity of the beach babe and the disgrace of the fallen woman. Meanwhile, the timing of Vicky’s changing of her and her brother’s names from Vicky and James to Morgan and Max once they are on the Gold Coast beach further depicts the seaside as a place for transformations. Her brother is described as being tossed roughly about in the surf before the sea “deposit[ed him] like a gift or something at [her] feet” (Savage 1992, 61). She nurtures him “while he cough[s] up half the South Pacific” (61). Instead of feeling discouraged from swimming and encouraged to stay on the shore, her brother later re-enters the water more safely, both children having learned their lesson. In this, the ocean is personified as a merciful, tempestuous force quite separate from Vicky and her brother but nonetheless in dialogue with them. On the shore, Vicky is present for her brother’s sake, but never is she framed within the male gaze: her maternal instincts manifest maturity and agency instead of servicing others’ sexual gratification. Their name changes after having emerged from the ocean suggest a cleansed rebirth, while Vicky’s demonstration of agency alongside the power of the ocean further positions her to be an agent as active as the landscape—not just a decorative metonym for the landscape. As well as a place for transitions, The House Tibet represents the beaches and connecting waterways of the Gold Coast as places specifically for women to escape men. As mentioned, Vicky moves from her home

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and her home state to leave her father and memories of abuse behind and in renaming herself on the Gold Coast experiences a rebirth or an erasure of her self, Vicky—as well as an erasure of an old place, Vic/toria—and a renewal of another. Vicky philosophises this transformative relationship with the ocean through emotional language and her initial contemplation of suicide by drowning. Before settling on the Gold Coast as her place of escape, Vicky laments, “I had nowhere to go and no one to go to … the best I could hope for was to find some place where I could kill myself” (Savage 1992, 35). Although this imagining is soon replaced with visions of living freely on the beach, the image of drowning stays with her, suggesting, perhaps, that the escape from the past she wants can only be imagined through death, but that death is not her only way to transform. She imagines, “swimming out into the rippley water and sinking under until nothing but my hair was left to float and then in a little while that would be gone too” (84). As her hair moves with the water and slowly seems to dissolve rather than sink, Vicky instead imagines her female immersion with the landscape, wherein her body and the beach become enmeshed. This sensual oneness with the ocean supports her Romantic (Victorian) conceptualisation of the beach as a space for healing; Vicky wants to be “in that water, to be tossed around by it and sort of cleaned” (61, original emphasis). The death drive in The Casuals, in contrast to that in The House Tibet , is less an escape from one man in particular but from the masculine dreariness of paradise as a whole. Sally shares that, while living in the highrise, she gazes “out at the perfect blue or endless black of the sea, and wish[es] for a tsunami”, and “surmise[s] that Eve probably felt a similar longing for catastrophe” (Breen 2011, 308). In this passage, a tidal wave destroying the entire Gold Coast represents the idea of the ocean as cleansing, but washing over the whole city. The constructed nature of the beach often hinders a beach’s ability to regenerate itself after storms, as is the case with some housing estates and other privatised constructs, as well as with some breakwaters and the removal of sand dunes for public access. Caroline Ford (2014) notes that this modernity essentially causes a beach’s collapse from natural paradise into a degraded estate, at which point the beach’s collapse also threatens the urban structures built along the shore. Indeed, the ocean is imagined as a last resort to cleanse the earth of its sins in many beach texts, which ultimately hark back to the biblical flood. In imagining the wild ocean destroying the city, Sally proposes that the city is its own fallible sin just as she cannot be contained to

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the role of prop. Consequently, the passage reframes the Gold Coast as paradise to the Gold Coast as Sodom—a city God destroys for the sins of its population. Most importantly, however, these characters’ imagining of the Gold Cost as a space for female escape and cleansing draws attention to the Gold Coast’s status as an imagined place, one that is not stuck to, or in, any one perspective. Through female perspectives, the Gold Coast beachspace remains a space for transitions and freedom, while the ocean and mythologisation of the coastline are attached to male power—be that power in the male and tourist gaze or colonial violence over the earth and female body. This theme of women using the ocean to escape men occurs again in The House Tibet when Marcelle, another homeless girl, tells Vicky of her friend Allie’s experience of attempted rape when a group of male bikies had threatened her. Marcelle narrates how Alice: was standing over there by the river so she backed slowly down the bank and as soon as she felt the water on her feet, she turned and thrashed out into it, clothes and all. When she was a far way out she invited them to come and get her before the sharks did. (Savage 1992, 76)

In this scene, Allie risks death by shark attack or drowning instead of relenting to the violence of the men and, although the relationships of power are not binary, Allie finds agency in being able to stand still in the dangerous water. Again, the notion of paradise on the Gold Coast beach, and the river as a connecting waterway, is tied to male dominance and violence. While the shore itself does not offer safety, the water provides an insecure sanctuary from the men, with the risk of death in the water favourable to life on the land in the presence of men.

Conclusion Dominant representations of the Gold Coast in property development and city planning media, as well as advertising, journalism and tourist promotions mythologise the city as largely a glamorous, although sometimes a degraded, paradise. The Gold Coast, through the male and tourist gazes, becomes a mythic site that is adjacent to reality, an anachronism sitting at once on the ocean and in the sky. This heavenly aura of the Gold Coast is consistently attached to the sexualisation and objectification of

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young women as ‘beach babes’. In this way, the city is feminised as a idealised or fallen woman and thus represented as either befit (or not) for a heterosexual, Anglo/Western male and tourist gaze. The female narrators of The Casuals and The House Tibet are aware of how women on the Gold Coast beach form part of the spectacle of paradise, but reject the role of bathing beauty and their place in this masculine construction of paradise. However, the narrators still see the Gold Coast beach as a liminal space of transition and possible freedom, although the ocean is not a view under their dominion, but the churning lifeblood of the earth, where women weigh their lives on shore against the possibility of escaping from men and their dreary corporate lives into watery death/rebirth. These female-authored narratives of being female on the Gold Coast destabilise the myth of their supposedly subservient beauty and so invert the paradise narrative: for women, their bodies are not features of paradise but a way to become entrapped in a man’s world. For Garner’s, Savage’s and Breen’s protagonists, however, the idyllic landscapes offer opportunities for transformation and growth on their own terms. Disrupting the heavenly aura of the Gold Coast with female points of view firstly reveals how pervasively women’s bodies are commodified as place-making and elucidates that ideas of “paradise” are not equally shared. Instead of perpetuating simplistic narratives of beautiful women on the beautiful beach, female-written Gold Coast narratives invert the image of the fallen woman from one who is unjustly punished to an Eve who is wild and empowered. At the same time as transgressively reimagining the ‘beach babe’, these female perspectives offer a vision of the coastline that is active and dangerous while also vulnerable. Nonetheless, Gold Coast beaches are places for active female characters to transform and control their everyday lives.

References ABC News. 2017. Reports manipulated to mask rising Queensland crime rates, police sources allege. ABC News, 30 January. http://www.abc.net.au/news/ 2017-01-30/allegations-gold-coast-police-crime-managers-manipulatingstats/8217550. Accessed 31 January 2019. Barcan, R. 1995. Natural histories: Nature, history, and ‘regional consciousness’ on the Gold Coast. In Proceedings of the seventeenth annual conference of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, Adelaide, 1995, ed. C.

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Guerin, P. Butterss, and A. Nettelbeck, 46–51. https://openjournals.library. sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/issue/view/780. Accessed 31 January 2019. Booth, D. 2001. Australian beach cultures: The history of sun, sand, and surf. New York: Routledge. Booth, D. 2009. Nudes in the sand and perverts in the dunes. Journal of Australian Studies 21 (53): 170–182. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 14443059709387326. Boyd, R. 2010. The Australian ugliness. Melbourne: Text. Braithwaite, A. 2008. Channel Nine drama The Strip—new Underbelly on Gold Coast. The Daily Telegraph, 1 September. http://www.dailytelegraph. com.au/entertainment/channel-nine-drama-the-strip-new-underbelly-ongold-coast/news-story/0f9d804b8be6880b176fb80917be5927. Accessed 31 January 2019. Braun, V., G. Tricklebank, and V. Clarke. 2013. It shouldn’t stick out from your bikini at the beach: Meaning, gender, and the hairy/hairless body. Psychology of Women Quarterly 37 (4): 478–493. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0361684313492950. Breen, S. 2011. The casuals. Sydney: Fourth Estate. Breen, S. 2018. The Gold Coast: The sun-drenched sin city that wants to shine. The Guardian, 11 April. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/apr/ 11/the-gold-coast-sun-drenched-sin-city-that-wants-to-shine. Accessed 31 January 2019. City of Gold Coast. 2017. Economic development. http://www.goldcoast. qld.gov.au/business/economic-development-288.html. Accessed 31 January 2019. Condon, M. 1995. A night at the Pink Poodle. Sydney: Random House. Condon, M. 2008. Gold Coast’s dark underbelly. The Courier Mail, 10 June. http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/gold-coastsdark-underbelly/news-story/3fd12f07f6588670c048721d8b48be8e?sv= c47644743139dc59fff4000019d4df8a. Accessed 31 January 2019. Dedekorkut, Aysin, and Caryl Jane Bosman. 2011. The unbearable lightness of being Gold Coast. Conference Proceeding. State of Australian Cities National Conference. Dredge, D. 2011. Tourism reform, policy and development in Queensland, 1989–2011. Queensland Review 18 (2): 152–174. Ellison, E. 2013. The Australian beachspace: Flagging the spaces of Australian beach texts. PhD thesis, Queensland University of Technology. Ellison, E. 2017. The gritty urban: The Australian beach as city periphery in cinema. In Filmurbia, ed. D. Forrest, G. Harper, and J. Rayner, 79–94. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Ellison, E., and L. Hawkes. 2016. Australian beachspace: The plurality of an iconic site. Borderlands E-Journal 15 (1): 1–18. http://www.borderlands. net.au/vol15no1_2016/ellisonhawkes_beachspace.pdf. Accessed 31 January 2019. Estes, C.P. 1992. Women who run with the wolves. London: Rider. Ford, C. 2014. Sydney beaches: A history. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Garner, H. 2010. Postcards from surfers. Hawthorn, Australian: Penguin. Gold Coast Town Council. 2016. Queensland government. http://www. archivessearch.qld.gov.au/Search/AgencyDetails.aspx?AgencyId=10379. Griffin, G. 1998. The good, the bad and the peculiar: Cultures and policies of urban planning and development on the Gold Coast. Urban Policy and Research 16 (4): 285–292. https://doi.org/10.1080/08111149808727776. Griffin, G. 2003. Beyond the beach and into the blue: Gold Coast high-rises and the oceanic gaze. Cultural Studies Review 9 (1): 124–138. Griffin, G. 2004. ‘The man has gone—The dream lives on’: The Palazzo Versace and the re-branding of the Gold Coast. Queensland Review 11 (2): 75–88. Jones, M. 1986. A sunny place for shady people: The real Gold Coast story. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Khamis, S. 2010. Braving the Burqini™ : Re-branding the Australian beach. Cultural Geographies 17 (3): 379–390. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1474474010368608. Moore, T. 2017. Gold Coast domestic violence: ‘The floodgates are open’. Brisbane Times, 31 January. https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/ national/queensland/gold-coast-domestic-violence-the-floodgates-are-open20170131-gu2l55.html. Accessed 31 January 2019. Mulvey, L. 1975. Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen 16 (3): 6–18. Palmer, K. 2018. Sun, surf, sex, and the everyday: Subverting the tourist gaze with Gold Coast narrative fiction. In The Routledge handbook of popular culture and tourism, ed. C. Lundberg and V. Ziakas, 183–194. London: Routledge. Population Australia. 2018. Gold Coast population 2018. http://www. population.net.au/gold-coast-population. Accessed 31 January 2019. Savage, G. 1990. Lolita strikes back. Island Winter 1990 (43/44): 7–9. Savage, G. 1992. The house Tibet. Vitoria: Penguin. Stimson, R.J., and J. Minnery. 1998. Why people move to the ‘sun-belt’: A case study of long-distance migration to the Gold Coast. Australia. Urban Studies 35 (2): 193–214. Surfers Paradise Alliance. 2017. Surfers Paradise: Gold Coast. http://www. surfersparadise.com/things-to-do/attractions/surfers-paradise-the-6ththeme-park. Urry, J. 2005. The tourist gaze, 2nd ed. London: Sage.

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Winchester, H.P.M., and K. Everett. 2000. Schoolies week as a rite of passage: A study of celebration and control. In Embodied geographies: Spaces, bodies and rites of passage, ed. E.K. Teather, 59–76. London: Routledge. Wise, P. 2006. Australia’s Gold Coast: A city producing itself. In Urban space and cityscapes perspectives from modern and contemporary culture, ed. C. Linder, 177–191. London: Routledge.

Reading the Beach as Text

Walking the Australian Beach: Mapping Footprints in the Sand Lesley Hawkes

Introduction Walking and Australian beaches go hand in hand. At any time of the day throughout the year, there will be people walking along the shorelines of Australian beaches. This chapter draws on recent research on the beach and on walking to explore what this popular activity can reveal about concepts of space and belonging. While there has been much research on walking, especially city walking (de Certeau 1984; Wunderlich 2008; Vergunst 2010; Brown and Shortell 2015), and detailed research on the beach as an historical site (Brewster 2003; Ford 2014), there has been little research on beach walking (Game and Metcalfe 2011). Elizabeth Ellison defines the beach as “the coastline of a continent where the land meets the sea. It must be a landscape with sand (of variable quality), and the ability to walk directly into the water” (2010, 2). A walk along the beach is a walk along the sand that is directly adjacent to—and, therefore, connects to—the ocean. In Australia, these walks, because of the length of most Australian beaches, are long and horizontal. Using the lenses of spatial, ethnographic and cultural studies, this chapter examines what it is

L. Hawkes (B) Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Ellison and D. L. Brien (eds.), Writing the Australian Beach, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35264-6_10

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about a beach walk that makes it different from other forms of walking and why this form of activity appeals to so many people.

Walking Practices This chapter uses Filipa Wunderlich’s (2008) frame of walking practice to investigate and analyse beach walking in Australia and how it functions differently from other key practices of walking in the country. Wunderlich’s three different types of current and representative walking practices are: purposive walking, discursive walking and conceptual walking. Purposive walking is a necessary activity performed while aiming for a destination. It is a walking task: walking to or towards. This is the type of walking carried out to get to work or an appointment; through the city; or, in relation to bushwalking, to get to the top of a hill, to the end of the trail and so forth. It is also the type of walking that is most associated with technology (Wunderlich 2008). During a purposive walk, the walker may talk on the phone, listen to music or podcasts, or follow their digital navigation system. No, or few, stops are made on this walk. This style of walking is the most popular type of walking in the city. Eric Jaffe, drawing on work by Richard Florida, suggests that a city’s economic viability effects the speed of walking (Jaffe 2012). He uses Florida’s term of “urban metabolism” to explain why people in cities walk at a faster pace. He finds that the more economically successful a city is, the faster walkers will walk through it. A purposive walking style is the type of walk that is least likely to be carried out on the beach as there is seldom an unnegotiable destination point in mind when taking a walk along the shoreline. Discursive walking, in comparison, is a spontaneous way of walking characterised by varying pace and rhythm. In this mode, there is more awareness of the external environment and the walker is not necessarily walking to, or towards, anywhere in particular. There is no set destination or goal. Rather, the walker is just walking. This is the type of walking that is most often carried out on the beach. Walking may be a form of mapping, but walking on the beach is a temporal and shared experience. Each visit will require a new map being imagined. An example of discursive walking in action is the way walkers will engage in merging with different landscapes while walking in a beach landscape, such as walking into the edge of the ocean as they step. They are not swimmers, but placing their feet into the water indicates this walk is different from other walks where one may go out of their way to avoid a puddle of water. The walker is crossing two spaces, water and sand, but not giving over completely to one.

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Conceptual walking is a reflective mode of walking: the walk is planned beforehand and it is the actual choreographed walk that is important. This type of walk can be characterised as following in the footsteps of a famous or favourite writer (Coleridge Way Walk, e.g., or the James Joyce Dublin Walk) or taking a guided tour of a city to look at specific works of art or historical sites. This type of walk is interesting to consider in relation to the beach as the beach walk is seldom planned ahead and yet the holiday is usually organised in advance, and the walk may have been reflected upon many times before it is carried out. Holiday beach walks can also be repetitive—day to day but also year to year as many families in Australia return to similar locations annually on their holidays (White 2005). On a beach walk, there is also the constant reminder—in terms of the footprints in the sand—that the walker is following in the footsteps of others. In this case, however, the footsteps are actual physical footsteps, not the imagined footsteps of famous authors or adventurers. Beach footsteps belong to other unknown walkers. These walkers are most usually people, but also dogs and birds may leave their footprints in the sand. Using this frame of walking practices, this chapter examines walking as a model of transportation and how this differs from city and bushwalking. It then establishes one of the first major overviews of beach walking as practice.

Walking as Transportation Walking, as noted above, can be taken in a purposive mode that allows a walker to move from one place to another. Walking as a mode of transportation that is destination focussed allows digressions and possibilities that other modes of transport do not. Trains and trams move along carefully designed tracks, cars and buses along roads, and airplanes have very strict routes to follow. Bicycles also allow for digressions, but they too are limited by physical capability and (formal and informal) cycling tracks. This is not to say that walking also does not have limitations, some physical and some cultural with Rebecca Solnit suggesting that walking can be invested with “wildly different cultural meanings” (3). In her book Wanderlust (2001), Solnit explores the history behind walking habits and finds that one of the major restrictions on walking has been gender. A walker’s gender has had a significant impact on the places and times that people choose to, or are able to, walk. She writes: “Women have routinely been punished and intimidated for attempting

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that most simple of freedoms, taking a walk, because their walking and indeed their very beings have been always seen as sexual” (233). She gives the example of the word ‘street walker’ and how, for women, this has become imbued with negative sexual connotations. The same negativity has not been placed on male walkers. She also found that race and class influenced where, when and how people walk. In the past, for instance, if people of a lower working class found themselves in a neighbourhood, they were not supposed to be in they could be punished and in some cases put in gaol. She gives the example of lower classes entering upperclass areas or people of different races going into ‘no go’ areas. Solnit’s book is one of the most comprehensive studies on the history of walking and on walking through different terrains, but it does not provide much detail on walking the beach. However, her book highlights the complex cultural networks and histories that surround walking.

