As the weather heats up, Australians start talking about where they are “going away” for the summer holidays, and for most, it is the beach. As an island continent, Australia is quite literally defined by its 37,000km of coast. The statistics alone can explain why Australians are so obsessed with getting some sand between their toes – around 85% of the population live within an hour’s drive of one of the 11,000 plus beaches – but the beach’s significance in Australian life goes far deeper than convenience.
Related article: Five magnificent islands off the Queensland coast
The continent's vast interior - "the bush" - captured the first settler's imagination, giving the colonies their mythology of shearers, miners and bushrangers. (Before 1903, a swim during daylight hours could get you arrested.) But as the 20th Century dawned, the coastal cities boomed and rural life was eclipsed by the new nation's factory jobs and suburbs. Beach going was a simple and common pastime 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, Melbourne's Brighton and their de rigueur tableaus of primly dressed beach goers. The locations featured in these paintings are unrecognisable today 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 Parade), 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 the Gold Coast can also surprise even the most dedicated beach snob with its sea hazed dunes, warm waves and soft, clean sand.
It is the beaches' 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, they captured a uniquely sunlit Australian branch of angst. Likewise Tim Winton's and Robert Drewe's novels -often set along the southern 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 outsidethe capital cities, since every state has 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 (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 10m 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 is a place for the tentative dips of the toes in the shallows of early childhood and a place where teenage rites of passage played out. It is where many old Australians retire and where their ashes are scattered at life's end. It is where they celebrate, socialise, exercise or relax with a book on the sand. It is also where they go to gather their thoughts in times of crisis.
It is not an easy task to tease a national psyche out of a landscape, a geological fact. But with most past stories 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.
source : bbc.co.uk
