The Pass, Byron Bay NSW. Photograph courtesy of Delphine Ducaruge. When the British colonised the harbour they named Sydney, they didn’t think much of the beaches, although the Aboriginal residents had been enjoying them for centuries, swimming and eating shellfish and creating rock art. Indeed, early settlers were so turned off by the sun and sand that the Sydney Police Act in 1833 incorporated a law prohibiting ocean swimming between the hours of 6am and 8pm, ostensibly for the sake of public decency. It was not until the start of the 20th century that the ruling was finally overturned, and crowds began to flock to the seashore in modest neck-to-knee costumes.
How much has changed. Today, of course, the beach is a cardinal landscape for many Australians, scantily clad in bikinis and budgie smugglers — so much so that it is hard to imagine Australia’s culture without beaches. The bush and the beach: twin compass points, like north and south, used to fix our place in the world. We have evolved from beach-averse into beach lovers, by and large, clustering along the coastlines. “Girt by sea,” as our terrible anthem has it. This is why the surf lifesaver is such a significant national symbol. It was Australia, in fact, which originated surf lifesaving in 1907, pretty much as soon as swimming was made legal.
I am an expat living on the East Coast of the US, and sometimes I get homesick for antipodean life. Whenever I do, I pull a book off the shelf containing a photograph: “Sunbaker”, by Max Dupain, shot in 1937 at Culburra Beach in New South Wales. The silver gelatin print shows a man lying on sand so white it is almost indistinguishable from the sky, so he seems to be floating in his hedonistic bliss. Droplets of water glisten on deeply bronzed shoulders. His head is resting on his hand, vulnerable but carefree. The heat is palpable: you can almost feel the blistering sun. I look at this photo, so famous that I probably don’t even need to describe it to you, and I am instantly transported 15,000 kilometres around the globe to Nobbys Beach, or Bondi Beach, or Rainbow Beach, or any one of the countless beaches etched into my memory after years of visiting them.
If I imagine an Australian beach right now, I picture red and yellow flags flapping endlessly. A lifesaver sits in her high wood chair, surveying a domain of umbrellas and towels. There are surfboards in the waves and seagulls in the air, permeated by the unmistakable smell of sunscreen and hot chips. The sound of someone crinkling the wrapper on a Golden Gaytime.
It is a seductive vision — who wouldn’t want to be there? (Why am I over here?) But lately, my fantasy beach has been invaded by an old memory. When I was 10 years old or so, I saw my younger sister get caught in a rip-tide off a beach, and a stranger had to dive in to rescue her, slicing up his feet on concealed oysters. The pleasure and freedom embodied by Dupain’s “Sunbaker” is mixed up, for me, with recollections of my mother screaming and blood on the sand (my sister was fine).
This memory doesn’t diminish my enjoyment of beaches; I will still gladly go with an Esky and a book. But it does remind me that the beach is a more complicated space than we generally acknowledge.
While they are certainly sites of play and relaxation, they are also wild and can turn dangerous in an instant. When you dip your toe into the tide, you are really dipping your toe into the edge of a vast wilderness. Bluebottles and blubber jellyfish are reminders of this, thrown up from the deep. So are sharks. There is an old story by H. P. Lovecraft and Sonia Greene, “The Horror at Martin’s Beach”, about a monstrous sea creature that attacks lifesavers and sailors. The point of the story is the sea’s unfathomable power: we do not really know it at all. To lounge in the sand, sunbaking like Dupain’s friend, is to brush against this giant force, which also makes itself known through tsunamis. Part of the function of the surf lifesaver is to insulate us from such a troubling reality.
At the same time, the beach is also a place of refuge. Perhaps because they exist on a literal periphery — the edge of a landmass — they also seem to sit on the edge of society. As a result, they invite alternate ways of living. “The Beach”, by Alex Garland, is about this very thing: a supposedly utopian community of backpackers built on a beach in Thailand. Fire Island, near New York, is not too dissimilar with its long, windswept beach. In the 1930s, LGBTQ New Yorkers escaped a repressive city and set up a queer enclave, called Cherry Grove, where they could live as they wanted. The beach gave them freedom.
Even now, when the repression is largely gone, Cherry Grove and its neighbour, Fire Island Pines, remains a home away from home for many people.
For others, though, the beach is a site of violence and conflict: think Gallipoli, Normandy, Dunkirk. Because it mingles people from disparate backgrounds, the beach can see class and racial tensions reach boiling point, as we saw in Cronulla in 2005.
On a more existential level, the beach is also an early casualty of climate change. Across the world, beaches are receding or eroding, some slated to vanish entirely in the coming decades.
But for me, above all, the beach is a reminder of time. Every grain of sand is made of stone or shell — the remaining granules of ancient geological and biological processes. To walk along a beach is to walk over millions of years; as the nature writer Rachel Carson once wrote, sand contains “the history of the earth”.
It is not a coincidence, I think, that the traveller in H. G. Wells’s “The Time Machine”, when he goes far into the future, finds himself on a beach. The beach becomes, in Wells’s novel, the terminus of human evolution. A beginning and an end.
I think of all these things when I look at Dupain’s “Sunbaker”, the most famous photograph ever taken by an Australian. Is there a more beautiful picture in existence? “It was a simple affair,” Dupain once recalled of the day he shot it. “We were camping down the south coast and one of my friends leapt out of the surf and slammed down onto the beach to have a sunbake — marvellous. We made the image and it’s been around, I suppose as a sort of icon of the Australian way of life.”