Walking Through City and Bush Most research on walking has been undertaken in relation to walking in urban spaces and the city. One of the most well-known investigations into urban walking is Michel de Certeau’s influential essay ‘Walking in the city’ (1984). Drawing on Bachelard’s work, de Certeau writes about being a flâneur and walking through the urban city streets, self-planning and mapping individual tracks. He finds people of the city “walk – which is an elementary form of the experience of the city; they are walkers” (1984, 93). The essay sets out how New York City walkers become creative practitioners zigzagging through the city and mapping their individual experiences. The more people know the city, the more they will take short cuts and zigzag through it. Jo Vergunst, drawing on de Certeau’s work, finds “people walk into the street and out of it again, crossing it, weaving through it, and incorporating it into a larger journey” (2010, 380). They plot their own contoured map through the city streets. Wunderlich writes: “Walking is an ordinary activity in our everyday life in the city. As a necessary practice, walking is almost instinctively performed in urban space” (2008, 128). Walking is a spatial experience as it combines the activity of moving through space with the sensorial experience of that space. Wunderlich continues to write that walking “is most commonly referred to as a means of transportation, or a way of getting around. However, it is also an essential mode of experiencing urban space” (128). The walker gets to know and feel the space through which they walk. As they move through

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the urban space and begin a process of self-mapping, they develop a sense of belonging. De Certeau writes that city walkers are “practitioners” who “make use of spaces that cannot be seen” (1984, 93). The more such walkers walk through the streets, the more they gain a sense of identity and ownership. This practice of mapping is also in operation in bushwalking. The bush, according to the Oxford Australian National Dictionary, is “natural vegetation of any kind; a tract of land covered in such vegetation” (Moore 2016). When on a bushwalk, it is often impossible to see the final destination, and this is part of the experience of walking. There is an element of trust that the walk will end at a particular landmark: a lookout, the top of a mountain, a waterfall or a campsite. Even though the end point cannot be seen, the trail has been planned and the course designed. As Waitt et al. (2009) have found, in this regard the bushwalk is seen as safe because someone has designed the course or there may be a guide or some markers to follow. In this sense, the walk is pre-mapped and pre-known and part of the experience of bushwalking is the ability to follow a path or map (digital, paper or compass) and not get lost (Waitt et al. 2009). A 2008 survey relating to bushwalking and nature walking found that when people know the area they are walking, like urban walkers, they criss-cross the country and walk off the trails (Waitt et al. 2009). This is interesting to consider through Wunderlich’s walking practices framework: in some ways, this is still purposive walking with a destination in mind, yet it also has elements of conceptual walking—walking through pre-mediated routes planned and prepared by the walker in advance because of their knowledge of the area. Gordon Waitt, Nicholas Gill and Lesley Head found that people who walk the same country routes regularly make their own routes through “a network of criss-crossing paths” (2009, 41) and these paths can be conceptualised as a territorialising process. They also write that when visitors walk in the bush, especially in areas they regard as wilderness, the way they walk is informed by the colonial logic of terra nullius and wilderness values: “In other words, how most visitors walk through this place is informed by the assumption they have the right to go anywhere, ignoring the traditional owners” (50). This process also fits into how de Certeau finds people walk the city. Criss-crossing through the city, these urban walkers create their own lived conceptual maps. There is also an element of trust while city walking, as routes are followed along existing paths. These paths may be used in different ways,

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including to create individual shortcuts, but the more the city becomes known, the more self-mapping can occur (de Certeau 1984).

Beach Walking Very little research has actually been undertaken on how, where and why people walk along the beach. There are books on individuals going on walks to discover themselves in other locations (A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson [1998], Wild by Cheryl Strayed [2012]), or people going on a pilgrimage or other religious walks (I’m Off Then: Losing and Finding Myself on the Camino de Santigo by Hape Kerkeling [2009]), or retracing authors’ or artists’ steps (Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel by R. Jarvis [1997]). In relation to the beach, there are many books about the history of lifesavers (Brawley 2007; Jaggard 2006), swimmers (Seitchik-Readon and Clements 2018) and surfers (Jarratt 2017), but very little about the cultural history of beach walking. In many ways, walking has not registered as a cultural activity on beaches, even though it is one of the most popular activities carried out there. The simple process of walking on the beach has not been examined except in medical or health journals. A quick search will find many articles about how walking will improve patients’ recovery (Bull and Hardman 2018; Brooks 2016). The beach and walking have been discussed at length within the context of the current ‘wellness’ trends, with popular questions asked on Google in relation to the beach and walking including: How many calories do you burn on a beach walk? Is beach walking bad for your knees? Is the beach good for your feet? These questions all relate to walking and the health concerns of the walker but do not consider the wider cultural significance of beach walking. Walking and the beach have thus been connected in relation to health benefits but not in a cultural, topographical or social context. This lack of research into beach walking could be considered surprising, as Australia is a country known for its beaches. Andrew Short and Brad Farmer have counted 11,761 beaches in Australia (Short and Farmer 2012). Some part of a beach is accessible from all states of the country with the exception of the landlocked Australian Capital Territory, and all major capital cities and urban areas, except Alice Springs, have beaches within easy reach. The WalkMyWorld travel webpage explains: “If you were to visit an Australian beach per day, it would take you 27 years to see them all” (2018). 85% of Australians live within 50 kilometres of a

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coastline (Clark and Johnston 2016, iv), and many Australians also work and/or holiday at the beach. Australian beaches also attract 58% of all international tourists (Maguire et al. 2011, 781). Research reveals that, during these visits, beach walking is a popular activity with one survey by Ocean and Coast Management finding that, out of 350 people surveyed, the two major activities they participated in at the beach were walking and swimming (Maguire et al. 2011, 781). 91.4% of respondents indicated they walked, while 78.9% said they swam, making walking the most popular activity to occur on the beach in this report (2011, 781). These figures include both domestic and international visitors to the beach. It is possible to identify that beach walking does differ from other types of walking, and, in this investigation, I suggest that the key distinctions of beach walking are in terms of gender, timing, aesthetics and sense of ownership. Both women and men walk along the beach. Often, they walk together but they also walk alone. The point needs to be made, however, that they usually only walk from sunrise to sunset. There are very few people who walk along the beach once the sun goes down. As Elizabeth Ellison highlights in her article ‘Facing death on the Australian beach: examining fear and transcendence’ (2017), the beach is a very different space at night. Even though more Australian beaches are placing lighting along boardwalks (Mooloolaba, a beach on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, is one example), the beach can still be an isolated space at night. Australian beaches have lifeguards on duty only during the daylight hours patrolling and watching out for danger. For example, they are on duty on Surfers Paradise Beach (located on the Gold Coast, Queensland) from 7.30 a.m. to 6.30 p.m., and it is recommended that no swimming occurs outside of these patrolled times. Even though beaches can be quite different depending on their location as either urbanised or regional, Australia’s beaches feel strongly ‘natural’. This is an important part of the walking practice (Game and Metcalf 2011). One respondent from Ann Game’s survey on people who regularly visit Bondi Beach said that while walking, “he looked at the water a lot and watched the waves” (Game and Metcalf 2011, 48), but seldom turned the other way and watched the buildings. While this walker enjoyed the convenience of being so close to an urban space, he wanted to appreciate the natural aesthetics of the landscape while on the beach. Grahame Griffin’s work highlights how it was only from the midtwentieth century that sea views became the marker of a wealthy lifestyle, noting that in the “late fifties and into the sixties the sea view became a

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more sought after and valuable commodity” (2003, 4). Looking out at a sea view is aesthetically pleasing, but it is also embedded with financial value. Walking barefoot is also usually only done on the beach (McFarlane 2013), although Robert McFarlane in The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (2013) notes a revival of barefoot bushwalking. McFarlane makes the point that a reason for this resurgence is that the touch of skin on land brings to life “the tactile details of a landscape that often pass unnoticed. They are durably imprinted memories, these footnotes, born of the skin of the walker meeting the skin of the land” (2013, 159). The walker on the beach is aware of these imprinted memories. Mayer Hillman and Anne Whalley in their 1979 book, Walking is Transport, found “by far the greatest number of journeys by foot is made by children under the age of fifteen” (34). This is an interesting point to consider when thinking about beach walks. Perhaps, beach walking returns adult walkers to a different time—a time based on walking, memory and re-memorying (remembering memories of past times). Adults walking the beaches today may have walked the beaches as youngsters and these walks bring back memories.

Ownership and Public Beaches Australian beaches today are public spaces that cannot be privately owned, meaning that, in many cases, long, expansive walking can occur. Most Australians have a strong belief that nobody can ‘own’ a beach. There was a recent example where a family was asked to leave the beach in front of a Queensland resort. The family complained, and the resort later offered an apology because “all of the beaches in Australia are technically Crown land, meaning they’re for public use” (Wolfe 2018, 1). A walker is seldom cut off by fences or built barriers. Beaches in Australia are public up to the point where the high-tide watermark reaches its upper level (Wolfe 2018, 1). Resorts, hotels or houses do not, and cannot, own the beach and cannot close off the beach in front of their dwellings (Wolfe 2018, 1). This is very different from other parts of the world where it is impossible to walk along the beach without encountering ‘Do Not Enter’ signs. Beach walkers in Australia are not confronted with a sense of being excluded from any part of the beach. Walkers can embrace the walk with a sense of belonging but are fully aware they are not the owners of the territory. In many cases, the beach will be the longest stretch of land in

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Australia that people can walk on without confronting a sense of others’ ownership. Caroline Ford’s recent book Sydney Beaches: A History (2014) sets out the history of ownership of Sydney’s shorelines and finds that the public beaches taken for granted today have had a long history filled with tension and struggle. She provides a number of detailed examples of how the public fought to have the beaches of Sydney available to all rather than just for the very wealthy or big business. One of the examples she discusses is Tamarama Beach, near Bondi Beach. She explains that in the nineteenth century, this beach was not freely accessible: “A fence that locked out all but paying customers enclosed the grounds, including the Crown reserve that encompassed the beach” (Ford 2014, 18). Individuals and the local council argued strongly for public access to the beach. Ford notes that, in relation to the Council, there were economic factors at work as well: “Certainly there was a local expectation that the city’s beaches should remain free and open to all. But the council’s interest in its beaches extended from the altruistic to the economic” (19). Ford stresses how this aspect of the beach experience has changed but also reminds that “the beaches may have changed but our relationship to the ocean, the beaches and the coast is not so different” (2014, 10). Today, the only exception to non-ownership of a beach shoreline is if a mining company owns the mining rights to the beach. Amy Remeikis, writing for a local paper The Brisbane Times under the headline ‘Queensland law guarantees public right to seashore walks’ (2014), opened her piece with a comment that related to beach walkers: “Queensland, your long walks on the beach can continue unimpeded” (1). This article explored the rights that private landholders have over the beach and quoted Andrew Cripps, Natural Resources Minister of Queensland at this time, who stated that the government believed “all Queenslanders should have the right to access the beach” (1). In this, the Minister stressed that all Queenslanders have the right to walk along the beach. One of the outcomes of the Gold Coast’s Oceans Beach Strategy for the decade from 2013 to 2023 is to maintain “the long stretches of unadorned sandy beach” (2013). This brings its own problems as beach erosion is a major concern on beaches. Environmental issues such as climate change, unpredictable weather and the effects of structures being built too close to shorelines have meant sand is being lost at an alarming rate from some beaches (Clark and Johnston 2016), and there is a constant need to replace this loss. This means that, in many cases, the long shorelines that are walked upon by beach walkers are actually an

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illusion, manufactured by local councils and governments. These are not the natural landscapes of the shorelines, but constructions purpose-made for walkers and other users. As mentioned above, beach walkers recognise that other people have walked on the sand before them; there are often traces of these previous footprints for them to see. While walkers know the footprints they see and follow are recent, they also recognise that these visual markers have been occurring day after day, year after year, decade after decade and century after century. Walking on the beach is a present activity, but it is also a link to acknowledging Indigenous peoples who have mapped and known the space previously. This earlier mapping has not disappeared as the beach is still a space where this knowledge is enacted with every new footprint made. City walkers seldom think of the Indigenous peoples who may have walked the spaces before them (Porter 2013). In many ways, the landscapes of Australian beaches do not allow this zigzagging and meandering or assured self-mapping. There is both a sense of non-ownership of the space while, at the same time, a sense that all own the space at the beach: “This is not to suggest that the beach is a level playing field … but to imagine that response-ability and dialogue are available to us as nonIndigenous Australians” (Brewster 2003, 40). This means that the beach is one Australian space where walkers of the space are aware that they are not the owners of it. They are also aware that others have walked before them. In this way, the beach becomes a shared space. Grahame Griffin finds that the “last true wilderness is the sea” (2003, 128), but the sand that connects to the sea is harder to colonise. Walking the beach is different from walking the city or along bush tracks where the landscape may shift and change with every turn. The beach outlook may change with weather changes, and swimmers, surfers, dolphins and birds may appear but the walk, especially along many Australian beaches, remains a long, horizontal trail. People walk along the shoreline, following the space of the water meeting the sand. It is a crooked, horizontal walk where there is a strong awareness that others have walked the same space. There is a lack of absolute ownership of footprints on the sand. The footprints are evident, but it is not certain whose feet made them.

Specific Walking Styles: The Promenade It is possible to identify a specific style of walking on the beach that stands out as distinct from the beach walking discussed above. Strand walking and promenade walking have a relatively long cultural history

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(Booth 2001, 167) and appear to be regaining popularity. More and more beaches are reinstating strands and promenades back into Australian beach spaces (Cartlidge and Armitage 2014). Townsville in Northern Queensland, for example, has a strand which dates back to the 1860s, but this has recently been remodelled and is currently described by the Council as being “custom-built for enjoyment” (City of Townsville 2018, 1). In the nineteenth century, promenade walking became a social spectacle and people walked to be seen. This is an example of conceptual walking as the walk would be carefully orchestrated, and stops would be planned and mapped out. Walkers would stroll the promenade in their best clothes, and the purpose of the walk was principally for display (Booth 2001). The promenade became an area used for walking and was used to add economic value—or more specifically—capital value, to the beach. Shops and vendors were placed along the promenade in order to allow people to make purchases. While much beach walking, as noted above, is about the natural aesthetics of the ocean, the promenade walk is, by contrast, far more about the buildings, the activities they promote, and being seen by other people than any engagement with the natural world. There was a shift away from promenades in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s in Australia, but this infrastructure feature is today being included in more and more beach planning. There are a number of reasons for this resurgence: protecting the shoreline, providing shade and a space for commercial activities and more clearly defining the boundaries between the ocean and the land. Promenades were originally built as a way for businesses to profit from the beach experience, and this is one of the driving factors pushing their resurgence today. Walking on these new promenades may also cause traffic problems because many allow bicycles to share the paths. Nigel Cartlidge and Lynne Armitage write that walking becomes difficult if the walkers “are constantly on the alert for vehicles, often travelling much faster than walking speed” (2014, 18). It will be of interest to see if these built walkways will have an impact on the discursive walking style that is usually undertaken when beach walking.

Conclusion Despite its popularly, walking the beach is not an activity that can be taken for granted due to the complex relationships between walker and surroundings. There is still much research to be undertaken on the relationship between walking and the beach and what the process of beach

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walking can reveal about spatial belonging and understanding. Australia is a rich site for further research on this topic because of its mixture of urban and more secluded beaches. What has, however, been made clear through this examination of walking the beach is how complex the process of beach walking can be. There is not one mode of walking on the beach, there is not one essential beach on which to walk, and a beach walk is not one thing to all people. People walk for different reasons: health, relaxation, nostalgia, pleasure, escape, leisure, to experience the landscape and connect with—and make—memories. Just as de Certeau found that walkers in the city develop their own method for walking so, too, do walkers on beaches, and how different beaches require, or provoke, different personal maps for walking would be a point of interest in future studies. By using the lenses of spatial, ethnographic and cultural studies, this chapter has revealed that walking on the beach is a complicated blend of cultural and spatial experiences. Walkers read the beach as they walk along the shorelines. There may not be words along the sand, although sometimes there are, but there are markers of past visits and past mappings. These markers combine with the expectations and memories of the walkers to create personal maps of the landscape. These are not the zigzag maps that cross through urban landscapes; rather, they are about creating a sense of belonging that is not about ownership; it is a shared activity on a shared space. Finally, this chapter has revealed that walking the beach is far more than a simple physical activity, it is instead one rich in cultural meaning and personal significance.

References Booth, D. 2001. Australian beach cultures: The history of sun, sand and surf. London: Routledge. Brawley, S. 2007. Bondi lifesaver: A history of an Australian icon. Sydney: ABC Books. Brewster, A. 2003. The beach as ‘Dreaming Place’: Reconciliation, the past and the zone of intersubjectivity in Indigenous literature. New Literatures Review 40: 33–41. Brooks, D. 2016. Supervised walking training improves health-related quality of life and exercise endurance in people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Journal of Physiotherapy 62 (1): 50. Brown, E., and T. Shortell (eds.). 2015. Walking in cities: Quotidian mobility as urban theory, method and practice. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Bryson, B. 1998. A walk in the woods. New York: Broadway Books.

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Bull, F., and A. Hardman. 2018. Walking: A best buy for public and planetary health. British Journal of Sports Medicine 52 (755–756): 2019. https://doi. org/10.1136/bjsports-2017-098566. Cartlidge, N., and L. Armitage. 2014. The oceanway, promenade or smart transport route? PIA State Conference, Gold Coast, Plan, People, Place, Gold Coast, September. City of the Gold Coast. 2013. Ocean beach strategy: 2013–2023. Gold Coast City Council. City of Townsville. 2018. The beaches and the Strand. https://www.townsville. qld.gov.au/facilities-and-recreation/parks-beaches-and-community-venues/ the-strand-and-beaches. Accessed 20 June 2018. Clark, G.F., and E.L. Johnston. 2016. Australia: State of the environment 2016. Canberra: Australian Government, Department of the Environment and Energy. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. Walking in the city. In The practice of everyday life, trans. Steven Rendall, 91–111. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ellison, E. 2010. Flagging spaces: Exploring the myth of the Australian beach as an egalitarian space. Ignite10! Creative Industries Postgraduate Research Conference, 27–29 October, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, OLD. Ellison, E. 2017. Facing death on the Australian beach: Examining fear and transcendence. TEXT, Special Issue No. 45. http://www.textjournal.com.au/ speciss/issue45/Ellison.pdf. Accessed 31 January 2019. Ford, C. 2014. Sydney beaches: A history. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Game, A., and A. Metcalfe. 2011. My corner of the world: Bachelard and Bondi Beach. Emotion, Space and Society 4 (1): 42–50. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. emospa.2010.10.002. Griffin, G. 2003. Beyond the beach and into the blue: Gold Coast high-rises and the oceanic gaze. Cultural Studies Review 9 (1): 124–138. Hillman, M., and A. Whalley. 1979. Walking is transport. London: Policy Studies Institute. Jaffe, E. 2012. Why people in cities walk fast. https://www.citylab.com/life/ 2012/03/why-people-cities-walk-fast/1550. Accessed 1 October 2017. Jaggard, E. 2006. Between the flags: One hundred summers of Australian surf lifesaving. Sydney: UNSW Press. Jarratt, P. 2017. Surfing Australia: A complete history of surfboard riding in Australia. Richmond: Hardie Grant Books. Kerkeling, H. 2009. I’m off then: Losing and finding myself on the Camino de Santigo. New York: Free Press.

