Tourism and Australian Beach Cultures

Revealing Bodies

By Christine Metusela, Gordon Waitt

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2012 Christine Metusela and Gordon Waitt
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84541-286-9

Contents

List of Figures,
List of Tables,
Acknowledgements,
Preface,
Maps,
Introduction: Stripping Off,
1 Sex in Private: ‘Bathing in Perfection’,
2 The Public Bathing Reserve: Disciplining the ‘Insatiable Desire to Pose on the Sands’,
3 Rail and Car Mobilities: Technologies of Movement and Touring the Sublime,
4 The ‘Brighton of Australia’ Becomes the ‘Sheffield of the South’: Knowledge, Power and the Production of an ‘Industrial Heartland’ in an ‘Earthly Paradise’,
5 ‘Battle for Honours’: Surf Lifesavers, Masculinity, Performativity and Spatiality,
6 Making Bathing ‘Modern’,
Conclusion,
References,

CHAPTER 1

Sex in Private: ‘Bathing in Perfection’

One autumn morning in 1895, Mr C. Holbrook, was charged for bathing within ‘public view’ of Barney and Manning Streets in Kiama, between 7 am and 8 am with ‘insufficient dress’ (Kiama Independent, 1895). Since 1833, in accordance to Act William I V, bathing during daylight in public view was banned in Sydney Cove and Darling Harbour by the New South Wales Legislative Assembly and extended in 1838 by Act Victoria II to all bathing resorts. In his defence Holbrook pointed to the lack of notification about the bans: ‘No hours for bathing have been put up anywhere; no restrictions and no cautions; nor have any such appeared in any public newspaper or at any conspicuous place’. He went on to argue that: ‘if the Act William IV should now be enforced … then it will discourage visitors from coming to this town, many of whom come partly to bathe in the waves of the sea on beaches’. Holbrook pointed to the European therapeutic discourses to fashion the bodies of bathers, rather than bathing in public being understood as obscene. Mr Holbrook was determined to legalise daylight bathing from the beach, and redefine the signification of bathing bodies at colonial bathing resorts as the sight of the middle-class body at play. Holbrook was fined under the Towns Police Act (Kiama Independent, 1895). Daylight bathing became a site of contest between colonisers.

Since the opening of the first guest houses in the 1850s, the Port of Kiama, some 120 kilometres south of Sydney, was a popular bathing resort for affluent Sydneysiders who travelled by steamship to bathe in ocean baths. For Kiama, tourism in the 1850s was an important industry, alongside quarrying of blue metal and dairy farming (McDermott, 2005). Unlike the beaches of Sydney, the ocean baths of Kiama had not generated letters to the media from tourists or residents complaining of witnessing naked bodies as obscene. At Kiama, a sense of rightness and respectably was embedded through the designed layout of the ocean baths. During the late 19th century,allegations of the obscene were shielded against by keeping ‘his’ and ‘her’ bathing facilities not only in separate spaces in this bathing resort, but also hidden from public view. At Kiama, the act of bathing for the colonial gentry was shielded by a zone of privacy.

The aim of this chapter is to explore the daylight bathing ban. Why was bathing banned during daylight hours in the colony of New South Wales? How did bathing resorts respond to the ban on daylight bathing? Did the daylight bathing ban stop people from visiting bathing resorts? To answer these questions it is necessary to explore how bodies in public view at the beach were positioned through the interconnections between bathing, nakedness, sexuality and gender. At the most basic level the chapter examines nakedness. Rob Cover (2003: 55) argues that in the Judeo-Christian biblical tradition, nakedness ‘was inseparable from sex and sexuality’, and was ‘located adjacent to the indecent, the obscene and the immoral’. In the Judeo-Christian biblical tradition nakedness is understood as the exposure of the genitals and cannot be separated from sexuality. As argued by Cover (2003), for nakedness to occur in the presence of a second party, it required establishing different sets of ideas or context within which nakedness could be shared for practical or pleasurable purposes. David Bell and Ruth Holliday (2000) outlined that in Britain until the mid-1800s, social nudity amongst men was the norm for bathers in many bathing resorts. The exposure to the sea was understood as ‘therapeutic rather than pornographic’ (Bell & Holliday, 2000: 132). In Australian colonial society, the naked bathing body on the beach became invested with classed, sexual and racial meanings. There was a spectrum of readings of nakedness that require registering.

