Sand In Our Souls

Leone Huntsman

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780522849455
• eBook ISBN:
  9780522863451
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

Images of 'the beach' pervade Australian popular culture. However the deeper significance of the experience of 'the beach', and its influence on Australian culture generally, have not yet been seriously explored. How, why and when did the beach become part of the Australian way of life?In Sand in our Souls Leone Huntsman describes the forces and pressures that encouraged or impeded Australians' enjoyment of sand and surf, from early enjoyment of bathing, through nearly a century of repressive restrictions, to freedom won in the face of drawn-out opposition. The ways in which artists, writers, film-makers and the advertising industry have depicted the beach are examined for the light they throw on the beach's significance. She traces the development of a distinctively Australian way-of-being-at-the-beach, suggesting that the beach experience has been absorbed into our emerging culture and continues to shape it in subtle ways.Huntsman's provocative arguments will stimulate debate on the concept of 'national identity' appropriate for a new Australian century, and promote a deeper understanding of an aspect of life in Australia that is cherished by many of those who live here.

PART 1 The Evolution of the
Australian Beach

1

First Impressions

Brief encounters: the beach and culture contact betore tirst settlement

In EXPLORING THE HISTORY of crosscultural conflict between Europeans and the inhabitants of the Marquesas Islands in the Pacific, Greg Dening uses an overarching metaphor—introduced in the title of his book, Islands and Beaches—to understand and to explain the process of culture contact itself. An ‘island’ is the culture constructed by a people; a ‘beach’ is the boundary between cultures. As newcomers cross that boundary, bringing with them all the cultural meanings and phenomena from their own ‘island’, they change the culture of the newly entered ‘island’ forever.1

The ships of European explorers can hardly be said to have penetrated the ‘island’ of the Australian continent before 1788. They skittered along the coastlines, the explorers and their crews viewing the native inhabitants on the beach and never penetrating far beyond it. But to their perceptions of the new land they brought the values of their ‘island’—of cultural and moral superiority, imperial rights to exploration and acquisition, appraisal of opportunities for exploitation and profit, and the Enlightenment ideal of the advancement of knowledge through the observation and recording of new phenomena.

Thus first impressions were filtered through existing preconceptions, starkly revealed in Sir Joseph Banks’s description of the people seen from Captain James Cook’s Endeavour when it first touched on the Australian continent in 1770:

In the morn we . . . [discerned] 5 people who appeared through our glasses to be enormously black: so far did the prejudices which we had built on Dampier’s account influence us that we fancied we could see their Colour when we could scarce distinguish whether or not they were men.2

Here Banks refers to William Dampier’s unfavourable accounts of West Australian Aboriginal people in published accounts of his landings in 1688 and 1699, and reveals his own awareness of the extent to which perception was influenced by expectation.

We have no corresponding account of the Aboriginals’ interpretation of the ships and strangers they saw from the beach. While Banks and his scientific colleagues meticulously catalogued ‘facts’ about Aboriginal people in the same way as they named and classified new plants and animals, the meaning of the Aboriginals’ behaviour on the beach eluded them. They observed three main kinds of response to their presence: attempts to repel them by threatening gestures and displays of weapons; apparent indifference as the people went about their daily tasks of carrying wood or spearing and cooking fish; and ignoring them, running away or melting into vegetation beyond the beach.

Was this behaviour cowardice, as Banks chose to label it—or a prudent withdrawal from contact until more understanding of the newcomers’ motives could be gleaned or these unsettling apparitions disappeared for ever? Whatever the reason, no relationship between newcomers and inhabitants could be established during these fleeting encounters. The Europeans were baffled by the Aboriginal people’s indifference to the goods they brought with them. They threw beads, ribbons and cloths as presents into a ‘house’ near the beach, only to find the next day that every individual thing they had thrown there was left behind, untouched. There was an apparent refusal on the part of the Aboriginal people to accept any offerings that would have established a relationship of reciprocity between the two peoples. On the other hand, the Europeans had no qualms in taking with them all the ‘lances’ (spears) that they found in one of the houses, an early indication of their assumed right to appropriate whatever was of interest or profit to them.

The early and sometimes unfavourable judgements of the Aboriginal people expressed by early explorers co-existed with a rather wistful envy of their carefree way of life as contrasted with that of effete Europeans—a sentiment influenced by another cultural belief in the virtues of the Noble Savage. Thus Captain James Cook wrote:

From what I have said of the Natives of New-Holland they may appear to be some of the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans; being wholly unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a Tranquillity which is not disturb’d by the Inequality of Condition: the Earth and the sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life, they covet not Magnificent Houses . . . they seem’d to set no Value upon any thing we gave them . . . this in my opinion argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessarys of Life and that they have no superfluities.3

Before the first settlement was established in Port Jackson, Governor Phillip noted on 22 January 1788 that he had named one of the harbour’s inlets Manly Cove because of the confidence and manly behaviour shown by the natives there—thereby naming the place that later became part of one of Sydney’s premier beach resorts.

The brief encounters on the beach only dramatised the difference between the two peoples. Each remained an enigma to the other. Dening’s ‘beach’ was more of a chasm than a boundary, a seemingly unbridgeable gap in understanding between the two cultures that was to have tragic consequences in the years to come.