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Maguire, G., K. Miller, M. Weston, and K. Young. 2011. Being beside the seaside: Beach use and preferences among coastal residents of south-eastern Australia. Ocean and Coast Management 55: 781–788. McFarlane, R. 2013. The old ways: A journey on foot. London: Penguin. Moore, B. (ed.). 2016. Oxford Australian national dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Porter, L. 2013. Co-existence in cities: The challenge of Indigenous urban planning in the 21st century. In Reclaiming Indigenous Planning, ed. R. Walker, T. Jojolat, and D. Natcher, 283–310. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. Remeikis, A. 2014. Queensland law guarantees public right to sea shore walks. The Brisbane Times, 29 August. https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/ national/queensland/queensland-law-guarantees-public-right-to-sea-shorewalks-20140829-10a8e5.html. Accessed 1 June 2018. Seitchik-Readon, D., and C. Clements. 2018. Places we travel. Richmond: Hardie Grant Travel. Short, A., and B. Farmer. 2012. 101 Best Australian beaches. Sydney: New South Books. Solnit, R. 2001. Wanderlust: A history of walking. London: Verso. Strayed, C. 2012. Wild: From lost to found on the Pacific Crest Trail. New York: Knopf. Vergunst, J. 2010. Rhythms of walking: History and presence in a city street. Space and Culture 13 (4): 376–388. Waitt, G., N. Gill, and L. Head. 2009. Walking practice and suburban naturetalk. Social and Cultural Geography 10 (1): 41–60. WalkMyWorld. 2018. https://www.walkmyworld.com.au. Accessed 5 December 2018. White, R. 2005. On holidays: A history of getting away in Australia. North Melbourne: Pluto Press. Wolfe, N. 2018. Beach access rights: Is anyone allowed to actually own the beach. News.com.au, 5 May. https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-advice/ travellers-stories/beach-access-rights-is-anyone-allowed-to-actually-ownthe-beach/news-story/5f5378a43851170893dedc7eee8150c3. Accessed 6 December 2018. Wunderlich, F.M. 2008. Walking and rhythmicity: Sensing urban space. Journal of Urban Design 13 (1): 125–139.

Australian Beach Soccer: Tracing Paradoxical Narratives Lee McGowan, Elizabeth Ellison and Michele Lastella

Introduction In Australian culture, the beach is seen to offer ‘a way of life’ and a sense of belonging (Bonner et al. 2001). It also plays figurative and literal roles in generating myths of egalitarianism (Booth 2001), despite their refutation (Ellison 2014). The beach shapes the physical periphery, the existential centre, and has closely informed ideas around national identity (Turner 1993). Its sand-based sporting culture provides the background for a high number of activities, from amateur through to professional levels that, through their own inherent characteristics of competition, security, social participation and marginalisation, illustrate the nation’s complex, dichotomous relationship with its coastline. While the beach ably

L. McGowan (B) University of the Sunshine Coast, Sippy Downs, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] E. Ellison Creative Industries, Central Queensland University, Noosaville, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] M. Lastella Appleton Institute for Behavoural Science, Central Queensland University, Adelaide, SA, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Ellison and D. L. Brien (eds.), Writing the Australian Beach, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35264-6_11

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supports sports aimed at individual exceptionalism such as swimming, surfing, Ironman (a distinctly Australian competition consisting of running, swimming, surf-skiing and paddle boarding) and triathlons (swimming, cycling and running), it appears to provide an unstable foundation for professional team sports. One such example is beach cricket. Amid the annual furore of the Australian summer’s formal international season, beach cricket is a staple recreational activity. Yet competitive beach cricket’s lifespan was brief. The Beach Cricket Tri-Nations Series, sponsored by the Australian beer brand XXXX (pronounced ‘four ex’), was launched in 2006 to coincide with and capitalise on the 2006–2007 Ashes Test. The gimmick competition came to a short-lived and ill-fated end in 2008 (Crikey 2007). This chapter examines another example where the notion of professional competition undermines the pitch for the egalitarian level playing field, and draws a hard, sandy line between the beach as workplace and site for leisure (see also chapter “Food Writing and the Australian Beach: From Leisure to Labour”). It is concerned with an anomaly in both Australian beach and Australian sporting culture: the birth, difficult life and near death of Australian beach football. Football—or as it is known in Australia, soccer—is the world’s most popular sport (Goldblatt 2007; Stølen et al. 2005). It is, and can be, played in almost any context, irrespective of the physical environment. Its basic rules and requirements—a ball-shaped object and space to play— enable ease of, and expansive, participation. Players and/or teams simply aim to score more goals than their opponent. A common romantic myth associated with football is the game’s seeming negation of advantage. The playing field is figuratively and literally level. Beach soccer, or football played on sand, has existed for almost a century (McGowan et al. 2019). Having only recently being taken up outside of its native Brazilian home, it has garnered significant levels of participation and enough media attention to be formally ‘auspiced’ and regulated by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), world football’s governing body. Beach soccer follows similar principles to its turf-based parent, except that it is played on sand. The sandy playing surface dramatically affects ball movement and passing play. Participation, however, requires departure from the general physical approaches to football on grass and this makes it an exception among the code’s variations. While beach football grows in popularity in California, Southern Europe, South East Asia and other sites where beach culture is prevalent, Australia offers a stark contrast. Despite a pervasive beach culture, an emphatic

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emphasis on sporting culture and a keen embrace of sporting mythologies, beach soccer is largely absent from Australian shores, and not for a lack of effort. Beach soccer has undergone little academic scrutiny. Research tends to relate to the health and fitness aspects (see Shimakawa et al. 2016; Rosario et al. 2015; Marquez et al. 2016a) and in planning for the medical care of tournament participants (Marquez et al. 2016b). Otherwise, the game, including the cultural aspects of its play, and particularly in an Australian context, remains relatively unexplored. While limited by its scope and scale in its efforts to culturally locate the sport in the Australian context, this chapter will examine the sport’s development and contemporary state of play. It will contextualise football played on sand, and its rapid growth outside of Australia. It considers the Australian version and seeks to understand why it has not realised, and or maintained, a much greater presence on the beaches of a self-proclaimed sporting nation’s contemporary landscape. To do so, it briefly characterises the tensions and divergences in the academic discussions that reside within sports and cultural research on the Australian beach.

The Complexity of the Australian Beach Identified by a potent combination of cultural markers—the sun, the sand and the sea—the Australian beach appears to negate class distinction, encourage social participation (Booth 2001) and, where it is most commonly associated with leisure, be integral to Australian culture (Bonner et al. 2001). Representing physical and figurative limits, it is seen as the transitionary space between oceans and landmass and a barrier to intrusion (Ellison 2016). As such, it underlines a great wealth of tensions and divergences that are often incongruous to its traditional positioning as a cornerstone of a spirited national identity (Fiske et al. 1987). As a landscape, the Australian beach has a fraught history and an equally entangled present (Ellison 2016). A source of participative enjoyment for holidays and relaxation (White 2005), it is also a venue for sport (Owen 2002) and, therefore, significant and fierce competition. With maintenance and care provided by lifeguards, local councils, state government and tourism boards, it is viewed domestically as being safe, open and accessible. At the same time, its security is enforced by border patrols funded by federal agencies. The beach is commonly thought of as a site of community congregation and celebration, for festivals, barbecues

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and fireworks. But it can also be seen as a site of violence—both historic and contemporary—from the predominantly white European invaders of the past to the 2005 Cronulla race riots (Taylor 2006) and the ongoing demonisation of refugees arriving by boat (Doherty 2017). The beach also blurs boundaries between regional and urban landscapes. Unlike the mythologised outback, it is physically familiar and recognisable to a majority of Australians. Almost 90% of the population live in coastal regions, along the eastern coast of the continent (Ellison 2016). Most Australian cities are situated near or on the coast, and many of the country’s major beaches are associated with the socio-economic suburbs they are closest to (Ellison 2013; Huntsman 2001). For instance, Bondi Beach in Sydney is an outer suburb of the major metropolis and, thus, is familiar and accessible to visitors—even if the suburb has high living costs. Often presented, through marketing imagery and academic theory, as an isolatable concept or a single site of cultural significance, Australian beaches are rich and diverse (Osbaldiston 2018); the beaches of the tropical climes of northern Queensland are very different to those of the substantially cooler southern Victorian shores. The figurative and physical differences are clearly apparent in a comparison between the gaudy colour of tourist attractions and large-scale accommodations of Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast, and the relatively inaccessible quiet of leafy camping grounds in picturesque coastal towns on the northern coast of New South Wales, such as Pottsville less than 60 kilometres away. While reports of international surfing success seem to be as frequent as reports of shark attacks (between September and November 2018, there were four shark-related incidents, including one fatality, in Queensland alone [SBS News 2018]), the Australian coastline highlights a fascinating relationship between beach and sport. While pollution, jet-ski incidents, paragliding injuries, drowning and fishing fatalities regularly draw the attention of local media, the Australian beach has a strong history of high acclaim in execution of iconic national and international sporting competitions. For example, the most recent 2018 Commonwealth Games, hosted by Queensland’s Gold Coast, saw the unprecedented, successful integration of para-athletic competition within the tournament. Home nation athletes achieved a high level of success, and the tournament attracted significant international audiences, while the beach was barely out of sight. Aside from the Commonwealth Games, internationally renowned Ironman and other water-based sporting competitions are frequently televised, while Olympic beach volleyball cemented its place

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in the pantheon of athleticism on Sydney’s Bondi Beach in 2000. This event caught national attention when the Australian women’s team won. These events are also significant as they represent the few occasions when beaches are partitioned, where entry is refused and only permitted under strict circumstances, usually by ticket purchase. The tournament grandstand, usually temporary, can pose a striking and, at times, threatening image. There was significant resistance, for instance, to the cordoning off of Bondi for the Olympic Games in 2000, with locals concerned about the impact on local businesses as well as environmental concerns for the iconic location. As a result, Waverly Council, the local governing body, negotiated funding and recognition for their suburb and community in a special agreement with the Sydney Olympic Committee (Owen 2002). Backlash around the Commonwealth Games was also significant and based around similar concerns (Smee 2018).

Football on International Sand Beach soccer is a variant of football, the world’s most popular sport’s code (Goldblatt 2007; Stølen et al. 2005). It is played recreationally and at internationally governed professional levels (FIFA 2018). Two teams consisting of five players each compete across three 12-minute periods. The game, now regularly televised, although generally on secondary cable sports channels, continues to gather a growing international following (Beach Soccer World Wide [BSWW] 2018). Its peak competition is a biennial FIFA-branded World Cup, involving over 80 different countries. Despite this, it does, and will likely only ever, exist at the periphery of international football franchises. Were football a continent, beach soccer’s claim would be limited to mere stretches of its coastline. Yet it is significant. Due to beach soccer’s existence, the beach is a site of football practice that forces a substantial rethink in approach to the way the game is played. The ball bounces inconsistently and irregularly on sand, forcing players to balance before lobbing or volleying the ball to another. The preparation of the surface is basic—a minimum 40 centimetres depth, and relatively level and free of pebbles and shells (FIFA 2015). The surface also impacts on the speed and ease of movement of its participants, who must also account for a shifting, uneven surface. This forces a majority of the game to take place ‘above’ rather than ‘on’ the pitch surface. These restrictions on, and necessary changes of, ball movement and player interchange, including passing and ‘shooting’ at goal, necessitate

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greater precision than football’s orthodox eleven-a-side format (Marquez et al. 2016a). In addition, while the core skills of the footballer are key, the increased acrobatic ability and accentuation of skills in juggling the ball, that would be complementary for a footballer playing on grass, are mandatory for the beach soccer player. There are two significant competitions governed by what are regarded as the main organising bodies. FIFA are the authoritative overseeing body, along with their partner and the sport’s ‘founding’ organisation, the Barcelona-based BSWW, who oversee day-to-day operations, competition and administration. BSWW maintains that it initiated the sport in 1992 and that its codification for a pilot tournament held in Los Angeles by a founding partner, the Beach Soccer Company, led to the first official tournament in the same year (FIFA 2018; Beach Soccer Company 2002). A follow-up tournament occurred in Miami in 1993 (FIFA 2018). The other major body, the North American Sand Soccer Championship (NASSC), commenced officiating sand soccer around the same time. Their first tournament of scale took place in Virginia, in May 1994, at their purpose-built facility (Hampton Roads Soccer Council 2018). By 2015, almost 1100 teams participated in, and an estimated 200,000 spectators regularly attended, their competition (Hampton Roads Soccer Council 2018). In 1994, the sport was replicated by a Brazilian marketing agency in partnership with a competing US sports agency and the first truly international tournament took place in Rio de Janeiro. That organisation has evolved into the BSWW and has continued to grow in popularity and reach, with a steady increase in the number of teams participating in related tournaments. The initiation of a women’s tournament in 2016 is noted as a marker for growing demand and participation numbers (Garry 2016) although, as has been speculated about the grass-based equivalent (Tate 2016), it could just as equally have been driven by the less than altruistic desire of FIFA to expand revenue streams. Each authority—BSWW, latterly FIFA, and the NASSC—lays a degree of claim to the game’s inception, and each is highly contestable. While they distance their respective sports from Praia de Futebol (Portuguese for ‘football on sand’), it is much more likely the game originated on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro some seventy years earlier. It must be noted that these authorities do not actively deny their sport’s origins, but rather neglect it through a lack of acknowledgement. The differentiation of beach soccer from sand soccer is, if anything, not much more

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than the differences that exist between either game and the praia de futebol played on the Copa Cabana almost a century ago. Football on sand is likely to have emerged in Rio de Janeiro, its spiritual home, in the early 1920s as a result of the city’s beaches, good weather, living conditions often reflecting abject poverty, population density and limited space for grass football pitches. In contrast, the city’s beaches were open and free, and commonly used for exercise and social participation. Rio’s beaches were, indeed, regarded as sites of play and recreational activity before they became a place for holidays and relaxation (Goldblatt 2014). Brazilian interest in football’s popularity grew exponentially in the 1920s (Goldblatt 2007). Neighbourhood teams would regularly compete for honours on the southern reaches of the city’s beaches. Anecdotal evidence supports that the pastime continued to be popular through the 1930s and 1940s with, by the 1950s, several clubs including Pracinha, Ouro Preto and Juventus well-established and competing in formalised local competitions. In 1960, building on the game’s increasing popularity, the Federation of Beach Sports of the State of Rio de Janeiro unified beach football’s officiation and governance of the sport. By the 1980s, ribbon pitch markers lined the sands along Rio’s 87 kilometres of beachfront, but the game’s success became its burden with Rio de Janeiro City Council petitioning for more peaceful, relaxing beaches that attracted tourists. In the 1990s, coinciding with developments in the game’s expansion in the USA, football on sand was being restricted in Rio de Janeiro through increased costs and limitations placed on the sites of its practice. The first Beach Soccer World Championship was established in 1995. The competition, much like BSWW, its auspicing organisation, has evolved and grown significantly. Thanks to increasing media and public attention, alongside beach football’s annual international tournament, there are now regular competitive professional league competition in Europe, and North and South America. The international tournament format, the FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup, now runs for 10 days and involves 16 teams. Initially, it was held annually in Rio de Janeiro, where it attracted significant television interest and commercial sponsorship. Its popularity gained the attention and support of FIFA, who partnered with BSWW, in 2005. A FIFA rebrand saw the tournament retitled (from World Championship to World Cup) and moved internationally to capitalise on, and continue to expand, its global interests (FIFA 2018). Under BSWW’s direction and FIFA’s oversight, the FIFA Beach Soccer World

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Cup now takes place every two years. The tournament’s first venue outside of Brazil was Marseille, France, in 2008 and it has been played in a different country since. The event continues to gain popularity, with more teams than ever participating and related confederation qualifying tournaments. In 2016, in an effort to formally reconnect praia de futebol to its cultural heritage, it was declared an activity invented and maintained by the Carioca, the residents of Rio de Janeiro, in a Brazilian Bill of Rights, Draft Law No. 2102/2016 (Vereadora 2016).

Soccer on Australian Sand The significant revelation in this chapter is not necessarily the differences of approach in terms of participation, but in the insight gained when the sport is examined through the lens of the Australian context. Where Australia’s national identity is intrinsically tied to sporting success (Rickard 1996) and in equal measure to beach culture (Fiske et al. 1987), it can be argued that beach soccer should be successful and popular in Australia. There are no limitations on potential sites of practice. The beach has long been one of the nation’s most popular venues for formal and informal sports-related activity, with early horse racing events in Fremantle being held on the beach (Rickard 1996, 96). Soccer, at grassroots level, boasts Australia’s highest levels of participation (Australian Sports Commission 2016). There should be no obstacles to its success and yet, despite passionate support from those Australians who do participate, the game has failed to find even stable levels of engagement, let alone media attention, funding and the necessary factors for sustainability. This may be related to how the overarching soccer code is viewed in Australia. Leading contemporary sports writer, Joe Gorman (2017), builds on work by Roy Hay (2006), Ian Syson (2009) and others, to note the sport’s place in the sporting and cultural landscape—at once, disregarded as a minority interest by mainstream media, but overwhelmingly popular in the community. It is worth noting the socially and geographically limited sporting audiences and the three other codes soccer competes with in Australia: the National Rugby League (NRL) finds its fan base concentrated in two states, New South Wales and Queensland; the Australian Football League (AFL), or ‘Aussie Rules’, is seen primarily as the sport of Victoria (and indeed, has only relatively recently evolved from the Victorian Football League); and Rugby Union is most popular among, and arguably

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demarked by its association with, private school-based sporting communities. Football, or soccer, has the same historical longevity as its sibling codes; it was recently traced to the mid-1860s (Syson 2018). Yet, as a competitive public sport, soccer found a meaningful footing in the 1880s (Hay 1994; Syson 2013; Downes et al. 2015), and only as a result of immigration and the community-building that followed post-war did it gain relative popularity. Soccer has, to a large part, been unable to capitalise on intermittent surges of interest (due, in the main, to political in-fighting, poor, selfserving administration and inflated expectation in public perception in terms of international success). It has not, however, been able to detach from its description as a ‘minority interest’. The term is arguably used to articulate its popularity among, and long association with, Australia’s immigrant populations, and to reinforce its marginalisation, highlighting concerns of assimilation, citizenship, ethnicity and identity (Gorman 2017; Warren 2003). This is, of course, in stark contrast to how the sport is viewed overseas—particularly where, since the early 1990s, it has been taken up across the class structure (See Hornby 1992, 1997; Taylor 1997; Cox et al. 2002; Hill 2006). A more stable base may have assisted Australian beach soccer to escape its current near-death status. Its position in the wider sporting context in Australia, with its advantages of being staged and played on an arguably more even, ‘level’, playing field in a seemingly more egalitarian landscape, brings with it the most negative aspects of both its sporting and cultural contexts. Beach soccer resolutely mirrors the beach in Australian culture, fraught with tension (Ellison 2014), caught between formal competition and recreation (Game 1990). It also suffers as a result of the turbulent development, position and relationships soccer itself has within the Australian context. Australian beach soccer’s story peaks with fleeting early success and a gradual break down as a result of disruption, division and a lack of support by the governing body. The first national Australian beach soccer team participated in the first FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup in Brazil, 2005. The team lost both its games in the competition. Australia’s national governing body, Football Federation Australia (FFA), who are responsible for the governance of beach soccer, made the strategic decision to switch to a different international confederation with a view to making it easier to qualify. The squad met with some success, qualifying for the Asian Federation Cup in 2009 and 2013. Their best finish, in 2013, was fourth. In the same

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year, the Australian team attended the separate Asian Beach Soccer Cup, where they finished fifth. The following year, 2014, the Australian team was invited for an exhibition match against the hosts, Tahiti, as part of the Opening Ceremony of the FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup, in Papete, but Tahiti did not participate in the larger tournament. Since that success and recognition on the world stage, a lack of support and cohesion at the national level, together with a lack of focus at the grassroots level, have detracted from Australia’s participation in international tournaments. In 2016, for a brief period, David Zrilic, a former Socceroo and Australian beach soccer’s most recognisable player, undertook promotion of Gol, a hybridised and unsuccessful variation. Separately, at an independent competition in Wollongong, Australian beach soccer league competition enjoyed mixed fortunes across its five year history. The 2017 season ran from October to December. The tournament, especially its internationally focused sibling event, the Australian Beach Soccer Cup, attracted relatively large audiences, gained sponsorship and local and some national attention, including a feature on SBS football show, The World Game (21 December 2014). It was also briefly supported by Football New South Wales and Football Federation Australia in 2015, the state and national governing bodies. No tournament was scheduled or occurred in 2018. At the time of writing, there are signs that the sport is played at local levels and that it may remerge, but this lack of certainty and stability around regular competition is indicative of Australian beach soccer’s future.

