The continent’s vast interior – 'the bush' – captured the first
settler’s imagination, giving the colonies their mythology of shearers
and miners and bushrangers. (Before 1903, a swim during daylight hours
could get you arrested.) But as the 20th century dawned, the coastal
cities boomed; rural life was eclipsed by the new nation’s factory jobs
and suburbs. It was a simple and common pastime – beach going – that
came to be a part of how Australians thought of themselves.
Spurred on by the guidebooks of the day, well-heeled English
gentlemen travellers rapturously recounted the sublimity of crashing
surf and rocky outcrops in their journals. Those of a less Romantic
inclination were equally drawn to the beach, if not for a ‘surf bathe’,
then for a picnic and a promenade, fish and chips and a flirt.
Australian Impressionists like Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin, worked en plein air
to depict the lovely coastal landscapes of Sydney’s Coogee and
Melbourne’s Brighton and their de rigueur tableaus of primly dressed
beach goers. The locations featured in these paintings are
unrecognisable today (and everyone got their gear off long ago) but the
dual meaning of the beach, a place that is both semi-sacred in its
natural beauty and also verging-on-the-profane with its good times, has
only continued to grow more powerful.
Australia’s most urbanised beaches still represent the hedonistic,
social side of beach going. Concrete clad and perennially crowded,
Bondi’s well-trodden stretch of sand presents a broad slice of modern
Sydney life, from the weather-beaten lap swimmers at the Icebergs sea
pool, to the Negroni-swilling regulars at North Bondi Italian.
Melbourne’s St Kilda has stayed true to its Victorian pleasure palace
roots, with a melancholy pier to stroll by day, and bars, restaurants
and live music at pubs like The Prince (2 Acland St) and the Espy (11
The Esplanade) for after dark. Likewise, Perth’s Cottesloe (104 Marine
Pde, Cottesloe), a genteel surf beach among 40km of perfect specimens,
is known for its boozy Sunday sessions, sunsets and cafés. While sneered
at for its theme parks and overdevelopment, Queensland’s Gold Coast is a
beloved destination for many with the high rise and fast food outlets
to prove it, but can also surprise even the most dedicated beach snob
with its sea hazed dunes, warm waves and soft, clean sand.
It’s the beach’s other side though, its mystical allure, and the
austere introversion it both soothes and engenders, that has become a
stalwart feature in Australian film, literature and popular music. When
Cold Chisel’s Jimmy Barnes sang about pushing surfboards through
turnstiles in Misfits or Midnight Oil’s Peter Garret howled
'catch the bus to Bondi, sit on the beach and wonder', they were not
only conjuring a scene familiar to their 80s pub rock audience but more
importantly captured a uniquely sunlit Australian branch of angst.
Likewise Tim Winton and Robert Drewe’s novels – set often along the
south coast of Western Australian – vividly evoke the primal sensuality
of the surf, and its ability to calm and inspire, but also destroy.
The Romantic ideal of the soul-crunching beach is not hard to find
out of the capital cities, with every state having their fair share of
stunning coastal strips and semi-wilderness. The awesome (in the true
sense of the word) thundering power of the Southern Ocean is what makes
Victoria’s Great Ocean Road truly great, and it also fuels the legendary
Bells Beach (woo-woo enough a surfing spot to be the dénouement of
Kathyrn Bigelow’s Point Break).
The surf of Western Australia’s Margaret River is often described as
‘epic’ while the other 12,500km of the Indian Ocean coast has surreally
un-peopled reef, point and beach breaks giving way to shimmering ten
metre tides up north.
Byron Bay has a foot in either camp; it heaves with hard-partying
visitors during summer and can sometimes feel like a victim of its own
popularity, but for most of the year its cluster of beaches and
surrounding hinterland preserve an almost eerily transcendent beauty
that has long inspired talk of ley lines and magic power of place.
The beach for most Australians is not just a place to cool off on a
hot day, it’s a place of the tentative dips of the toes in the shallows
of early childhood, a place where teenage rites of passage played out.
It’s where many old Australians retire to, and where their ashes are
scattered at life’s end. Australians celebrate, socialise, exercise or
relax with a book on the sand. It’s also where they go to gather their
thoughts in times of crisis.
It’s not an easy task to tease a national psyche out of a landscape, a
geological fact. But with most of the stories of past’s hard men
meaning little to 21st-century Australians, the beach in itself is about
as inclusive and complex a foundation myth as any country could hope
for.