The early years: 1788 to the 1830s

After THE First Fleet had landed on ‘the fatal shore’, 4 the earliest interactions between the new settlers and Aboriginal people took place around the beaches of Port Jackson, Botany Bay, Pittwater and Broken Bay. The newcomers observed that the natives subsisted mainly on the fish and shellfish that they drew from the waters surrounding the settlement. The early diarists described in some detail the different functions of men and women with respect to fishing: the way they broiled the fish they had caught over little fires in their canoes; the fashioning of fishhooks and the construction of canoes. Joseph Lycett’s painting Aborigines Spearing Fish, Others Diving for Crayfish, a Party Seated Beside a Fire Cooking Fish shows a division of labour between the sexes, with women catching fish from the canoes, swimming or diving, the men spearing fish from the rocks. Cook had also observed this separation between the roles of men and women in the ‘primitive’ societies encountered during the voyage—in Tierra del Fuego, Tahiti, New Zealand, and now, it was evident, in New South Wales. In this one respect at least, the settlers must have been reassured that the natives, in other ways so alien, were like them.

The Eora people living around Port Jackson were proficient swimmers. In 1791 Bennelong and several others swam out to rescue a group of settlers whose boat had overturned in Farm Cove; they returned those rescued to shore and dried out their clothes over a fire. The name ‘bogie hole’, derived from an Aboriginal word meaning to bathe or swim, was often used until quite recent times for a swimming-place. When I was a child we called the smaller rock pool at the northern end of Bondi beach the bogie hole, and in his Oxford Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms G. A. Wilkes notes the first recording of the word in an utterance by Colbee, one of the Aboriginal people captured by Governor Arthur Phillip.5

Joseph Lycett (c. 1775-1828), Aborigines Spearing Fish, Others Diving for Crayfish, a Party Seated Beside a Fire Cooking Fish, c. 1817. Watercolour, 17.7 × 28 cm

Source: ‘Drawings of the natives & scenery of Van Diemans [sic] Land’, National Library of Australia, R5686. By permission of the National Library of Australia

Early bathing and swimming

There is considerable evidence, scattered and fragmentary though it is, that the settlers greatly enjoyed bathing in the waters of the harbour. Early records suggest that convicts, soldiers and early colonists needed no urging to follow the example of the Aboriginal people and to enter the water—in fact, they persisted in doing so, despite officialdom’s efforts to discourage them.

Lack of familiarity with the water meant that few of those who lived in Britain or Ireland could swim, so one might assume that this applied also to the colonists. The evidence, however, suggests that the ability to swim was widespread. It is likely that some learnt the skill (and the pleasure to be derived from swimming) by watching the original inhabitants enjoying themselves in the water. The historian Michael Cannon conjectures that ‘no doubt the hotter climate, combined with easy access to beaches and rivers [and bay and harbour shores] encouraged a good deal of bathing simply for the sake of coolness in summer’.6 Most of the First Fleet diarists allude to the heat of that first summer, Watkin Tench noting that it ‘felt like the blast of a heated oven . . . it was allowed by every person, to surpass all that they had before felt, either there or in any other part of the world’.7

By 1803 bathing was so common that Governor King apparently felt it necessary to restore some decorum, possibly using the dangerous creatures lurking in the water as an excuse for what may have been an attempt to uphold propriety when he issued a government dispatch published in the Sydney Gazette on 20 October of that year:

This Bay and Harbour in general,—being unfortunately full of Voracious Sharks and Stingrays only, it is recommended to the Convicts not to go into the water without the utmost precaution and they are positively prohibited from bathing in front of the Encampment.

Whether or not the convicts heeded this injunction, the Fig Tree, overlooking Woolloomooloo Bay, remained a very popular bathing spot, providing trees and rocks for shade, for diving, and for concealment while changing. (This was the site of what was to become the Domain Baths, first enclosed in 1860, opened as the Domain Baths in 1908, renamed the Andrew ‘Boy’ Charlton pool in 1968, and still in use today.) The Ben Bolt, an abandoned hulk, was sunk near the shore, and wooden fences built out to it to form the sides of an enclosure, supposedly as some protection against sharks (but since one could dive and swim underwater around the submerged sides of the hulk ou...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART 1 The Evolution of the Australian Beach
• 1 First Impressions
• 2 The Triumph of Respectability
• 3 Writers and Artists, the Bush and the Beach
• 4 Beginnings: A New Century, a New Nation and the Struggle for the Beach
• 5 The Achievement of Freedom on the Beach
• 6 The Australianising of the Beach
• 7 The Beach from the Mid-twentieth Century to the Present
• PART 2 Representations of the Beach in the Twentieth Century
• 8 EARLY representations and emerging themes
• 9 Childhood and the Beach
• 10 The prominence o f Nature: Diverse Connections
• 11 The Beach and Popular Culture
• 12 The Serene and the Sinister: Contrasting Aspects of the Beach
• 13 Reflections on Representations of the Beacn and Immersion in Place
• PART 3 Influences of the Beach in Australian Culture
• 14 The concept of national Identity
• 15 Meanings of the Beach, and the Shapinq of an Australian Culture
• 16 Balancing Acts
• 17 Present and Future Challenges
• 18 In Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index