Conclusion Where beach soccer remains on the periphery internationally, it continues to gain presence. In Australia, however, negative cultural associations, the weight of expectation and perceived lack of success have pushed the game beyond the periphery. In many ways, football on sand can be seen as an anathema to the media-driven environs of football on grass, where money now most commonly equals success—after all, the best footballers do not necessarily make the best beach soccer players. In the Australian context, the coastal kick-about has tried and failed to draw on romanticised notions of the egalitarian beach myth, the level playing field. The game and its organising bodies have been unable to tap into the spirit of Australian beach culture and its mythical deconstruction of class distinction.

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This chapter has been primarily concerned with the impact the beach has on the way football is played and on its cultural development so that some understanding can be developed around its perceived lack of success in Australia where the beach is such an integral part of its culture. While the global game’s contemporary state of play and current success appears to have been determined and driven by the commercial impetus of organisations associated with professional football at a global scale, such as FIFA, this is not quite the case in Australia. The sport requires adjustment and differentiation in physical approach to that of its overarching code. Its site of practice, the Australian beach, should have offered the sport increased traction, even when it is borne of what it is considered a marginalised code in the wider sporting context. The Australian beach is a homogenised symbol, with a complex past and present, and seen as singular and peripheral, situated at the physical border and figurative edges of cultural overlap. With this in mind, this chapter has attempted to offer a view of Australian beach soccer within the context of BSWW and within the landscape of the Australian beach. It examined the sport’s rise and near demise in a country that arguably should have ordinarily embraced it.

References Australian Sports Commission. 2016. Ausplay participation data for the sports sector: Summary of key national findings (October 2015 to September 2016 Data). December 2016. https://www.ausport.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_ file/0007/653875/34648_AusPlay_summary_report_accessible_FINAL_ updated_211216.pdf. Accessed 15 August 2018. Beach Soccer Company. 2002. The history and growth of pro beach soccer (1992 to present). https://web.archive.org/web/20020215032512/; http://www. beachsoccer.com/history.htm. Accessed 16 August 2017. Beach Soccer World Wide. 2018. Beach soccer: More than a decade. http:// beachsoccer.com/sport/history. Accessed 15 November 2018. Bonner, F., S. McKay, and A. McKee. 2001. On the beach. Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 15 (3): 269–274. https:// doi.org/10.1080/10304310120086768. Accessed 31 January 2019. Booth, D. 2001. Australian Beach Cultures: The History of Sun, Sand and Surf. London: Frank Cass. Cox, R., D. Russell, and W. Vamplew. 2002. Encyclopedia of British football. London: Routledge.

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Australia’s Ocean Baths: Stories of Design, Aesthetics and Swimming Susan Carson

Introduction In ‘The public sphere on the beach’ (2006), John Hartley and Joshua Green state that “cultural studies has never really given up on the beach, which has proven to be a machine for thinking about identity, the body, desire and nation” (341). Australia’s endlessly photogenic ocean baths occupy a distinctive position historically, socially and culturally in the context of this ‘machine’. Today, ocean baths are represented in the discourse of beach culture as both an artefact of a particular historical period (early to mid-twentieth century) and a site of contemporary pleasure. Still in use for bathing, countless images of ocean baths are found on a multitude of digital publishing platforms and there is growing interest in their significance and conservation. At once autonomous and yet connected to the coastline, ocean baths are often sited (at least in Sydney, New South Wales) at the southern end of a beach or cut into the platform of rocky headlands. This chapter considers, however, another aspect to the discussion of ocean baths, which is how the aesthetic dimensions of ocean baths place the sites in the realm of public art. The ‘machine’ of the ocean bath is a space that materially and imaginatively intervenes in beach culture to

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offer a distinctive bathing experience. The regulation of the ocean swimming experience with concrete walls and chain railings provides swimmers with a space that challenges the culture and ethos of the open beach. Ocean baths in Australia often are adjacent to an urban environment and the pools exist in a particular relationship to the surrounding city or town. Most are in New South Wales, where there are around 100 ocean pools along the coastline, in comparison with some twenty ocean pools in Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia. In some locations, the baths are closely tied to representations of a city and operate as a tourist drawcard (as at Bondi Beach or Newcastle in New South Wales), while in other sites the baths are quiet, sequestered spaces mostly frequented by locals. Recent scholarship has paid tribute to the role of ocean baths in Australian swimming and beach cultures (McDermott 2012) and the continuing importance of ocean baths to the social and cultural life of their respective communities (Ford 2009). This chapter focusses on the aesthetic dimension of the ocean bath experience rather than the historiographic. Images of ocean baths appear in tourist websites, personal blogs, Instagram sites and in glossy coffee table publications as well as in film, poetry and prose. The images indicate that the space of the ocean bath is viewed by swimmers and beach visitors as a work of art, quite apart from the creative treatment applied by artists and photographers. The visually compelling contrast of the formal qualities of the engineered pool with the natural landform and ocean swell gives Australia’s ocean baths a distinct presence. In this context, the baths can be discussed as a form of sculpture that, like commissioned forms of public art, provides a space of reflection and transformation as well as swimming. For some, these rock pools “accommodate many rituals, not just the ebb and flow of the tides” (Eastway 2014, Foreword). The argument for juxtaposing technology and nature to produce a work of art is not new. In The New Sculpture (1973), Clement Greenberg argues that “feats of engineering that aim to provide the greatest possible amount of visibility with the least possible expenditure of tactile surface belong categorically to the free and total medium of sculpture” (145). Greenberg was concerned chiefly with the way in which different art forms converged “under modernism” in a common style, but his point about the connections between engineering and sculpture is relevant to a discussion of the aesthetics of ocean baths. Indeed, the relationship between engineering and structural art and design was the subject of David Billington’s The Tower and the Bridge (1983). Although Billington

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did not address ocean pools specifically, his theorising did initiate a body of work linking structural art and major engineering, since described as producing a “paradigm shift” in design philosophies (Nan Hu et al. 2014, 408). Given that many baths were designed for swimming, and in particular swimming training for surf clubs, their rectangular shape with designated lanes is not surprising. Although ‘fitted’ into diverse landforms (beach, rock platform), most major baths feature the lines of modernist abstraction of the twentieth-century outdoor swimming pool. There are, of course, also many baths that are of different shapes as they have been cut out of stone and bulwarked by engineering, such as the Bogey Hole at Newcastle, built originally with convict labour (Stanley 2015, 35). However, this chapter is concerned with the larger baths located in or near cities, and these tend to be rectangular. Many of these baths, especially those associated with coastal rock formations, have become famous globally for their picturesque potential. In addition to the work of visual communicators, writers and poets have also documented the historical and community aspect of the ocean bathing experience. Les Murray links visual aesthetics and cultural history in his poem ‘The Ocean Baths’ (1991) in which a swimmer experiences the excitement of climbing fast through ocean water to surface and see the houses and sky above: Here the sky, the size of a mirror, the size of a fix becomes imperative: I explode up through it beneath a whole flowering height of villas and chlorine tiled pools where some men still swear hard to keep faith with their fathers who are obsolete and sacred. (Stanza 6)

Murray pays tribute to the Depression workers who concreted the pool, trapping “ocean in oblongs”. These workers go to war, the aftermath of which includes the Bomb and the ‘appalling horizontals’ of television. In this way, the design features and the structural material of the pool provide the aesthetic and cultural framework for the poet’s interrogation of contemporary culture. Whereas the cultural and historical dimension of Australia’s ocean baths has received critical attention, less has been said about the aesthetic dimensions of the baths, notwithstanding Murray’s elegant connection

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between mid-twentieth century culture and design. The following discussion focuses on three areas: the way in which the juxtaposition of engineered and natural forms can be approached as ‘art’; the way in which this intersection clears a space for a particular type of experience for the swimmer (with reference to the ideas of Martin Heidegger); and, finally, the way in which images of sculptural abstraction in relation to ocean baths continue to be circulated through contemporary media. In commenting on Heidegger’s work linking sculpture to place, Paul Crowther states that since the modern and postmodern periods, sculpture is now “based on the hewing, carving, digging, casting, or arranging of three-dimensional material” (2007, 162, original emphasis). Crowther clarifies this point in a note to this article, stating that “working with, or upon, three-dimensional forms has a meaning, which exceeds their historically specific contexts” (162). Therefore, some site-specific works can be seen as an individual “object of wonder or region of perceptual exploration in its own right” (163). Here I am not arguing that the construction of the ocean bath was designed as a sculpture or artwork by civic authorities. The rationale, as indicated below, was pragmatic and utilitarian. But many ocean baths have become objects of wonder. The use of selective stylistic principles and the placement of the pool in relation to surrounding beach and ocean resulted in sites that are constantly referenced, especially in visual culture, in terms of aesthetics and sculptural form.

Definitions Ocean baths are pools that have been designed as safe swimming locations and sites of relaxation. This discussion supports the following definition that states an ocean pool or bath is “a public seawater pool sited on a surf coast so that waves can wash in to the pool” (All into Ocean Pools 2018). In Australia, wild surf and danger from sharks meant that swimming safety was an impetus for the construction of many ocean baths. While some ocean baths began life as part of a ‘lido’, or entertainment complex, Caroline Ford states that by the early decades of the twentieth century “the concept that all Australians shared a right to the beach had both created the spaces on which modern Australian beach culture would emerge, and ensured that the spaces remained largely unoccupied and free to access” (2009, 110). The ocean baths discussed in this chapter are those that have been constructed by authorities for swimming, usually close to a surfing

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beach and often embedded in rocky platforms. They are coastal, unchlorinated and washed through by waves, although some do have pumps in order to assist with water flow and cleanliness. Some date from the nineteenth century and many were constructed or upgraded during the interwar Depression. They are public spaces that exhibit a design aesthetic that, it is argued herein, is part existing landform (beach and rock) and part public art. Sometimes a contemporary commissioned sculpture is sited close-by, as in The Sea Nymphs or The Oceanides sculpture at the famous Fairy Bower surfing break in Manly, Sydney. These commissioned works can be an abstract figure (as in The Sea Nymphs ) or a historical reference (as in the commemorative sculpture of 1912 Olympic swimmer, Mina Wylie, overlooking the entrance to Wylie’s Baths in Coogee, Sydney) (Fig. 1). The commissioned work conforms to the normative perception of public art as that which is produced by an individual artist for the public domain, usually sited outside. According to Cheryl Krause Knight, public art is designed to stimulate the intellects, senses and emotions of viewers regardless of a location (2008, 46). If, however, the ocean bath is to be

Fig. 1 Sculpture of Mina Wylie, Coogee (Photo: Michele Withers. Permission supplied)

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seen as a work of public art, then its location is critical, even if not historically bound. Edgar Illas argues similarly in his essay ‘Urban tellurics in Barcelona: Between a Heideggerian rock and a postmodern swimming pool’: “Indeed as many scholars have shown, public art can function in multiple ways as a memory site, as testimony, as protest, as affirmation of the collective or as trace against erasure” (2014, 447). Both Knight and Illas identify the importance of the experiential response of visitors to the public art site. At an ocean pool, the imaginative and spiritual dimension of a swim is referenced by swimmers who speak of the quality of being ‘transformed’ by each swim as a singular experience and how the sky and sea are always different (ABC News 2018). Indeed, the 2010 National Policy Statement of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA) stated that “whilst specific ‘installation’ artworks will remain a relevant aspect of public art, public spaces and landscapes provide enormous potential for art themes that are also subtly embedded in design of a place and its materiality” (AILA 2010). For the ocean bath swimmer, the landscape and constructed space of the ocean bath provokes a different type of experiential and aesthetic response to that generated during swimming at an open beach. As an ‘installation’, the ocean bath frames the swimmer in modernity and allows for challenges to the open surf, expressed when swimmers swing on the chain rails that divide surf and pool. In Art and Space, Heidegger (1973) writes about the relationship between sculpture, places and space and the type of aesthetic responses produced by these relationships. He refers to the way in which a space is created by a ‘clearing-away’ process that involves ‘making-room’ and a ‘release of the place’. This perspective moves the focus away from sculpture as an artefact to the experiential or phenomenological. One of the interesting ways in which Heidegger’s ideas can be considered in relation to the ocean bath is by way of his argument that the three-dimensional nature of sculpture produces a work that one can walk around or through (or, in this case, swim or float in the space). Crowther argues that this process demands vision, touch and mobility, as opposed to other art forms which may require fewer senses to appreciate (2007, 165). The swimmer can experience the lines and dimensions of a space that is purpose built within, or adjacent to, a natural landform.

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Publics, Art and Aesthetics In Sydney, residents have long defended public access to the beach and debated whether man-made structures improve or desecrate the beach. Caroline Ford in ‘A summer fling: the rise and fall of aquariums and fun parks on Sydney’s ocean coast 1885–1920’ (2009) states that the shape of Australia’s urban coast is the result of Australia’s working class and middle class lack of enthusiasm for the type of leisure parks that existed in Europe and America, and that “Australian workers sought ‘independent’ entertainment at the beaches” (110). For Ford, “the physical beach of the twentieth century was consequently marked more by sand and seawalls than by the presence of fun parks and amusements sites” (110). Although the Australian beach celebrated freedom and a natural environment, the growth of surf clubs and swimming competitions meant an increasing focus on physical training. Christine Metusela and Gordon Waitt state that in the early twentieth century, bathing bodies became increasingly ‘disciplined’ by the sport of swimming and that “swimming carnivals were legitimised through the transformation of the swimmer’s bodies into a mechanistic device through discourses of sport, health and medicine” (2012, 19). If in Australia the focus on the outdoors and the swimmer’s body on the beach was an indicator of progress, in Europe the design of pools became a marker of modernity. Johannes Stoffler, who has written about European interwar pools, said that the pool design was to have an “emphatically functional construction” (2014, 57). However, reinforced concrete was also thought to have ‘sculptural possibilities’ and many indoor and outdoor pools referenced the modernist aesthetic of function, technology and seagoing vessels such as the ocean liner (2014, 63). In the historical lineage of the Australian beach, ocean baths occupy a space between ocean swimming and surfing and the regulation of the in-ground pool. Today, many popular ocean baths continue to offer a space for floating in, and the enjoyment of, ocean water as well as regulated lanes for lap swimmers. Marie-Louise McDermott argues for greater efforts to sustain and create ocean pools and draws attention to the significance of their actornetworks (such as swimming clubs, schools and the tourism industry). McDermott states that the style of an ocean pool can “make it particularly appealing to artists and photographers”:

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They are [also] attracted to the straight lines and geometric patterns of the more formalised ocean pools and to the simplicity of the ring-of-rocks pools … Regional differences in art and beach cultures are also important. Newcastle residents have long seen ocean pools as a worthy subject for painting. (2012, 239)

The identification of the painterly quality of ocean baths is linked to the sculptural aesthetics of the placement of the pool as well as to the beauty of the coastline and beach. Peter Eastway comments that “Unlike our land-locked public baths with their rectangular grids and bright paint, these rock pools grow from their surroundings … straight lines and chain rails merge solidly into the natural erosion of our crumbling headlands” (2014, Foreword). Such comments about the formal qualities of ocean baths indicate that these sites provide an intriguing intervention into natural beach or headland landscapes. The lines of the ocean pool walls, as well as the chain railing that sits on top of the walls of the baths, provide both security for swimmers and a visual contrast to the ocean. Numerous social media channels capture the design elements of ocean pools with images that zoom in on the steps, chains and walls of the site and indeed highlight the abstract design elements (including bright colour) of the pools (see, for example, the Instagram hashtag #oceanbaths). These images indicate that photographers respond to the sculptural qualities of the bathing environment. Such tensions between human design and the natural environment are guaranteed to produce aesthetically attractive sites according to architect Rudolf Finsterwalder who states that: “Man sees nature as beautiful because of its regularity and perfection, but sometimes this seems too perfect. Man quite often feels tensions and interferences as important, aesthetically attractive” (2011, 135). In Murray’s poem, it can be seen how the pool wall functions as an interface between surf, beach and rock. These tensions have been articulated by Hannah Lewi and Christine Phillips who identify Modernism’s impact on pool design, both outdoor and in relation to ocean baths, in the interwar period. Lewi and Phillips argue that outdoor pools in the first half of the twentieth century were a product of Modernism’s fixation on controlling and taming the natural environment “as a potential site of play” (2013, 281). The authors state that this need for control seeped into found venues in lakes, rivers and the ocean: “This motivation to regulate, and render safe, bodies of water and topography was keenly evident

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in pools built on the water’s edge – at the dynamic interface between land and water where culture and nature s nakedly meet” (282). This dynamism, demonstrated in Murray’s poem, links the experience of surfing and ocean bath swimming, but is of a different register. The outdoor pool created the type of “modern engineered environment” celebrated in Modernism (Lewi and Phillips 2013, 282). In Australia, the Modernist aesthetic was adopted as significant ocean baths, such as at Bondi, were extended and renovated. Lewi and Phillips cite Alan Powers’ comment on pool styling as “a form of accidental Modernism, deriving from an engineer’s approach to structure and materials combined with a sense of ‘unpretentious elegance’” (282). Paul Crowther’s analysis of Heidegger’s point about the process of ‘clearing away’ and the changes brought to a space by the installation of an engineered work is pertinent in relation to discussing this coastal interface: Of course, one might think, initially, of the bridge as no more than a resource placed in a pre-existent space. But Heidegger’s point is a corrective to this. The building of the bridge defines a location, and it is in respect of this that a space is created through room being made for the edifice. Whereas informed mono-directional vision is sufficient for the aesthetic perception of pictorial art, sculpture’s aesthetic perception demands vision, touch, and mobility – the very factors which are involved in our coming to know, and dwell in, a place. Its three-dimensional being, in other words involves aesthetic criteria which link it to elemental and relational place, and which distinguish it from those of pictorial art. (2007, 165)

The concept of the ocean bath as a place of ‘dwelling’ returns us to Les Murray’s poem in which the artificially constructed pool prompts an appreciation of the ocean but also a critique of modernity. Murray’s swimmer experiences the vision, touch and mobility of the ocean in conjunction with an appreciation of the built environment that defines the ocean bath. Thus, the ability of the swimmer ‘to know’ a place is enhanced and extended by the fulfilment of these aesthetic criteria. The effect is to provide a sculptural and aesthetic intervention into the beach. As Crowther argues, Heidegger is interested in writing about the way in which space is “overcome” in the creation of sculpture (151). In an ocean bath, however, this sense of being overcome is tempered by the natural elements of beach and ocean.

