The Beach Versus the Bush : The Sea exhibition, Rex Irwin Gallery, July 19, 2005

Robert Drewe

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There's a line I like in Louis Malle's film " Atlantic City ". Burt Lancaster is strolling along the boardwalk, and he sighs and says: "The Atlantic Ocean was really something then. Yep, you should have seen the Atlantic Ocean in the old days."

I think that's how Australians think about the sea. It's all bound up in nostalgia for the past. "The Pacific Ocean was really something in the old days. "You should have seen Bondi back then, Manly back then, Bronte back then."

As a novelist interested in our history and geography I have conflicting feelings about the past. I've often written bout it, but when I talk about it I'm struck by a strangely familiar feeling -- well beyond déjà vu.

It's the sort of feeling summed up by Barry Humphries as "the anticipatory excitement of dancing with your mother."

In this country, it seems to me, the Good Old Past is always being trotted out for one more waltz.

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Be that as it may, there's no getting away from the fact that the coast, the beach, has a powerful grip on the Australian psyche. I thought this evening I might look at the reasons for that.

I once heard an English academic putting forward his theory that Australia suffers from something called the Swinburne Complex.

The English Victorian poet, critic and keen masochist Algernon Charles Swinburne so adored vigorous surf swimming that the French philosopher-psychologist Gaston Bachelard named a neurosis after him.

Swinburne called the sea "my nursing mother". He reckoned it had a "goodlier breast" than his own mother. It was Swinburne who addressed a wave thus: My lips will feast on the foam of thy lips./Thy sweet hard kisses are strong like wine/Thy large embraces are keen like pain.

According to Bachelard, those neurotics with the Swinburne Complex not only desire the physical struggle against the surf, and the ambivalence of pleasure and pain ("each wave hurts, each one cuts like a whip"), but delight in the dramatic moment that the good and evil of a whole universe come together in the swimmer's/poet's heart. Presumably around the time the body's circulation finally triumphs over the cold water.

If Swinburne were around today he'd probably be president of the Icebergs at Bondi. So does Bachelard's diagnosis hold water for the mental condition of Australians? Well, while we enjoy large Swinburnian doses of salt water, big waves, wet sand and fresh air, the national obsession with the beach stops a bit short of spartan discomfort. That's not what turns Australians on. It's something else, and this is my theory:

The overwhelming reason why at least the last three generations of Australians regard the beach in a sensual and nostalgic light (how shall I put this delicately?) is because they first experienced sex there.

For the rest of their lives, therefore, the beach, the coast, is not only a regular pleasure, but an idee fixe, an obsession that resurfaces at each of the critical physical and emotional stages in their lives: as new lovers, as honeymooners, as annually-vacationing parents, and as the retired elderly.

After all that teenage canoodling in the sandhills or holiday cottages, behind the surf club, on the off-shore islands and in the camping areas, those contemporary Australians who marry invariably honeymoon at the beach. (Heard of anyone honeymooning at Broken Hill? Mount Isa? Kalgoorlie ?)

Later, as parents, our average Australian couples take their families on regular holidays to a favorite beach -- often to the same beach where those earlier events occurred.

(Interestingly, at these annual family beach holidays, parents and children often experience role reversal, the adults shedding their ponderous grown-up habits, playing games and acting the goat, while the children are permitted to stay up late, experiment with alcohol, eat normally-restricted junk food, and perform adult tasks with outboard motors, and so on.)

And finally, in increasingly large numbers, Australians retire to the particular piece of coastline befitting their class and superannuation and, importantly, as Queensland has proved, offering the most lenient death duties.

Incidentally, those people who haven't moved voluntarily to the seafront might find themselves there anyway -- deposited by their children in one of the old people's homes which line the Esplanades and Ocean View Parades of old beach suburbs from Cottesloe to St Kilda to Manly.

And it is from the verandahs and sun terraces of these Sunsets and Eventides , facing mock-optimistically out to sea, the southerly hissing through the ubiquitous Norfolk Island pines, that Australians finally pass into that infinity beyond the horizon (more or less in the direction of New Zealand).

