°Land, border and contract
The opening paragraphs of “Under the beach, the barbed wire”, still being drafted:
If for a certain imaginary, the beach has often evoked a realm of authenticity hidden under the concrete strata of urban development, capitalist spectacle and exploitation, the relentlessly iconised Australian beach has, in addition, been put to use as proof of egalitarian sentiment and vast democratic horizons. Here, the generic vista of the Western frontier is shorn of its embarrassing wars over land, the guns and forts lined up against the natives, and redrawn as pre-economic, pre-political idyll. Never quite acknowledged as urban but, even so, presented as more urbane and civilised than either rural, uncultivated or desert lands, the space of the beach is assumed to have shaken off the dissensions of politics and economics much as the figurative beachgoer is presumed to effortlessly shed clothing. Like Rousseau’s state of nature, the mystical space-time of the beach operates as both a denial of the nation-state—the presupposition of the contrat social in its legal, political and not least, economic senses—and its naturalisation. And no more pronounced are these projections than in post-colonial spaces such as Australia, where persistent anxieties about unruly savages mingle with dreams of being closer to nature.
Popcultists have long campaigned for ‘the beach’ to be recognised as Australia’s eminent utopia. Some five years ago, Craig McGregor argued that the beach represents “our yearning for a world different from the concrete pavement universe that most of us inhabit for most of our lives. The beach today represents escape, freedom, self-fulfilment, the Right Path. It represents the way our lives should be.” Similarly, John Fiske contended that the beach “is the place where we go on holidays (Holy Days), a place and time that is neither home nor work, outside the profane normality.” It is perhaps not surprising that such homilies have become more pious just as coastal areas have become more developed, increasingly the scene of bloated property values, mortgage anxieties and a burgeoning tourist industry run mostly on precarious labour. Indeed, these hymns to ‘the beach’ are a crucial affective support in this political-economy and these industries. And they leverage affection all the more fiercely when deployed as eulogies or calls to restoration. Therefore, it is in part because beachside suburbs do not provide for an indifferent repose, longed for as both fortress and refuge, that they have become the scenes of overt violence, riot police and emergency ‘lockdown’ laws that seek to restore, by force, the order on which seaside utopics were assembled.
The enchantment of ‘the beach’ in Australia began in the late 1940s—which is to say, in the immediate post-WWII period and at the ideological high point of Fordism and the Keynsian settlement. That post-war accord between unions and employers took shape as a nationalist compact between descendants of the English upper classes and working class Irish. Persuaded by clerical anti-communism, promises of property and class mobility—in the form of the postwar housing ownership boom and university admissions—the latter were seduced into forgetting their genealogy as convicts deported from Britain under policies justified by their depiction as a separate ‘race’. This particular racialisation was set aside with the post-WWII Anglo-Celtic compact, which is the precise meaning of the figure of the Aussie and its egalitarian ethos—which is also an ethnos—of the ‘fair go’. Frozen in that dehistoricised and dreamlike zone after colonisation had been accomplished and before the collapse of the ‘White Australia’ policy in the early 1970s, the ostensible peace and contracted civility of the emblematic beachside has always been contingent on violence and separation, borders and fencelines, property and expropriation.
In the final month of 2005 in Sydney, it was this contingency that would be laid bare and, with recourse to emergency laws, reasserted as necessary for the restoration of what was deemed natural. […]