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Image Making and Ocean Baths The Australian fascination with geometry and modernist form is apparent in contemporary image making. The communities who swim, sit beside and photograph the ocean baths continue to refer to the lines, grids and blocks, steps and rectangular shapes found in the baths as much as produce images of the ocean waves and spray, general beach views or, indeed, the ubiquitous selfie. The pool is a type of immersive stage in which the swimmer performs a series of stylised rituals. In ‘“Waves and water”: Australian beach photographs travel to Queensland’ (2016), Diana Fletcher identifies different ways in which the beach landscape and ocean baths prompted major Australian paintings and photographs. Fletcher points out that the ocean bath photographs are often contemplative and “painterly” (43), in contrast to beach and ocean representations that may be more active and idealised. The contemplative, painterly aspect of images of ocean baths is circulated across diverse photo-sharing social media sites that have multiplied the types of representation, often in contrast to photography of beaches in general (see chapter “Instafamous: Social Media Influencers and Australian Beaches”). The visual response to democratic traditions associated with the ocean baths and the aesthetic understandings of the swimming experience are now accessible to large numbers of people. Social media platforms such as Instagram accounted for 3.5 billion likes being logged globally every day in 2016 (Gretzel 2017, 117). The photos and comments on ocean baths indicate how modernist aesthetics are newly transmitted. Many Instagram shots favour wider abstractionism of block colour and lines, with bodies minimised against the pool wall or floating in the middle of the rectangular shape. One notices a constant juxtaposition between the geometry of the pool that holds back larger waves that are usually described in Instagram posts as ‘crashing’. The beach appears in the distance, off to one side of the ocean baths. The image of the bather varies according to respective community cultures. The Bondi Icebergs Pool is a showcase of the fit and the famous and some swimmers will sculpt their bodies in the gym before appearing in the pool. In many locations (such as the Icebergs), the walls and structures of the ocean bath encourage the staging of the ubiquitous selfie for immediate sharing on social media sites. However, at a site such as McIver’s Ladies Bath in Coogee, Sydney, swimmers are photographed from a distance. Only women and young children are permitted entry and

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the heritage listed baths occupy a private space against the rocky headland. Sydney writer Mary O’Connell describes her experience of the baths versus the beach thus: “As down on the beach the strutting and fretting of perfect bodies continues, the ocean rock pools have always provided a gentler place of acceptance for the unfashionable body – including the aging body, the wounded body, the shy body” (O’Connell 2016). The ocean pools appear to appeal to those who are ambivalent about the discourse of openness and egalitarianism of ‘the beach’ which is often a site of competition. Ocean baths can also become a site of contestation. At Ballina in northern New South Wales, a 2017 proposal for an ocean pool promises to be one of the first ‘new’ pools to be added to the New South Wales coastline in forty years (Echo Net Daily 2015). As part of the proposal, the Ballina Shire Council commissioned a survey of community and stakeholders to investigate developing an ocean pool for community swimming. The survey, undertaken by the University of Southern Queensland, reported a favourable response to the plan which is designed to provide a sharkfree swimming space and encourage community and tourist engagement with the area. However, 9% of those surveyed resisted the plan. The four areas of concern expressed were based on potential problems with ongoing maintenance, initial resourcing, environmental issues and, interestingly, the fear that an unattractive design will detract from beach aesthetics (Dimmock and Weiler 2017, 6). Apparently, the interruption of the existing rock formations in order to maintain high visual and aesthetic significance is an issue when restoring ocean baths as well as proposing new sites. A paper for Engineers Australia titled ‘Case studies in improving design criteria for ocean swimming pools utilising physical modelling and other investigative techniques’ (2011) noted that heritage legislation states that: The heritage listing of all ocean swimming pools must be considered in the pool design. Any upgrade proposals must be consistent with the recommendations of the pool’s conservation management plan, maintain as much of the existing pool’s form and character as possible, and there should be minimal alteration made to the existing rock formations in order to maintain their high visual and aesthetic significance. (13)

The contestation over public space, especially the development of the coastline and beach, continues. Ballina beaches have experienced an

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increase in shark attacks in recent years and there is increasing pressure to provide a safe ocean swimming space. At the same time, the imperative of maintaining the existing pool’s ‘form’ is made clear in the passage above. The heritage value of ocean baths is identified as a mix of natural rock formations and introduced engineering to a standard of aesthetic significance.

Conclusion One can argue that the allusive quality of the ocean bath experience and the aesthetics of the space mean that ocean baths will continue to fascinate visually, particularly as images that focus on the design qualities and aesthetic dimensions continue to be reproduced on social media sites. As well as the long-distance photographs of the pool and setting, many photos on Instagram sites dedicated to ocean baths feature close-up shots of stairs, lines, ropes and chains, juxtaposing colour as well as content. In Against the Tide: New Work on Australasian Aquatic Cultures (2009), Rob Hess and Claire Parker call for a much broader discussion than existing scholarly work on beach culture, surfing, surf-life-saving and swimming would indicate (2062). Perhaps re-imagining ocean baths as a work of sculptural/public art can extend the critique of beach and ocean cultures, especially given recent calls for the development of new ocean baths such as at Ballina. Paul Crowther argues for the value of sculptural juxtapositions in general in the following terms: To see a bird in flight or the motion of waves embodied in stone is a miraculous conjunction in imaginative terms. And precisely because of the emphatic incongruity of these, and, indeed all sculptural juxtapositions, the work’s embodying or suggesting of one form of thing in the substantiality of another will always have something of a quasi-magical character. (2007, 167)

Such juxtapositions relate to the aesthetic contrasts delivered by the space of the ocean bath. In tracing some of the aesthetic elements that deliver the quasi-magical quality of this space, this chapter attempts to intervene in the discourse of the Australian beach by extending discussions of the built environment and associated sculptural aesthetics of the coastline. Les Murray’s poem The Ocean Baths (1991) is but one example of the way in which writers and artists continue to re-imagine this extraordinary coast.

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References ABC News. 2018. Why Sydney’s unique ocean pools are the envy of other Australian cities. ABC News, 6 June. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-07/ sydneys-ocean-pools-who-built-them/9808500. Accessed 7 June 2018. All into Ocean Pools Inc. 2018. https://allintooceanpoolsinc.org/ocean-pools/ australias-ocean-pools-summary. Accessed 10 December 2018. Australian Institute of Landscape Architects. 2010. Public art and landscape national policy statement November 2010. http://www.aila.org.au/policies. Accessed 10 June 2018. Carson, S., and M. Pennings (eds.). 2017. Performing cultural tourism: Communities, tourists and creative practices. London: Routledge. Crowther, P. 2007. Space, place, and sculpture: Working with Heidegger. Continental Philosophy Review 40 (2): 151–170. Dimmock, K., and B. Weiler. 2017. Community and business impacts of the proposed Ballina Ocean Pool. Report submitted to Ballina Ocean Pool Committee, Southern Cross University, Lismore, NSW. https://epubs.scu.edu.au/ bus_tourism_pubs/878. Accessed 20 May 2018. Eastway, P. 2014. Foreword. In Sydney rock pools photographs by Ignacio Palacios. Sydney: Ignacio Palacios Photography. Echo Net Daily. 2015. Plans firm for Ballina ocean pool. https://www.echo. net.au/2015/09/plans-firm-for-ballina-ocean-pool. Accessed 12 December 2018. Finsterwalder, R. 2011. Form follows nature? In Form follows nature: A history of nature as model for design in engineering, architecture and art, ed. J. Kepler, C. Nicolai, F. Otto, and D. Thompson, 131–150. New York: Springer. Fletcher, D. 2016. Waves and water: Australian beach photographs travel to Queensland. Signals 114: 38–43. Ford, C. 2009. A summer fling: The rise and fall of aquariums and fun parks on Sydney’s ocean coast 1885–1920. Journal of Tourism History 1 (2): 95–112. Franklin, A. 2014. On why we dig the beach: Tracing the subjects and objects of the bucket and spade for a relational materialist theory of the beach. Tourist Studies 14 (3): 261–285. Greenberg, C. 1973. The new sculpture. Art and culture: Critical essays, 139– 145. London: Thames and Hudson. Gretzel, U. 2017. #travelselfie: A netographic study of travel identity. In Performing cultural tourism, ed. S. Carson and M. Pennings, 115–127. London: Routledge. Hartley, J., and J. Green. 2006. The public sphere on the beach. European Journal of Cultural Studies 9 (3): 341–362. Heidegger, M. 1973. Art and space. Man and World 6 (1): 3–8.

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Hess, R., and C. Parker. 2009. Against the tide: New work on Australasian aquatic cultures. The International Journal of the History of Sport 24 (14): 2060–2068. Hu, N., P. Feng, and G.-L. Dai. 2014. Structural art: Past, present and future. Engineering Structures 79: 407–416. Illas, E. 2014. Urban tellurics in Barcelona: Between a Heideggerian rock and a postmodern swimming pool. Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 1 (3): 443– 459. Jayewardene, I.F.W., R. Jacobs, D.W. Cameron, and L. Skountzos. 2011. Case studies in improving design criteria for ocean swimming pools utilising physical modelling and other investigative techniques. In Coasts and ports 2011: Diverse and developing: Proceedings of the 20th Australasian Coastal and Ocean Engineering Conference and the 13th Australasian Port and Harbour Conference, 340–345. Barton, ACT, Australia: Engineers Australia. Knight, C.K. 2008. Public art: Theory, practice and populism. London: Wiley. Lewi, H., and C. Phillips. 2013. Immersed at the water’s edge: Modern British and Australian seaside pools as sites of ‘good living’. Architectural Research Quarterly 17 (3–4): 281–291. McDermott, M.-L. 2012. Wet, wild and convivial: Past, present and future contributions of Australia’s ocean pools to surf, beach, pool and body cultures and recreational coasts. Doctoral thesis, Edith Cowan University. Metusela, C., and G. Waitt. 2012. Tourism and Australian beach cultures: Revealing bodies. Bristol: Channel View Publications. Murray, L. 1991. The Ocean Baths. Collected Poems. https://www.poetrylibrary. edu.au/poets/murray-les/the-ocean-baths-0562028. Accessed 10 January 2019. O’Connell, M. 2016. History of the ocean pool. http://maryoconnell.com. au/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/SampleOceanPools2016_5pools.pdf. Accessed 13 August 2017. Rowe, D. 2015. Eastern beach, Geelong’s aquatic playground: Its physical history, context and conservation. Historic Environment 27 (3): 78–90. Stanley, T. (ed.). 2015. Religion after secularization in Australia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Stoffler, J. 2014. Modernism for the people: Swimming pool landscapes in Switzerland. In Modernism and landscape architecture, 1890–1940, ed. T. O’Malley and J. Wolschke-Bulmahn, 51–70. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art.

Sculpture by the Sea: A Visual Essay Mark Maxwell and Elizabeth Ellison

Introduction The ongoing international popularity of beach art festival Sculpture by the Sea has seen the development and exhibition of significant sculptural works along Australia’s east and west coasts. While smaller, regional festivals exist in Australia (e.g. the SWELL Sculpture Festival that happens annually at Currumbin on Queensland’s Gold Coast), Sculpture by the Sea is the most prominent and is now an international phenomenon. The Sculpture by the Sea organisation is officially tied to three locations: Bondi Beach (in Sydney, Australia), Cottesloe Beach (in Perth, Australia, Fig. 1) and Aarhaus (in Denmark). The Aarhaus exhibition joined Sculpture by the Sea in 2009, established under the patronage of (former Australian) Crown Princess Mary of Denmark (Scarlett 2009). This visual essay examines the question of how coastal landscapes can contribute to meaning in site-specific art. Using the specific case study of Sculpture by the Sea, it is possible to interpret that the site itself, the coastal landscape, is incredibly significant in the production of meaning in

M. Maxwell Sunshine Coast, QLD, Australia E. Ellison (B) Creative Industries, Central Queensland University, Noosaville, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Ellison and D. L. Brien (eds.), Writing the Australian Beach, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35264-6_13

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Fig. 1 A wide angle shot of Cottesloe’s beach at sunset, showing the Cottesloe Pavilion on the left and incorporating a number of major sculptures. Most obvious here is Geoff Overheu’s ‘Final Approach’ (2018), a red aeroplane signalling the end of Modernism

these exhibitions. The images featured here were taken during the 2016 Bondi Beach exhibition and the 2018 Cottesloe Beach exhibition, and this chapter is a consideration of these exhibitions and the role the landscape plays within them. Unlike traditional galleries or museum spaces, public sculptures temporarily located on site are intrinsically embedded within the context of their surroundings. As such, this visual essay presents a reflection on two specific exhibitions of Sculpture by the Sea and the experiences of the authors as observers, documenters and researchers within the site. Three key themes emerged from our analysis of these two exhibitions—the environment, community engagement and playfulness (Figs. 2 and 3).

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Fig. 2 Tsukasa Nakahara’s ‘Water Blocks’ (2016). One of our favourite pieces, these glass and stainless steel blocks are representative, and reflective, of the waves of the ocean behind them

Setting the Scene As a series of public art events, Sculpture by the Sea can be triangulated within three major concepts: public art, site-specific art and nontraditional gallery spaces. Public art has a long history and modern sculptors have varied intentions behind their work. In 1989, Albert Elsen suggested ten propositions for modern public sculpture, including sculpture as memorial, as a civic symbol and as an opportunity to enhance the visual qualities of an area; or, in his words, to “humanize the urban environment through wit, poetry, and mystery, and by means of beauty to mute bad architecture and even reclaim devastation” (293). Of course, public art is not without its controversy. Consider, for instance the furore over Richard Serra’s ‘Titled Arc’ in New York’s Federal Plaza (Deutsche 1992, 34) or the “seaside shaft” sculpture that divided opinion in Australia’s Bryon Bay (Sapwell 2019). While it remains difficult to exactly define public

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Fig. 3 John Petrie’s ‘Space’ (2018) is a striking sculpture placed on the groyne at Cottesloe Beach. Petrie shaped the sculpture from ancient basalt (Sculpture by the Sea 2018a)

art, Knight provides some definitional considerations: “Its works are conceived for larger audiences, and placed to garner their attention; meant to provide an edifying, commemorative, or entertaining experience; and convey messages through generally comprehensible content” (2008, 1). Public art is often (although not always) fixed in a particular site and, therefore, becomes entrenched in the meaning of the place in which it is situated. Some works are designed specifically to suit and, in fact, become a part of the site in which they are established. These works can be considered as site-specific art, “defined by its place and position” (Kaye 2000, 1). Site-specific art is a term with a long history and many complexities. Miwon Kwon, for instance, notes how artists have “variously conceived the site not only in physical and spatial terms but as a cultural framework defined by the institutions of art” (2004, 13, original emphasis), and her work unpacks the idea of site beyond physical location into

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more cultural, temporal and philosophical concepts. Despite the complexity of understanding the concept of ‘site’, the physical location in which a work is situated can contribute to the way a viewer engages with that work. Where traditional museums and galleries can be considered off-putting for some members of the public (Ryan and Picken 2017), the inclusion of artwork in, and on, public sites—like Australian beaches—can generate a higher level of public participation with art. Public art can, therefore, play a role in allowing people to encounter art in their everyday life, without needing to purposefully enter a gallery or museum space. In one of few academic discussions that specifically focus on Sculpture by the Sea, Louise Ryan and Felicity Picken suggested: This sense of community that public art has aimed to promote can be seen as reacting to sectors of the population who feel alienated and uncomfortable in the museum setting. Sculpture especially, is more accessible when situated in outdoor spaces, and viewed as less exclusionary and elitist, having the ability to attract larger and more diverse audiences. (2017, 3)

It is clear that the general public feels comfortable engaging with—and sometimes interacting with—the artwork in these public, open settings (Fig. 4). To date, there have been only a small number of investigations into Sculpture by the Sea. Mireille Astore (2005) recorded her experience as an artist and the producer of ‘Tampa’ (2003), a work designed to challenge representations and interpretations of immigrants in the wake of then Prime Minister John Howard’s aggressive stance on asylum seekers. Maree Stenglin analysed the 2006 Bondi Beach iteration of the event and explored the interactions between objects, spaces and visitors in a “lively three-dimensional seascape” (2007, 202). More recently, Hilary du Cros and Lee Jolliffe (2017) compared Sculpture by the Sea with a Canadian sculpture trail, particularly considering how tourists experience such landscapes. Ryan and Picken (2017) also considered the exhibition as a tourist experience, examining the importance of the beach’s role as a leisure space in Australia. While other research has discussed Sculpture by the Sea, this is usually focusing on a particular art work (e.g. Christine Evans’ article from 2003 discussing asylum seekers in Australia, which cites a specific sculpture). This essay, therefore, intends to contribute to

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Fig. 4 People feel more comfortable engaging and interacting with the sculptures outside of the gallery space. Just visible in the background is Stuart Green’s ‘(b)RAIN’ (2018)

this emerging field by considering, using photographs as a visual representation, the role of the coastal landscape as site in these two iterations of the exhibition. Sculpture by the Sea As an event, Sculpture by the Sea is now over 20 years old. As such, it has a significant history of delivering these events: on Bondi Beach (since 1997) and then at Bondi and Cottesloe Beaches (since 2005). The two exhibitions are now held over approximately two weeks in each location, always at roughly the same time each year: November for Bondi and March for Cottesloe. This coincides with the beginning and end of the Summer season, a high period of tourism for Australia. These events are highly

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popular and encourage large attendance of visitors during their respective showings (Fig. 5). Bondi Beach is an outer suburb of Sydney, the capital of New South Wales and an internationally iconic location. The festival is geographically located along the coastal walk between Bondi Beach and Tamarama Beach. Sculptures usually take a variety of shapes and forms, and in 2016 were located on the rocks, the pathways, the grassy park at the height of the walk and even on the sand of Tamarama Beach directly. Cottesloe Beach, the edge of a suburb on the west coast of Perth (the capital city of Western Australia), hosts a slightly more geographically contained exhibition, and in 2018, this included sculptures along walkways, a groyne that reaches out into the sea, and even in the ocean itself (Fig. 6). The sculptures are distinct, often significant in size and scope, and make interesting use of the beach locations in which they are situated. Not solely using the sandy stretch of beaches, instead, both the Cottesloe

Fig. 5 Observers are captivated by the ocean and the beach, and also Yumin Jing’s ‘Travelling Bag’ (2016) at Bondi Beach

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Fig. 6 Sunset over the groyne at Cottesloe. The piece visible at the end of the walkway is R. M. Gomboc’s ‘The Elder’ (2018) and, in the foreground, Overhue’s ‘Final Approach’

and Bondi exhibitions specifically engage with the esplanades, pathways, ocean and rocks that surround each main beach. There are some striking differences between the two locations and their exhibitions: geographically, Bondi Beach overlooks the Pacific Ocean whereas Cottesloe Beach is located on the Indian Ocean. As participants at these festivals, we noticed how the differing solar patterns changed audience engagement with the works. The sun rises over Bondi Beach on the east coast, and we were joined at sunrise by a multitude of keen photographers and locals walking or jogging the coastal path. Sunrise on Cottesloe Beach was muted and the site was mostly deserted with the exception of some particularly keen swimmers; however, sunset over the west-facing ocean was bustling and saw a large number of participants walking through the exhibition and setting up their picnic rugs with snacks and drinks.