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As if it weren't enough for most Australians to experience the four or five main life stages -- as new lovers, spouses, parents and retirees -- at the beach, ninety per cent of them spend the ordinary troughs of daily life -- living and working, raising their children, going to school -- no more than thirty kilometres from the sea. Not surprisingly their whole sense of national identity and culture is bound up in the coast.

That stereotypical Australian ethos which historians say developed from the deprivation of 19 th century bush workers -- one of taciturn stoicism, practicality and independence -- the Australian Legend -- has irretrievably changed.

These days the national ethos is centred firmly on the seaboard. The Australian spirit, whether residing in the Darling Point barrister, the Gold Coast businessman, the Byron Bay surfer or the Geraldton crayfisherman, is primarily a search for physical and emotional comfort which seems only attainable with a glimpse of water in the mind's eye.

What caused this cultural shift? Hedonism, basically, the love of physical pleasure -- and a certain crusading newspaperman in a neck-to-knee swimming costume.

Frowned on both by authority and the intellectuals, hedonism found the first 120 years of European settlement in Australia heavy going. Physical discomfort was official policy: heavy English clothing was deemed best for a hot and humid climate; ocean swimming in daylight was prohibited as dangerous and immoral.

Then, on the morning of Sunday, October 2, 1902 -- a date with a surprising, if little-known, importance in Australian cultural history -- came the sea-change. On that day the myth of the outback began to give way to the worship of the coast.

The beginning of the end came when William Gocher, a newspaper editor from the Sydney seaside village of Manly , defied the law against daylight surf bathing three Sundays in row in September 1902. Finally, on the morning of October 2, tearing off his frock coat, Gocher plunged once more into the waves in his blue striped costume, shouting to the assembled police, "Take me, take me, I want to fight this case!"

Wading into the surf, they did. And he did. Hedonists and real estate developers, forging a partnership that has prospered ever since, took it from there.

The best example of the effect of William Gocher's provocative ocean dip is to be found in the changing fortunes of what was to become the country's most expensive and prestigious beach residential area, Palm Beach , New South Wales .

Though noticed by Captain Cook and commented upon favourably by the colony's first Governor, Captain Arthur Phillip ("the finest piece of enclosed water I have seen anywhere in the world"), the populace did not find the area especially desirable. Governor Lachlan Macquarie later granted one James Napper 400 acres comprising what are now Palm Beach and Whale Beach . But except for itinerant fishermen, timber cutters, rum smugglers and excise officers, it was untouched and uninhabited by Europeans for more than a century.

In 1900 the owners of the Napper land grant subdivided it, offering buyers the opportunity to find peace and quiet to fish or sail on Pittwater, or paddle their feet on the ocean beach. The developers' assessment of early-20 th century Sydneysiders' desire for solitude and outdoor relaxation was premature. Not one block was sold.

Then the crusading Mr Gocher went swimming at Manly. The hedonists and estate agents, who had been agitating for the regulations prohibiting surf bathing, applied renewed pressure. The law was soon overturned. Interest in hedonism and seaside land grew at once.

Over the next decade the sea-bathing laws were changed right around the coastline. In 1912 the next Palm Beach land sale, by the Barrenjoey Land Company, attracted wide interest. All the choice blocks were sold. Palm Beach was on its way to becoming fashionable. Ocean swimming and body-surfing became the vogue. All over Australia , ordinary people shed their heavy English clothing and dived in. The beach was now desirable terrain.

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If the public eagerly embraced the sea, the intellectual gatekeepers -- the writers and academics -- took another two generations to accept the cultural shift. They were not about to swap the bush for the coast that readily.

Blame the cultural cringe. For half a century after William Gocher's swim, the semi-nude bodies of Australians at the beach alarmed visiting intellectuals (mostly English), and Australian academics, especially English department teachers, often English themselves, aped their attitude. That timid sensualist D.H. Lawrence in particular was both fascinated and frightened by the freedom and hedonism of sun-browned and slippery Australians.