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Photography is encouraged at Sculpture by the Sea. There are no restrictions on the types of photography techniques used. The challenge for photographers is navigating the framing of the image and negotiating with the significant numbers of people in the vicinity of each work. Sunrise provided the rare opportunity to capture the works without large numbers of people—although Bondi Beach was significantly busier at sunrise than Cottesloe Beach. Comparatively, the late afternoon/evening was particularly busy on both sides of the country (Figs. 7 and 8). Where the more traditional gallery space sees visitors either restricted to particular viewing points or within a more contained, curated pathways, the Sculpture by the Sea festivals are more open to visitors wandering their own routes through the installations. As such, viewers often approach the artworks from different directions. When we observed the exhibitions, many viewers wanted to capture their experience, taking photographs (including selfies) of, and with, various artworks. Social media

Fig. 7 Cottesloe at sunrise. In the foreground is one of the many cats that form Mikaela Castledine’s sculpture ‘Feral’ (2018)

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Fig. 8 Cottesloe at sunset, again showcasing Castledine’s ‘Feral’ but this time featuring a large number of visitors

notably plays a key role in the photography of the festivals. The organisation runs a competition in which visitors upload their photos to platforms like Facebook and Instagram using the hashtag ‘SxSmoments’. At the end of the festival, the organisers choose a winner to attend the following festival at their expense as an official photographer. As such, geotagged and hashtagged photos are numerous during the festival period and provide user-generated visual documentation of the event. When analysing these two specific exhibitions of Sculpture by the Sea, it is possible to identify three key themes. Firstly, many of the works were powerfully inspired by the environment in which they were located. The work of Alessandra Rossi (see Fig. 9), and also the work of Jennifer Turpin and Michael Crawford, both from Bondi in 2016, interrogate challenges facing Australian beaches and waterways: the impact of coral bleaching and the importance of crayweed reforestation. Alessandra Rossi’s ‘Untitled (Coral)’ was a piece that, for us, relied heavily on its placement on the site. The sculpture has graded colouring, and depending on where

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Fig. 9 Alessandra Rossi’s ‘Untitled (Coral)’ (2016), a powerful piece that speaks to the damage of coral bleaching in nature while also being a “metaphor for the patination and discoloration of emotion engendered by the digital era” (Sculpture by the Sea 2016, 68)

the viewer is positioned, the output can change significantly. Aligning the colouring with the ocean horizon line in the background intrinsically links the work with its environment in a powerful way. While the artist notes that the work has multiple interpretations—coral bleaching as well as the ‘emotional bleaching’ technology and online experiences can generate—we found the work to be most meaningful when positioned carefully against the ocean (see Fig. 9). In this way, the image— comprised of the sculpture and the ocean—can be read as a call to action to consider the effects of bleaching on Australia’s coral reefs. Laura Stocker and Deborah Kennedy, in their work considering the sustainability of the Australian coastline, suggest that cultural exhibitions like Sculpture by the Sea can assist in “cultivating a broader and deeper appreciation of the coast” (2009, 400).

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Unfortunately, the impact of rough weather was particularly intrusive in 2016 at Bondi Beach, when Angelika Summa’s work, ‘Alien – SelfConsciousness is a Virus from Outer Space’, was damaged by swell and high seas during a wild storm and had to be removed before the end of the festival (Fig. 10). Unlike the controlled setting of carefully maintained interior gallery spaces, the beach is open to the elements throughout the day and overnight. While care is taken to avoid this sort of incident (and damage) occurring, the 2016 festival experienced unexpectedly strong tides: “For four hours the sculptures were pounded. We prepared for this but didn’t expect it to be significant … With the base and the sculpture, it was two tonnes. That’s how strong the water was” (Handley in The Australian 2016). Sculptures had to be moved during the 2017 Cottesloe event after unexpected high tides threatened the shoreline (Gartry and Powell 2017). On one hand, the Australian beach landscape

Fig. 10 A casualty of high seas and a rough storm, Angelika Summa’s ‘Alien – Self-Consciousness is a Virus from Outer Space’ (from Bondi in 2016) was damaged, dismantled and removed before the end of the festival

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is, generally, not unpredictable—there is a constancy to the tidal movements of the ocean on the sand. However, the impact of weather events often changes the aesthetic of the beach in surprising ways, most commonly through sand or dune erosion, but also increased the presence of marine life (e.g. high numbers of blue bottle jellyfish or other ‘stingers’ or masses of seaweed, shells deposited on the sand) or changed water conditions. Usually, galleries are highly controlled environments; comparatively, the ‘natural’ elements of the beach change the viewing experience of sculptures on, and adjacent to, the sand. A second theme that emerged in our analysis of these exhibitions was that of community engagement. Maree Stenglin suggested one element of building community with, and through, this type of exhibition is that of “breaking down the barriers to participation and offering visitors multiple fields of the culture to engage with” (2007, 202). This resonated with our experience of the exhibition, in which viewers of the works often chose their own level of engagement—regardless of the intentions of the artists and curators. We saw examples of this at both Bondi and Cottesloe, where we encountered many visitors missing, or ignoring, the small but noticeable signs stating, ‘Do Not Touch’. Of course, some sculptures invited engagement, like Denise Pepper’s ‘Waiting in the Wings’ (2018) (Fig. 11). This piece’s colourful, shiny wings had a seat placed in front, encouraging people to sit and rest, contemplate the view and pose for photographs. Others, like April Pine’s ‘Spirit’ (2018) (Fig. 12), were designed not to be touched and yet attracted great attention from visitors wanting to sit on, or touch, the aluminium dogs (on, ironically, a part of the beach where dogs were not allowed). This echoed what Ryan and Picken noted as the challenge of managing viewer expectations and behaviour towards the sculptures, where “volunteers [managing the site] complained that too many visitors were touching and even damaging artworks” (2017, 21). The confusion, perhaps, comes from the less traditional location of these works: in comparison, galleries and museums provide clearer expectations around how visitors can engage with the work. These can range from subtle interventions (security) to more obvious ones (signs or physical barriers) and alarms. This is unsurprising considering the playful nature of the Australian beach as a functional site. Beach activity has long been associated with leisure, holidays and play (White 2005). This speaks to the third theme we identified. As noted earlier, Sculpture by the Sea is always a temporary festival. The sculptures may be re-exhibited elsewhere, or purchased and

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Fig. 11 Denise Pepper’s ‘Waiting in the Wings’ (2018, Cottesloe) was a popular attraction, especially during sunset with the metallic segments glinting in the late afternoon light

installed permanently somewhere else, but they rarely remain in position after the end of the festival. As such, these artworks are interruptions to the usual way that visitors experience Bondi Beach and Cottesloe Beach. It is, therefore, not surprising that viewers of these artworks engage with these pieces in a way that is outside of a traditional gallery experience. The beach in Australia is ultimately a popular tourist destination for both national and international travellers; a place for holidays (White 2009). As such, the ‘standard’ rules of behaviour of the beach appear to apply rather than the norms of gallery visitors. Perhaps artists have to expect that their works will be consumed by an audience entrenched in beach behaviour—playful, transient—with the artworks becoming a temporary part of the wider fabric of the beach landscape.

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Fig. 12 April Pine’s ‘Spirit’ (2018) on Cottesloe Beach, featuring a number of aluminium dogs that attracted the attention of many viewers, particularly, but certainly not exclusively, children

Conclusion As of 2019, Sculpture by the Sea at Bondi Beach will be in its twentysecond year and Cottesloe in its fifteenth. It is clear that the general enthusiasm for these sculpture festivals continues and proves to be a way of engaging with both art and the Australian beach that appeals to a wide array of participants. Setting out to examine how a coastal landscape can generate meaning in site-specific art through a consideration of two iterations of Sculpture by the Sea, it is suggested that the influence of the coastal landscape emerges in three particular ways: an environmental influence on many of the art works; the opportunities for community engagement with the art works; and, the inherent playfulness of the beach location as distinct to a more traditional gallery or museum experience. Future possible research that more formally considers the Aarhaus iteration of the exhibition in Denmark would be useful. Similarly, research that interrogates the

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sculptors’ intentions and their experiences working within the landscape could reveal another lens to engagement with the works. While it is possible that Sculpture by the Sea may not continue indefinitely, examining its legacy during its existence suggests the coast will endure as a potential non-traditional exhibition space.

References Astore, M. 2003. Tampa. Sculpture by the Sea. Bondi Beach, Australia. Astore, M. 2005. When the artwork takes the pictures. Law Text Culture 10 (1): 239–258. https://ro.uow.edu.au/ltc/vol10/iss1/15. Accessed 31 January 2019. Castledine, M. 2018. Feral. Sculpture by the Sea. Cottesloe Beach, Australia. Deutsche, R. 1992. Art and public space: Questions of democracy. Social Text 33: 34–53. https://www.jstor.org/stable/466433. Accessed 31 January 2019. du Cros, H., and L. Jollifee. 2017. Sculpture trails: Investigating success factors. Journal of Heritage Tourism 12 (5): 536–545. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 1743873X.2016.1243120. Elsen, A. 1989. What we have learned about modern public sculpture: Ten propositions. Art Journal 48 (4): 291–297. https://www.jstor.org/stable/ 777011. Accessed 31 January 2019. Evans, C. 2003. Asylum seekers and ‘border panic’ in Australia. Peace Review 15 (2): 163–170. https://doi.org/10.1080/10402650307600. Gartry, L., and G. Powell. 2017. Sculpture by the Sea works moved as tide rushes in at Cottesloe. ABC News, 13 March. https://www.abc.net.au/ news/2017-03-13/sculpture-by-the-sea-works-have-to-be-moved-because-ofhigh-tide/8349412. Accessed 10 January 2019. Gomboc, R. M. 2018. The Elder. Sculpture by the Sea. Cottesloe Beach, Australia. Green, S. 2018. (b)RAIN. Sculpture by the Sea. Cottesloe Beach, Australia. Jing, Y. 2016. Travelling Bag. Sculpture by the Sea. Bondi Beach, Australia. Kaye, N. 2000. Site-specific art. Abingdon: Routledge. Knight, C.K. 2008. Public art: Theory, practice and populism. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Kwon, M. 2004. One place after another: Site-specific art and locational identity. Cambridge: MIT Press. Nakahara, T. 2016. Water Blocks. Sculpture by the Sea. Bondi Beach, Australia. Overhue, G. 2018. Final Approach. Sculpture by the Sea. Cottesloe Beach, Australia. Pepper, D. 2018. Waiting in the Wings. Sculpture by the Sea. Cottesloe Beach, Australia. Petrie, J. 2018. Space. Sculpture by the Sea. Cottesloe Beach, Australia.

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Pine, A. 2018. Spirit. Sculpture by the Sea. Cottesloe Beach, Australia. Rossi, A. 2016. Untiled (Coral). Sculpture by the Sea. Bondi Beach, Australia. Ryan, L., and F. Picken. 2017. “Too much to look at—Sea, seagulls, art!”: The experiential appeal of art exhibitions in public leisure spaces. Critical Tourism Studies Proceedings (1): 1–25. https://digitalcommons.library.tru. ca/cts-proceedings/vol2017/iss1/138. Accessed 16 January 2019. Sapwell, G. 2019. Byron Bay’s “phallic” sculpture faces uncertain future. ABC News, 16 January. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-16/byronbays-phallic-sculpture-faces-uncertain-future/10709174. Accessed 16 January 2019. Scarlett, K. 2009. From Bondi to Aarhus: Sculpture by the Sea. Art Monthly Australia (222): 18–20. https://sculpturebythesea.com/bondiaarhus-denmark/. Accessed 11 June 2018. Sculpture by the Sea. 2016. Bondi Beach, New South Wales: Sculpture by the Sea Festival. Festival Program. Sculpture by the Sea. 2018a. About. https://sculpturebythesea.com/about. Accessed 14 December 2018. Sculpture by the Sea. 2018b. Cottesloe Beach, Western Australia: Sculpture by the Sea Festival. Festival Program. Stenglin, M. 2007. Making art accessible: Opening up a whole new world. Visual Communication 6 (2): 202–213. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1470357207077182. Stocker, L., and D. Kennedy. 2009. Cultural models of the coast in Australia: Toward sustainability. Coastal Management 37 (5): 387–404. https://doi. org/10.1080/08920750902855998. Summa, A. 2016. Alien—Self-consciousness is a virus from outer space. Sculpture by the Sea. Bondi Beach, Australia. The Australian. 2016. Sculptures by the Sea artworks damaged by king tide. The Australian, 25 October. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/ news/nation/sculptures-by-the-sea-artworks-damaged-by-storm/news-story/ 82bf576121b7e4ed14b6334406b11644. Accessed 10 January 2019. White, R. 2005. On holidays: A history of getting away in Australia. North Melbourne: Pluto. White, R. 2009. A short history of beach holidays. In Something rich and strange: Sea changes, beaches and the littoral in the Antipodes, ed. R. Hosking, S. Hosking, R. Pannell, and N. Bierbaum, 1–19. Kent Town: Wakefield Press.

Index

A Aarhus, Denmark, 12, 209, 223 Aboriginal, 5, 7, 32, 33 Aboriginality, 5 Abrolhos Islands, 102 academic, 2, 6, 7, 20, 21, 41, 44, 183, 184, 213 academic labour, 6 advertisements, 75, 145 advertising, 1, 9, 20, 58, 59, 63, 66, 71, 72, 75, 81, 129, 144–146, 148, 152, 159 aesthetics, 12, 35, 103, 173, 177, 195–206, 221 affluence, 76–77, 78–79 The Age (newspaper), 76 aggression, 4, 213 ‘Alien – Self-Consciousness is a Virus from Outer Space’, 220 alliteration, 103 Alston, Mark, 82, 83 American market, 73 Americas, 78 America (USA), 2, 83, 187, 201

Anglicized, 5 Anglo-Australian, 5, 21, 78, 79 Anne Mason’s Home-tested Recipes (1957), 76 anonymity, 73 apartment building, 74 Aria (restaurant), 80 Aron, Jean-Paul, 82 art, 12, 152, 169, 196–198, 200–203, 209, 212, 213, 223 ‘Art and Space’, 200 artisan products, 79 artist, 82, 172, 196, 199, 201, 206, 212, 213, 219, 221, 222 art objects, 72 Asian Federation Cup, 189 Asia-Pacific, 78 aspiration, 83 Astley, Thea, 101 Astore, Mireille, 213 atmosphere, 101, 116, 138 atmospheric, 78, 103

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 E. Ellison and D. L. Brien (eds.), Writing the Australian Beach, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35264-6

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INDEX

audience, 1, 3, 12, 43, 48, 51, 62, 64, 109, 139, 184, 188, 190, 212, 213, 216, 222 Aussie Food: Great Australian Flavours from the City, Coast and Country (2014), 79 Australia, 1–9, 11–13, 19–22, 24, 25, 27, 33, 35, 39, 40, 44, 48, 49, 57–59, 65–67, 72, 76, 78, 92–94, 98, 100, 102, 103, 110, 111, 113, 114, 116, 128, 129, 131, 132, 137, 139, 143, 146, 153, 167–169, 172–174, 177, 178, 182, 183, 188–191, 195–198, 201, 203, 205, 209, 211, 213, 214, 219, 222 Australia (2008), 7 Australian Beach Cultures (2001), 2 Australian coast, 91, 98, 101, 103 Australian coastal Gothic, 91, 92, 96, 97, 103 Australian cuisine, 76 Australian fiction, 91 Australian film, 9, 47, 53, 93, 130, 137–139 Australian food, 71, 83 Australian Food: Coast + Country (2017), 80 Australian Football League (AFL), ‘Aussie Rules’, 188 Australian Gothic, 92, 94–96, 103, 131 Australian literature, 27, 35, 93, 94, 99 Australian poetry, 9, 92 Australian sculpture, 196, 213, 215, 219, 220 The Australian Women’s Weekly, 79 authenticity, 60, 65–67, 111 authority, 5, 22, 23, 186 avicennia, 97, 98

B background, 7, 78, 80, 82, 181, 214, 219 badlands, 92, 93, 99, 102, 103 Baldacchino, Geoffrey, 91, 99, 100 Ballina, NSW, 96, 205, 206 bar, 76, 79, 128, 144 Bass Strait Islands, 99 Batavia, 102 baths, 12, 196, 197, 199, 202, 204, 205 Baynton, Barbara, 94 Beach Cops (2015–2016), 74 beach cricket, 182 beach holiday, 58, 73, 77, 79 beachside suburbs, 19, 26, 73, 82 beach soccer, 8, 11, 182, 183, 185, 186, 188–191 Beach Soccer Company, 186 Beach Soccer World Championship, 187 Beach Soccer World Cup, 187–190 Beach Soccer World Wide (BSWW), 185, 186 beach volleyball, 2, 11, 184 Bea Restaurant, 80 beautiful, 2, 28, 29, 34, 64, 74, 80–83, 115, 119, 126, 133, 135, 137, 148–150, 155, 160, 202 beauty, 30, 62, 74, 83, 91, 98, 100, 111, 115, 116, 118, 119, 121, 126, 129, 134, 135, 144–146, 148–150, 152, 154, 155, 157, 160, 202, 211 Being Australian (2009), 3, 21 belonging, 4, 40, 43, 54, 128, 129, 132, 146, 149, 153, 167, 171, 174, 178, 181 bicycles, 169, 177 Bierbaum, Nena, 72 Big Scrub, 96, 97 bikini, 23, 26, 146–148, 153, 154

INDEX

Billington, David, 196 Birch, Tony, 41 biscuits, 75 Black Comedy (2019), 5 Blackrock (1997), 53, 130 boardshorts, 81 body, 8, 44, 48, 50, 52, 91, 117, 118, 128, 129, 145–147, 154, 155, 158, 159, 182, 185, 186, 189, 195, 197, 201, 205 The Body Surfers (1983), 95 Bodysurfers and Australian Beach Culture(2006), 3 Bondi Beach lifeguards, 74 Bondi Beach, Sydney, 7, 184, 185, 209, 215 Bondi Harvest (business), 82 Bondi Harvest (café), 82, 83 Bondi Harvest (cookbook) (2015), 83 Bondi Icebergs pool, 204 Bondi Ink Tattoo Crew (2015, 2017), 74 Bondi Junction, Sydney, 82 Bondi Rescue (2006–current), 5, 19, 74 Bondi Vet (2009–current), 74 Booth, Douglas, 2, 20, 22, 72, 81, 109, 146, 147, 153, 177, 181, 183 boundaries, 21, 78, 93 boundaries, local, 78 boundaries, national, 78 boundary(ies), 92, 128, 177, 184 Bra Boys , 40, 53 brand/branding, 63, 66, 72, 83, 150, 182 branding, place, 63, 64 Brazil, 188, 189 The Breaker (newspaper), 74 Breakers (1998–1999), 74 Breaker’s Modelling School, 74 Breath (2008), 29

229

Breen, Sally, 143, 145, 153, 155, 158, 160 Brewster, Anne, 5, 167, 176 Brien, Donna Lee, 10, 12, 53, 72, 83 Bronte Beach, Sydney, 82 bunnies, 75 burgers, 79 Burqini, 147 bush, 19, 20, 23, 42, 93–95, 110, 170, 171, 176 Bush Studies (1902), 94 business, 63, 73, 74, 82, 83, 151, 175, 177, 185 Byron Bay, New South Wales, 67

C café, 79, 82, 83, 133 café crawl, 76 cakes, 79, 80 California, USA, 64, 182 Call to Adventure, 46, 48, 50 camping, 73, 184 Campion, Kirsty, 6 canine, 75 caravan, 33, 73, 119 career, 6, 76 The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), 93 Carter, Paul, 4 Castledine, Mikaela, 217, 218 casual, 2, 77, 126, 129 Casuals, The (2011), 145 caterer, 76 catharsis, 10, 40, 41, 46–48, 50, 52, 53 Cathcart, Michael, 5, 7 celebrity(ies), 27, 76, 80, 81, 152 century, nineteenth, 58, 175, 177, 199 century, twentieth, 75, 198, 201, 202 century, twenty-first, 27, 84 Channel 9, 74

230

INDEX

character change, 41 character(s), 5, 9, 11, 21–23, 25, 27, 29–33, 35, 40, 41, 43–48, 54, 73, 91, 93, 95, 97, 99, 101–103, 125–127, 130, 132–136, 139, 145, 148, 150, 153, 159, 160, 205, 206 chardonnay, 75 chef, celebrity, 72 chefs, 73, 78, 80–82 childhood, 28, 51, 72 chocolate, 79 Christchurch, New Zealand, 6 Churchill, Dan, 81 circle of representation, 60, 65, 66 city, 11, 20, 25, 57, 61–64, 67, 73, 79, 80, 111, 117–119, 128, 131– 133, 135, 143–146, 148–153, 156, 158–160, 167–172, 175, 176, 178, 187, 196, 215 Clarke, Marcus, 94 Clark, Pamela, 79, 80 class, 10, 72, 117, 130, 170, 183, 189, 190, 201 class distinctions, 77 classed, 84 climate, 6, 35, 111 climate change, 12, 13, 67, 120, 121, 175 CloudStreet , 102 coast, 3, 10, 19, 23, 30, 78–81, 92–95, 98, 102, 109, 110, 113, 115–119, 121, 128, 136, 137, 152, 175, 184, 201, 209, 215, 216, 224 coastal, 1, 4, 7, 10, 20, 23, 27, 29, 31, 40, 42, 64, 67, 73, 77–80, 82, 91–93, 95–97, 111, 112, 114, 116, 117, 121, 138, 139, 144, 145, 151, 184, 190, 197, 199, 203, 209, 214–216, 223 coastal environments, 72

coastal lifestyles, 78 The Coast Dwellers (1994), 4, 129 coastlines, 4, 19, 47, 48, 51, 72, 78, 91–93, 95, 99–103, 109, 110, 114, 115, 144, 145, 150–152, 159, 160, 167, 173, 181, 184, 185, 195, 196, 202, 205, 206, 219 Coast: Seaside Recipes from Australia’s Leading Chefs (2003), 78 cocktails, 80, 145 colonial, 2, 4, 6, 12, 20, 21, 33, 94, 100, 109, 114, 116, 127, 130, 149, 159, 171 colonise, 151, 176 colour, 82, 115, 184, 202, 204, 206 column, 76 commodity(ies), 84, 145, 174 Commonwealth Games, Gold Coast, 2, 147, 184 community, 7, 22, 32, 47, 48, 60, 62, 65, 67, 92, 98, 131, 138, 183, 185, 188, 189, 196, 197, 204, 205, 210, 213, 221, 223 complexity, 2, 11, 33, 35, 130, 213 concept, 4, 8, 9, 12, 22, 45, 46, 61, 65, 80, 83, 91, 103, 111, 128, 130, 131, 138, 146, 167, 184, 198, 203, 211, 213 conceptualisation, 72, 81, 82, 158 Condon, Matthew, 145, 150–153 conflict, 7, 10, 40, 41, 46–48, 50, 52, 53, 96, 133 connection, 11, 48, 63, 72, 74, 77, 83, 100, 110, 196, 197 Conradson, David, 81 consumerism, 73 consumption, 58, 79, 98 continent, 4, 19, 20, 128–130, 137, 167, 184, 185 contradictions, 82, 153 Coogee Beach, Sydney, 74, 199, 204

INDEX

cook, 77, 80, 81, 84 cookbook, 8–10, 71, 72, 76–78, 80–83 cooking, 7, 72, 79, 82 Cook, James, 4, 95, 114 Cooper, Joanna, 82 Copa Cabana, 187 cordial, 75, 77 Cottesloe Beach, Perth, 7, 209, 215 Cottesloe, Western Australia, 7, 215 council, 4, 120, 175, 176, 183 country, 2–4, 6–10, 12, 13, 19, 20, 22, 33, 39, 63, 79, 80, 92, 128, 168, 171, 172, 184, 188, 191, 217 Crawford, Michael, 218 creative class, 82 critic, 24, 74 Cronulla Beach, New South Wales, 27 Cronulla race riots (2005), 7, 184 Cronulla riots (2005), 7, 21, 53 cuisine, 78, 80 cuisine, Australian, 76 culinary, 71, 72, 75–78, 81 culinary philosophy, 81, 82 culture, 3, 5–8, 20–22, 29, 33, 40–44, 57, 58, 65, 93, 100, 109, 113, 135, 143, 145, 181–183, 191, 196, 198, 203, 204, 221 culture, contemporary, 71, 83, 197 curries, 79 customary law, 4 customers, 66, 81, 136, 175 cycling, 169, 182

D daily, 25, 92 danger, 34, 48, 54, 92, 93, 98–100, 135, 136, 138, 139, 145, 154, 173, 198 dangerous space, beach as, 43

231

Dark Paradise (2016), 100 Darwin, Northern Territory, 7 Dead Calm (1989), 93, 126 death, 26, 28, 30, 34, 39, 43, 47, 49–51, 53, 97, 98, 110, 128, 133, 145, 146, 158–160, 182, 189 Death of a River Guide (1994), 99 Debord, Guy, 78 December Boys (2007), 130 De Certeau, Michel, 167, 170–172, 178 deck, 80 dedication, 81 Delbridge, A., 92 Desert Island Discs, 100 dessert, 79, 80 destination, 1, 10, 52, 57–61, 63–65, 67, 68, 100, 114, 126, 129, 136, 168, 169, 171, 222 destination images, 63, 64 digestion, 75 dining, 58, 77, 80, 83 dining, casual, 75–77, 79, 81, 82 dining, fine, 77, 78 dining, refined, 77 dining rooms, 75 dining, seaside, 77 dish, 76–80, 82, 83 distinctiveness, 79 diversity, 78, 99 Di Waite’s Palm Beach Cookery Book: A Collection of Simply Exquisite Recipes (1983), 76 dog, 62, 75, 132, 157, 169, 221, 223 dog biscuits, 75 domestic demands, 81 domestic labour, 77 dominance, 5, 6, 35, 126, 151, 153, 159 drama, 45, 53, 73, 74 The Dreaming (1988), 126

232

INDEX

Drewe, Robert, 23, 24, 27–29, 31, 35, 72, 95, 110 Drew, Philip, 4, 25, 129 Drift (2013), 44 drinking, 61, 133 dual nature of beach, 53 Dupain, Max, 5, 24, 72

E eating, 8, 75, 77, 79 eating and drinking, 71 editor, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 76 egalitarian, 7, 10, 71, 72, 77, 83, 129, 130, 182, 189, 190 ‘The Elder’, 216 Elder, Catriona, 3, 4, 20, 21 elegant, 77, 78, 197 Ellison, Elizabeth, 4, 9–12, 28, 33, 42, 53, 57, 72, 77, 83, 92, 93, 102, 111, 118, 125, 130, 154, 167, 173, 181, 183, 184, 189 embodied, 22, 51, 72, 206 emotion, 45, 47, 51, 199, 219 emotional, 20, 40, 43, 46–48, 50–53, 63, 72, 110, 112, 157, 158 emotional journey, 46–48, 50 employee, 137 engineering, 196, 197, 206 equality, 50, 73, 129 escape, 11, 29, 44, 53, 57, 73, 111, 114, 116, 118, 119, 121, 138, 156–159, 178, 189 ethical behaviour, 81 ethics, 20 ethnography, 3 Eurocentric, 6 Europe, 78, 117, 187, 201 event, 2, 6, 7, 21, 30, 32, 45, 48, 62, 65, 100–103, 114, 117, 120, 133, 139, 147, 185, 188, 190, 211, 213, 214, 218, 220, 221

everyday, 1, 29, 31, 34, 57, 58, 65, 126, 129, 130, 139, 144, 147, 152, 153, 155, 160, 170, 213 everydayness, 78, 128 everyday routines, 81 F fabricator, 82 Facebook, 59, 82, 218 factual, 74 fairies, 75 Fairy Bower, Sydney, 199 fame, 81, 114 family, 28, 33, 34, 52, 63, 64, 75, 80, 81, 100, 101, 131, 156, 174 fantastical, 75, 152 Farmer, B., 172 The Fatal Shore (1986), 2 fatigue, 73 ‘Feral’, 217, 218 fiction, 29, 30, 45, 58, 59, 99, 103, 110, 145 fictional, 21, 28, 71, 73, 74, 101, 121 fiction, Australian, 91, 92, 97 film, Australian, 9, 11, 39 ‘Final Approach’, 210, 216 Fine, Gary Alan, 81 Finsterwalder, Rudolf, 202 fish, 76, 77, 80, 137 fish and chips, 79 Fiske, John, 2, 20, 22, 25, 29, 42, 57, 65, 72, 95, 126, 128, 129, 183, 188 Flanagan, Richard, 95, 99 Flavour of Australia (1981), 76 food, 61, 67, 77–80, 82, 83 food preparation, 82 food producers, 82 food writer, 76 food writing, 9, 10, 71, 72, 84 football, 11, 182, 183, 185–187, 189–191

INDEX

Football Federation Australia (FFA), 189, 190 footprints, 11, 169, 176 Ford, Caroline, 158, 167, 175, 196, 198, 201 The Forgotten Islands (2011), 99 For the Term of his Natural Life (1870), 94 fragmentation, 100 Fremantle, Western Australia, 188 fresh produce, 79 fruit, 75, 80 fruit scones, 75 Frye, Northrop, 111, 113 fusion (food), 78 future, 6, 13, 51, 111, 121, 178, 190, 223

G gallery, 213, 214, 217, 220, 222, 223 Game, Ann, 3, 20, 110, 167, 173, 189 Gardner, Mark, 80 Garner, Helen, 145, 153, 154, 160 gaze, 148, 149, 158 gaze, male, 144, 146, 147, 150, 155, 157, 159, 160 gaze, tourist, 59, 144, 146, 147, 153, 159, 160 gender/gendered, 10, 27, 31, 40, 49, 50, 54, 72, 77, 84, 144, 145, 151, 153, 155, 169, 173 generations, 20, 58, 66, 67, 72 genre, 41, 84, 103, 133 Gibson, Ross, 10, 91–93, 102, 103, 129 Gilbert, Keith, 67 glamour, 74, 83, 84, 148, 154 global, 1, 3, 13, 25, 78, 83, 187, 191 Gold Coast, 2, 11, 52, 74, 111, 143–160, 175, 184

233

Gold Coast Commonwealth Games, 2, 147, 184 Gold Coast, Queensland, 7, 51, 73, 111, 127, 173, 184, 209 Gomboc, R.M., 216 Gothic, 91, 93–99, 102, 103 Gothic, Australian, 92, 94–96, 101, 103, 131 Gothic, coastal, 10, 91, 93, 95 Gould’s Book of Fish, 95 gourmet, 78 Greenberg, Clement, 196 Greenhill Beach, Sydney, 49 Gretzel, Ulrike, 204 growers markets, 79

H Halliday, Michael, 61 The Happy Family (1955), 75 Harlequin (1980), 126 hashtag, 10, 60–63, 218 haven, 10, 11, 30, 73, 116, 127, 129, 133, 136 Hawryluk, Lynda, 10, 96–98, 102 health, 81, 84, 110, 117, 148, 172, 178, 183, 201 hedonism, 23, 84 Heidegger, Martin, 198, 200, 203 Heiss, Anita, 5, 7 The Hero’s Journey, 45 Hess, Rob, 206 hill, 28, 79, 168 Hill, Kendall, 78 hinterland, 78, 96 history, 1, 9, 10, 20, 33, 35, 73, 93, 99, 100, 109–111, 114, 119, 155, 169, 170, 172, 175, 176, 183, 184, 190, 197, 211, 212, 214 Hodge, Bob, 2, 20, 22, 25, 29, 42, 57, 72, 95, 126, 129, 183, 188

234

INDEX

Holder, Katy, 77 holiday, 20, 28, 31, 57, 59, 63–65, 67, 73, 75–77, 80, 100, 126, 129, 133, 136–138, 144, 152, 169, 173, 183, 187, 221, 222 Holiday at the Seaside (c.1940s), 75 holiday, beach, 20, 58, 73, 75, 77, 79, 173 Home and Away (1988–current), 19, 73, 126 homosexuality, 74 honeycomb cheesecake slices, 77 horror, 95, 110, 125–127, 130–136, 138, 139, 154 Hosking, Rick, 72 Hosking, Susan, 72 hospitality, 79 hotels, 67, 75, 144, 147, 152, 174 House Tibet, The, 145, 156–160 Hughes, Robert, 2 humour, 5 Huntsman, Leone, 2, 9, 20, 28, 41, 72, 76, 95, 101, 184 Hutchinson Group, 76 I Icebergs Dining Room and Bar, 82 ice blocks, 80 ice cream, 80 ice cream parfaits, 75 iced cupcakes, 75 icon, 20, 22, 35, 148 iconic, 1–3, 5, 9, 10, 19, 23, 27, 47, 49, 51, 52, 72, 75, 83, 120, 126, 129, 130, 134, 139, 148, 184, 185, 215 iconicity, 2 iconography, 2, 22, 81, 152 idea, 1, 2, 4, 8, 12, 19, 22, 29, 31, 43, 44, 47, 51, 52, 58, 60, 63, 71–73, 78, 81, 83, 84, 101, 109, 111, 116, 118, 127, 129–131,

138, 152, 156, 158, 160, 181, 198, 200, 212 identity, 2, 3, 6, 8, 9, 13, 20, 21, 29, 43, 44, 59, 63, 67, 81, 109, 113, 128, 129, 171, 189, 195 identity, national, 1, 4, 6, 20, 21, 44, 129, 181, 183, 188 identity, occupational, 80, 81 Idriess, Ion, 94 Illas, Edgar, 200 illustration, 75, 80 image, 1, 2, 5, 10, 12, 23, 28, 29, 42, 45, 50, 51, 58–63, 65, 66, 72, 73, 78–80, 82, 83, 109, 113, 129, 134, 135, 144–148, 152, 154, 155, 158, 160, 185, 195, 196, 198, 202, 204, 206, 210, 217, 219 imagery, 10, 11, 64, 82, 94, 96, 98, 100, 109, 146, 154, 184 imagination, 2, 100, 110, 143, 147 imagination, popular, 57 imagine/imagining, 4, 26, 157–159, 176 Indian Ocean, 216 Indigenous, 4–7, 32, 35, 47, 53, 94, 98, 114, 116, 132, 135, 176 Indigenous feasting, 71 Indigenous sites, 71, 135 individual identity, 81 industry, 42, 58, 82, 114, 201 influence, 1, 27, 59, 63, 79, 112, 113, 127, 223 ingredient, 79, 81, 82 inspiration, 24, 76, 82, 110 Instagram, 9, 10, 59–63, 66, 67, 82, 196, 202, 204, 206, 218 instagrammability, 60 institution, 7, 212 interaction, 7, 65, 81, 153, 156, 213 international, 1–4, 11, 19, 29, 52, 57, 67, 109, 114, 128, 129, 146,

INDEX

173, 182, 184–187, 189, 190, 209, 222 intersectionality, 72 Ironman, 11, 51, 52, 182, 184 island, 10, 11, 61, 91, 92, 98–103, 114, 121, 127, 131, 135–137, 143, 144, 152 islomania, 101, 103

J Jaffe, Eric, 168 Jaggard, Ed, 3, 172 Janke, Terri, 6, 7 Jay, Ellen, 75 Jet ski, 182 Jindabyne (2006), 93 Jing, Yumin, 215 Jones, Dianne, 5

K Kate’s Cafe (The Breakers ), 74 Kiss or Kill (1997), 93 kitchen, 76, 80, 81 Krause Knight, Cheryl, 199

L labour, 10, 71, 72, 75, 77, 81, 83, 84, 197 labour, academic, 6 lamingtons, 79 landscape, 1, 3–5, 7, 10–12, 19, 20, 23, 24, 26, 28–30, 35, 41, 47, 53, 78, 79, 81, 82, 91–97, 99, 102, 103, 115, 125–127, 129–135, 137–139, 143–145, 147, 149–153, 156–158, 160, 167, 168, 173, 174, 176, 178, 183, 184, 188, 189, 191, 200, 202, 204, 209, 210, 213, 214, 220, 222–224

235

laneway, 79 Lantana (2001), 93 Lasseter, Harold Bell, 94 Lasseter’s Last Ride, 94 The Last Wave (1977), 126 later life, 72 law, 93, 95, 99, 111, 114 law, customary, 4 Lawrence, D.H., 24, 110 Lawson, Henry, 20, 94 leisure, 10, 39, 44, 71–73, 77, 79–81, 83, 111, 119, 126, 127, 129, 136, 138, 139, 178, 182, 183, 201, 213, 221 Lewi, Hannah, 202, 203 lifeguard, 2, 5, 9, 21–23, 31, 35, 51, 73, 79, 173, 183 lifestyle, 49, 57, 72, 78, 79, 83, 101, 114, 116, 147, 173 line drawings, 77 Lismore, New South Wales, 97 literature, Australian, 27, 35, 93, 94, 99 Little Golden Book, 75 locale, 2, 3, 78, 82, 84, 99, 103, 111–114, 118 local ingredients, 80, 81 localisation, 67 Long Weekend (1978), 126 Los Angeles, California, 83, 186 Lost Things (2003), 126 love, 26, 29, 33, 34, 81, 95, 110, 128, 156 Luhrmann, Baz, 7 luxury, 78, 152

M Macken, Deirdre, 75 Macleod, Virginia, 76 Mad Max (1981), 93 magazines, 61, 71, 75, 79