His novel Kangaroo shows his particular nervousness and resentment at the happy athleticism of the teenage boys frolicking on the NSW south coast. He thought they were as "mindless as opossums" and their "thick muscular legs" worried him more than was probably good for him.

But at least Lawrence was honest enough to see that it was the fear of freedom and pleasure in himself that he was fighting. Australian writers, as the late Geoffrey Dutton pointed out in his book The Beach , have also been a "peculiarly dry, puritanical lot." Dutton says, "It's as if our writers were still thinking of the beach as Englishmen, nervous and resentful like Lawrence ."

This moral aversion to the perceived hedonism of the beach was peculiar to the writers. The painters, from Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts and Charles Conder through Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan and every major Australian artist, to the master of Sydney coastal eroticism, Brett Whiteley, have always been fascinated by the coast's artistic possibilities.

So too, quite obviously, have the fine artists on exhibition here this evening: Fred Williams, Jan Senbergs, Henry Mulholland, Robert Dickerson, Louise Boscacci, Terry Matassoni, Fiona Hall, Rex Dupain, Nicholas Harding, Cressida Campbell, Laurence Aberhart, Jon Ellis, Jane Burton, Chris Langlois, Euan Macleod and, it was good to see, John Peter Russell (1858-1930)

Why not the writers? This niggled at me for ages. To take one example cited by Dutton: why did the critics for 100 years ignore Adam Lindsay Gordon's extraordinary poem The Swimmer , published in 1870, and compared favorably to the work of Walt Whitman? Meanwhile Gordon's The Sick Stockrider was encouraged to gallop on and on.

It took until the 1980s for Australian writers to record the shift from a rural to a coastal/city consciousness. Why? Professor George Seddon, of the Centre for Studies of Australian Literature, blames the infamous cultural cringe, especially the over-enthusiastic aping of the established romantic English tradition of William Cobbett, who saw the countryside as the fount of all health and reason.

This tradition, based on the rejection of the insanitary 19 th century English metropolis, was enthusiastically exported to both North America and Australia , where it didn't fit at all but where , bizarrely, it still hangs on, especially among poets.

This was certainly the prevailing literary climate in the early 1980s when such books as Tim Winton's An Open Swimmer and my own The Bodysurfers were first published. The coast still made university English departments uneasy. Especially in Melbourne 's academe, the beach was disliked as personal terrain as much as it was deemed unseemly as a backdrop for fiction.

It was seen as ideologically unsound: a vulgar milieu without any rules or discipline, populated by dumb surfers, vain body-worshippers, sandy children and the hoi polloi. Anglo-Celtic skins burned easily or you got grit in your private parts or dumped by waves. There was the worry about sharks. In other words it epitomised Sydney .

On the other side of the continent, of course, growing up wedged between the Indian Ocean and the desert, thousands of miles from the nearest metropolis, West Australians -- if they thought about it at all -- found it impossible to imagine an Australian culture which did not embrace the ocean and river shores.

Perhaps it was no coincidence that Winton and I were both West Australians, for whom the coast has always represented an Australianness just as valid as the myth of the outback.

Speaking for myself, the outback still has a hold on my sense of national identity. But for me, and I suspect most Australians these days, only the coast provides that irresistible nationalistic combination of bush and ocean.

When I feel most "Australian" is when I see a patch of ocean framed in the branches of a gum tree, an angophora or perhaps a spotted gum. For me, just as "the real Australia " has no other season but summer, "the real Australia " will always be that sensuous zone where the bush meets the sea.

The real Australia , of course, is myth as much as reality. But only the beach provokes that special tingling of the senses that also stands for something else.

Romantics could call it youth, or love -- the sweet frisson of memory that can give bodysurfing another meaning entirely.

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I'm sure the gifted artists represented in "The Sea" would be sympathetic to that point of view. It gives me great pleasure to open this exhibition.

© copyright Robert Drewe 2005

Robert Drewe's latest novel, Grace, was published by Viking/Penguin in August.