236

INDEX

Main Beach (Gold Coast, Qld), 74 Malcolm, Penelope, 75 male gaze, 145–147, 155, 157 manchego and olive tortilla, 77 mangroves, 97, 98, 128 Manly Beach, Sydney, 57, 64, 65, 199 map, 94, 149, 168, 170, 171, 178 mapping, 11, 168, 170, 171, 176, 178 Marlin, Demelza, 3, 110 Maroubra Beach, Sydney, 53 masculine, 4–7, 23, 35, 52, 53, 144, 150, 151, 153, 156, 158, 160 masculinity, 44 Mason, Anne, 76, 77 MasterChef Australia, 81 mateship, 20, 44, 50, 52 McDermott, Louise, 196, 201 McFarlane, Robert, 133, 174 McIver’s Ladies Baths, 204 meal, 75, 78–81 memoir, 11, 13, 27–29, 35, 71, 75, 144, 145, 150, 153, 155 memory, 73, 97, 102, 103, 112, 137, 139, 174, 200 men, 4, 35, 47, 51, 52, 137, 145, 147, 153, 156, 157, 159, 160, 173 menu, 77, 83 mermaids, 75 message, 53, 82, 116, 134, 212 Metcalfe, Andrew, 3, 110, 167 Metusela, Christine, 3, 201 millennials, 58, 60, 64, 65, 67 mind, 45, 77, 116–118, 129, 168 Minogue, Kylie, 2 mise en scène, 93 Modern Australian food: Delicious Classic & Contemporary Food from the City, Country & Coast (2014), 79

modernity, 11, 111–113, 115, 116, 118–121, 158, 200, 201, 203 Moffatt, Tracey, 7 molluscs, 76 The Monkeys Mask (2000), 93 Moran, Matt, 80 Moreton-Robinson, Aileen, 4, 6, 21, 22 Morris, Meagan, 2, 126 A Moveable Feast: Delicious Picnic Food (2016), 77 multi-location, 82 multi-media, 82 multi-modal, 82 Multiple Effects of Rainshadow (1996), 101 Mulvey, Laura, 146 Murray, Les, 197, 202, 203, 206 museum, 210, 213, 221, 223 myth, 7, 19–21, 43, 77, 112, 129, 137, 152, 154, 155, 157, 160, 181, 182, 190 Myths of Oz: Reading Australian popular culture (1987), 2, 42 N Nakahara, Tsukasa, 211 narrative, 4, 7–9, 11, 12, 20, 22, 23, 27, 28, 30–35, 41, 44, 46–48, 50–53, 59, 67, 68, 73, 83, 91–98, 100–103, 110, 112, 113, 116, 118, 121, 125–127, 130, 131, 133–136, 148, 156, 160 nation, 11, 22, 39, 126, 128, 149, 181, 183, 184, 188, 195 national, 1–3, 8, 19–21, 29, 52, 57, 61, 94, 126, 128, 129, 135, 148, 153, 184, 185, 189, 190, 222 National Rugby League (NRL), 188 nature, 8, 21, 22, 28, 41, 47, 48, 52, 53, 57, 65, 91, 93, 95, 98, 111, 115, 120, 121, 132, 134, 135,

INDEX

158, 171, 196, 200, 202, 203, 219, 221 Neighbours (1985–current), 73 Newcastle (2008), 23, 43, 130 Newcastle, New South Wales, 64, 196 New South Wales (NSW), 3, 7, 10, 61, 63, 64, 96, 98, 110, 134, 184, 188, 195, 196, 205, 215 New South Wales Police Force, 74 Newspaper, 71, 74–76, 99, 115, 119, 120, 148 New Zealand, 2, 80 A Night at the Pink Poodle, 145, 150 nineteenth century, 58, 175, 177, 199 non-fiction, 2, 9, 12, 41, 99 non-traditional gallery spaces, 211 Noosa, Qld, 7, 12, 109, 110, 114 Norfolk Island, 100 North American Sand Soccer Championship (NASSC), 186 North Bondi Fish (restaurant), 80 Northern Rivers, New South Wales, 10, 96 nostalgia, 73, 178 Nowra, Louis, 7 O occupations, 74 ocean, 13, 22–26, 28, 29, 31, 33–35, 51, 52, 74, 92, 101, 126–128, 134–136, 145, 148, 150, 152, 157–160, 167, 168, 173, 175, 177, 183, 196–198, 200–206, 211, 215, 216, 219, 221 ocean bath/ocean bathing, 8, 11, 12, 195–206 ‘The Ocean Baths’. See Murray, Les Oliver, Jamie, 81 Olympic Games, 185 On Bondi Beach (2013), 3 Onomatopoeia, 103 oral histories, 75

237

Osbaldiston, Nick, 3, 10, 57, 109–111, 113, 114, 116, 119, 184 Other, 5 Our Tamarama Kitchen (2015), 82 outback, 1, 4, 57, 81, 95, 125–127, 130, 133, 138, 139, 184 outback landscape, 19, 125, 127, 131 outdoor, 72, 73, 79, 197, 201–203, 213 Overheu, Geoff, 210 ownership, 4, 51, 119, 171, 173–176, 178 ozploitation, 126 P Pacific Ocean, 216 Palm Beach, Sydney, 73, 76 Palm Island, Queensland, 101 pannacotta, 78 Pannell, Rebecca, 72 Pan-seared calamari with chili, tomato, basil and risotto cake, 78 Paradise Beach (1993–1994), 73 Parker, Claire, 206 participation, 112, 181–183, 186–188, 190, 213, 221 parties, cocktail, 77 party, 94, 138, 143 passion, 62, 81 past, 5, 6, 35, 67, 72, 93, 97, 102, 109, 111, 114, 121, 132, 137, 158, 170, 174, 178, 184, 191 Past the Shallows (2011), 95, 99, 101 patrol, 74, 183 patrol, surf, 74 people, 5, 7, 8, 47, 48, 51, 58, 61, 72–74, 76, 78, 99, 110–112, 114–116, 119–121, 129, 146, 149, 154, 157, 167–173, 175–178, 204, 213, 214, 217, 221

238

INDEX

Pepper, Denise, 221, 222 Perth, Western Australia, 7, 102, 209, 215 Petrie, John, 212 Phillips, Christine, 12, 202, 203 photography, 10, 58, 59, 82, 148, 204, 217, 218 physical, 4, 22, 44, 46, 48, 50–54, 81, 83, 84, 121, 128, 152, 169, 178, 181–184, 191, 201, 205, 212, 213, 221 physical journey, 46–48, 50, 52 picnic, 75–77, 95, 131, 216 Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), 93, 94, 125, 131 picture book, 71, 75 Pine, April, 221, 223 Pines, 63, 64, 76 place, 2, 4, 5, 8, 11, 21, 25, 26, 30, 32–34, 39, 41, 42, 46–54, 57–60, 62–67, 72, 80, 83, 91–93, 95–97, 99–101, 103, 109–121, 126, 127, 129, 131, 135, 136, 138, 139, 151–154, 156–158, 160, 169, 171, 184–188, 195, 198, 200, 203, 205, 212, 222 place as character, 41 place branding, 63, 64 placelessness, 112 play, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 12, 25, 27, 30, 41, 53, 59, 73, 110, 126, 127, 135, 181–183, 187, 191, 210, 213, 218, 221 pleasure, 20, 72, 84, 103, 148, 150, 155, 178, 195 plot, 35, 40, 45, 46, 52, 126, 127, 133, 134, 170 poem, 23–25, 31, 35, 95–98, 102, 103, 110, 197, 202, 203, 206 poet, 25, 34, 197 poetry, 8, 10, 196, 211 poetry, Australian, 9, 92

poetry, prose, 92, 95, 196 police, 29, 73 police drama, 74 popular, 1, 10, 11, 13, 21, 25, 27, 35, 41, 59, 72, 76, 79, 81, 83, 113, 114, 126, 139, 167, 168, 172, 173, 182, 187, 188, 215, 222 popular culture, 2, 28, 72, 73, 83, 128 popular imagination, 57, 73, 83 popularity, 2, 23, 126, 177, 182, 186–189, 209 Port Arthur Historic Site, Tasmania, 100 Postcards from Surfers (2010), 145, 154 postcolonial, 6, 7, 143 post-war, 76, 189 potatoes, 77 power, 5, 13, 21, 27, 29, 35, 51, 73, 75, 82, 100, 110, 133, 135, 137, 150, 151, 155, 157, 159, 203 practitioner, 44, 82, 170, 171 Praia de Futebol (‘football on sand’), 186 prawn, 77 prawn cocktails, 77 present, 8, 45, 48, 61, 121, 145, 156, 157, 176, 183, 191 presenter, radio, 76 presenter, television, 76 production, 7, 10, 58, 72, 77, 121, 144, 209 profane, 112 professions, 81, 84 promenade, 176, 177 prose, 21, 30 prose poetry, 92 psychological, 81, 99, 113 Puberty Blues (1981), 40, 44, 49, 125

INDEX

public art, 12, 195, 196, 199, 200, 206, 211–213 public space, 4, 174, 199, 200, 205 Q Queensland, 2, 7, 25, 52, 92, 93, 101, 109, 110, 114, 136, 137, 144, 145, 173–175, 184, 188, 196, 205 Quinn, Hayden, 81 quotidian, 2, 10, 78 R Radiance (1998), 7 radio, 100 reader, 5, 12, 62, 76, 97, 111 recipe, 71, 76–80, 82, 83 recipe writer, 77 recreation/recreational, 57, 72, 139, 182, 187, 189 The Reef (2010), 93, 126 region/regional, 1, 4, 7, 10, 25, 63, 67, 92, 96, 97, 103, 114, 116, 173, 184, 198, 202, 209 regional towns, 79 rejuvenation, 110 relationship, 28, 30–33, 40, 43, 46, 54, 62, 97, 127, 134, 146, 155, 158, 159, 175, 177, 181, 184, 189, 196, 200 relationship-driven, 73 relax, 78 relaxation, 40, 52, 72, 83, 110, 139, 178, 183, 187, 198 representation, 1–3, 5, 6, 8–13, 20, 22–24, 35, 57, 59, 60, 71, 72, 74, 75, 81, 83, 100, 126–128, 130, 131, 135–138, 145, 146, 150, 152, 154, 155, 159, 196, 204, 213, 214 rescue, 47, 74, 114

239

research, 3, 10, 12, 13, 41, 42, 65, 167, 170, 172, 173, 177, 178, 183, 213, 223 residents, 1, 76, 115, 120, 144, 188, 201, 202 rest, 23, 31, 39, 52, 83, 99, 102, 115, 117, 221 restaurant, 61, 76, 79–82 restauranteur, 80 retail, 73, 144 retail therapy, 76 rhetoric, 78 rhetorical framing, 82 rice paper rolls, 79 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 186–188 The Road to Botany Bay (1987), 4 roller blading, 76 romance, 40, 53, 73, 128, 136 Romper Stomper (1992), 39 Rossi, Alessandra, 218, 219 routine, 23, 67, 73 Rowe, Vanessa, 82 rural, 1, 79, 80, 94, 125, 131, 138 rural horror, 131

S sacred, 50, 112, 117–119, 132, 135, 197 Sacred Cows (1996), 5 Safety in Numbers (2005), 126 sail/sailing, 75, 114, 136, 152 salad, 80 sand, 11, 22, 24, 27, 28, 31, 40, 50, 53, 75, 79, 97, 116, 119, 120, 128, 133, 134, 137, 147, 150, 158, 167–169, 175, 176, 178, 182, 183, 185–187, 190, 201, 215, 221 Sand in our Souls (2001), 2, 41 sandwiches, 75 Santa Monica, CA, 83

240

INDEX

Savage, Georgia, 145, 153, 156–160 scenery, 62, 95 scones, 75 screen, 11, 41, 44, 53, 127, 129, 130, 136 screenwriting, 9, 40, 41, 43–45 scriptwriting, 71 scriptwriting, culinary, 71 sculpture, 196, 198–200, 203, 210–215, 217–221, 223 Sculpture by the Sea, Aarhus, 209 Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi Beach, 12, 209, 214, 223 Sculpture by the Sea, Cottesloe, 12, 209, 212 sculpture, public, 210, 211 sea, 22, 25, 28, 31, 34, 41, 51, 78, 79, 92, 94, 101, 102, 113, 115, 116, 120, 121, 128, 137, 150, 155, 157, 158, 167, 173–176, 183, 200, 215, 220 seafood, 78, 80 seal, 66, 75 seaside, 24, 28, 73, 75, 76, 80, 103, 117, 128, 157 seasonality, 81 Second World War, 7, 76 seduction, 81, 154 sensuous, 73 Serra, Richard, 211 setting, 7, 10–12, 25, 26, 32, 33, 35, 41, 47, 48, 53, 72, 74, 76, 77, 81, 94, 112, 118, 125–127, 130, 132, 133, 135, 136, 139, 144, 206, 213, 216, 220, 223 Seven Versions of an Australian Badlands (2002), 92 shark, 28, 34, 93, 127, 136, 137, 159, 184, 198, 206 shed, 79 shellfish, 77, 80 shopping, 82

shopping mall, 82 shop(s), 73, 76, 133, 154, 177 shorelines, 22, 39, 91, 92, 103, 167, 168, 175–178, 220 site, 1–4, 7, 9–13, 20, 21, 26, 28, 31, 35, 43, 44, 57–59, 71–73, 77, 81–83, 91, 100, 103, 111–114, 117, 119, 126, 128, 132, 138, 139, 145, 146, 156, 159, 167, 169, 178, 182–185, 187, 188, 191, 195, 196, 198, 200–202, 204–206, 209, 210, 212–214, 216, 218, 221 site-specific art, 209, 211, 212, 223 slowness, 111 soap opera, 19, 73 social media, 9, 10, 60, 61, 63–67, 202, 204, 206, 217 solitude, 78, 81, 101 Solnit, Rebecca, 169, 170 soul, 48, 77, 120, 121, 149 South East Asia, 182 Southern Europe, 182 South Sydney, 49 space, 3, 4, 7–9, 12, 20–22, 30, 32, 34, 39–42, 44, 49–53, 57, 58, 77, 83, 91–93, 97, 98, 102, 111, 112, 120, 126–130, 134–136, 139, 143, 150, 152–155, 158–160, 167, 168, 170, 173, 176–178, 182, 183, 187, 195, 196, 198, 200, 201, 203, 205, 206, 210, 213, 214, 217, 220, 224 ‘Space’, 212 space, public, 4, 174, 199, 200, 205 Spanish tapas, 79 ‘Spirit’, 221, 223 sports, 7, 11, 182, 183, 185, 186, 188 Stone, Curtis, 80, 81 Storm Boy (1976), 41, 47, 125

INDEX

storylines, 74 strand, 176, 177 stress, 80, 175 stress deferral, 73 The Strip (2008), 74 strolling, 72 student, 73 student, graduate, 6 St Valentine’s Day, 95 stylist, 77 subject, 8, 41, 72, 76, 92, 125, 196, 202 subtitle, 79 suburb, 76, 128, 143, 144, 152, 184, 185, 215 suburb, beachside, 19, 26, 73, 82 Summa, Angelika, 220 summer, 28, 31, 73, 76–78, 100, 120, 129, 182, 201, 214 ‘Summer Bay’ (Home and Away), 73 sun, 26, 28, 31 Sunbaker (1937), 72 sunny, 39, 43, 53, 73 sunset, 80, 173, 210, 216, 218, 222 sunshine, 44, 79, 116 supermarket, 82 surf, 26, 28–31, 44, 49–51, 64, 73, 81, 82, 93, 109, 157, 197, 198, 200–202 surf boards, 49, 50 surf culture, 51, 53 Surfers Paradise, Qld, 7, 109, 111, 173 surfing, 11, 23, 27, 29, 30, 40, 43, 44, 50, 61, 72, 80, 81, 130, 133, 134, 182, 184, 198, 199, 201, 203, 206 Surfing the Menu (2003–2006), 80 Surfing the Menu Next Generation (2016), 81

241

swimming, 23, 61, 72, 75, 134, 136, 137, 157, 158, 173, 182, 196–198, 200, 201, 203–206 Sydney Harbour, 80 Sydney, NSW, 7 Sydney Olympic Games, 185 Sydney’s Northern Beaches, 74 symbol, 1, 7, 61, 63, 82, 109, 127, 151, 191, 211 symbolic, 4, 112, 121, 132, 135, 138, 146, 147, 153, 154 symbolism, 9, 21, 53

T table, 76, 196 Tahiti, 190 Tamarama Beach, Sydney, 175 Tampa (2003), 213 Tasmania, 61, 99, 100 Taylor, Affrica, 7, 21, 184 tea, 75 tea, afternoon, 75 tea-rooms, 75 teenage, 74 teenage suicide, 74 tee shirts, 81 television, culinary, 10, 71 television, food, 80–82 television, informational, 72 television, lifestyle, 71 television, reality, 5, 10, 19, 144, 146 tension, 7, 10, 21, 40, 48, 51, 53, 130, 132, 136, 147, 175, 183, 189, 202 text, 1–3, 5–13, 21, 23, 26, 32, 33, 35, 61, 62, 71, 72, 76, 79, 83, 92, 94, 99, 103, 110, 111, 113, 116, 130, 145, 148, 150, 154, 158 textual analysis, 8, 9, 113, 132, 145 thong, 2, 26, 29

242

INDEX

toffee apples, 75 To the Lighthouse (1927), 100 tourism/tourist, 1–3, 10, 11, 13, 19, 20, 32, 35, 52, 57–68, 99, 100, 109, 110, 113, 114, 118–120, 126, 129, 131, 132, 138, 143, 144, 146–149, 154, 159, 173, 183, 184, 187, 196, 201, 205, 213, 214, 222 Tourism and Australian Beach Cultures: Revealing Bodies (2012), 3 tourist gaze, 144, 146, 147, 150, 159, 160 Towards a Sociology of the Coast: Our Past, Present and Future Relationship to the Shore (2017), 3 Townsville, Qld, 177 trace, 44, 176, 200 transportation, 114, 118, 169, 170 travel, 58–67, 82, 100, 115, 120, 130, 133, 134, 137, 138, 172 traveler, 116 ‘Travelling Bag’, 215 travel writer, 76, 113, 116, 121 A Treasury of Australian Cookery (1962), 76 trend, 65, 82, 172 Trompf, Percy, 72 Turkey Shoot (1982), 126 Turner, Graeme, 2, 8, 20, 22, 25, 29, 42, 57, 72, 95, 126, 129, 181, 183, 188 Turpin, Jennifer, 218 twentieth century, 75, 198, 201, 202 twenty-first century, 27, 84 U uglification, 119 Underbelly (2008–current), 74 Uninhabited (2010), 93, 99, 126

‘Untitled (Coral)’, 218, 219 urban, 4, 20, 25, 40, 57, 60–63, 65–67, 73, 79, 128, 129, 133, 158, 170–173, 178, 184, 196, 201, 211 Urry, John, 58, 59, 66, 67, 148 Utopia, 42, 128 V vacation, 59, 67 vacation, beach, 57, 67, 73 Van Diemen’s Land, 95 verge, 75 view, 2, 5, 22, 32, 77, 118, 151, 173, 174, 189, 191, 221 vocationally-focused, 74 voices, 5, 6, 9, 22, 23, 27, 29, 35, 40 volleyball, beach, 2, 11, 184 W Waddell, Terri, 72 Waite, Di, 76 ‘Waiting in the Wings’, 221, 222 Waitt, Gordon, 3, 171, 201 Wake in Fright (1971), 126 walk/walking, 7, 8, 11, 61, 116, 132, 156, 167–178, 200, 215, 216 water, 7, 22–26, 28, 30, 31, 44, 50, 53, 61, 77, 99, 100, 127, 128, 134–137, 157–159, 167, 168, 176, 197, 199, 201–203, 220, 221 ‘Water Blocks’, 211 Webb, Jen, 8, 13 wellbeing, 84 Western Australia, 32, 61, 102, 109, 138, 196, 215 White, Richard, 73, 77, 100, 129, 169, 183, 221, 222 wine, 58, 76 wine writer, 76

INDEX

Winnett, Francine, 20, 21, 42 Winton, Tim, 9, 13, 21, 27, 29–31, 35, 95, 102 Wolf Creek (2005), 93, 95, 125 women, 10, 26, 40, 49, 51, 76, 77, 126, 144–150, 152–155, 157, 159, 160, 169, 170, 173, 185, 186, 204 Wonderland (2013–2015), 74 Woolf, Virginia, 100 workplace, 71, 74, 182 worksite, 74

243

writer, fiction, 41 writer, recipe, 77 writer, screen, 41, 43, 46, 53 writer, travel, 76, 113, 116, 121 writer, wine, 76 Wunderlich, Filipa M., 11, 167, 168, 170, 171

Y yoga, 75 YouTube, 82