Consequently, this chapter necessarily adopts a focus on empire. Ideas, fashions and technologies exported from Britain forged the establishment of resorts for the colonial gentry. Ocean baths were built informed by understandings of bathing as a therapeutic, pleasurable practice. As in England, bathing could occur at colonial bathing resorts amongst the gaze of others as a therapeutic practice without sexuality or shame. However, also exported from Britain were the ideologies, morals, values, habits, ideas and fashions that shaped the limits of race, gender and sexuality. This chapter explores how for the colonial gentry, bathing in public troubled the limits of race, class and gender.

The chapter draws on Judith Butler’s understanding of gender as:

the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being. (Butler, 1990: 33)

Butler argued that:

acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. This also suggests that if that reality is fabricated as an interior essence, that very interiority is an effect and function off a decidedly public and social discourse. (Butler, 1990: 136, italics in original)

Repeated performances of expected behaviours establish regulatory practices for bodies in the surf. Particular attention is given to how bathing bodies at the beach in the colony of New South Wales were rendered ‘obscene’ by bourgeois society. Bathing bodies at the beach were beyond accepted codes of public visibility. Bathing bodies subverted hegemonic sexed, gendered and classed construction of masculinity and caused ‘bathing trouble’. This chapter explores the competing sets of ideas that defined bathing bodies at the beach. Turning attention to how gender is constituted through the performance of expected behaviours illustrates how gender is always unstable. From the 1830s, bathing bodies at the beach became a site where bourgeois conceptions of masculinity required constant securing.

The chapter is divided into two main sections. The first section examines the emergence and transformation of the bathing resort in Britain, specifically Brighton. Two transformations of the bathing resort are discussed, the medical beach and the pleasure beach. At the end of the 19th century, Brighton is argued to be an anomalous place where pleasure in part was derived from the playing with and challenging of the boundaries between moral and immoral sexualities.

The second section examines how the touristic desires, pleasures and practices of the English bathing resort were then exported through colonisation to the Illawarra; along with compulsory heterosexuality, race, social stratification, clock-time, bathing machines and rail. Ideas about the colonial bathing resort were deeply embedded in British society, but were transformed and distorted in the colonial context of New South Wales. Insights are given to how a peculiarly colonial version of the bathing resort arose in the Illawarra in the first decades of the 1800s because of how public displays of the body were constructed as obscene. Daylight bathing bans did not prevent the emergence of colonial bathing resorts. The bathing body of initially women, and later men, were simply hidden from public view in ocean baths behind fences. Bathing bodies were constituted as ostensibly non-sexual by virtue of excluding the gaze of the opposite sex through segregated bathing and the medical–moral gaze that shifted the focus of ‘purity’ from a moral question to a medical one. Bathing bodies in ocean baths that remained hidden from public view affirmed hegemonic constructions of gender for middle-class men and women. Men retained their dignity. Women retained their modesty. However, by the late 1800s, increasing number of bathers refused to comply with the daylight bathing ban. These bodies were defined in letters to the editors of the Illawarra and Sydney press as obscene because they broke the accepted codes of public visibility. Men in authority positioned the nude bodies of daylight bathers as examples of vice, social chaos, moral depravity and ‘unmanly’ behaviour.

Brighton, England

In England, investigating the touristic practice of sea bathing has already been cogently outlined by John Urry (1990) and John Walton (1983). Both Urry and Walton traced the touristic cultures of sea bathing that gave rise to bathing resorts to the intersection of sets of ideas about class, gender and health. The cultural history of the English beach resort was dependent upon the stratification of society through imposing class allegiances, sensibilities, values and tastes. They point to how the growth of the English bathing resort in the early 1800s enabled the aristocracy to remain distinguishable as social actors. The aristocratic clientele of popular English spa towns, such as Bath and Harrogate, were lured away to the sea after the spa became an appropriated model of middle-class self-hood. The spa town was one way respectable middle-class men and women defined themselves through appropriating classed sensibilities and touristic consumption practices: ‘the spa habit spreading to the less polished of the gentry and the urban middle ranks’ (Walton, 1983: 8). Dennis Jeans (1990) described how bathing resorts in early 19th century England, such as Brighton, Scarborough and Weymouth, not only replaced the spas such as Bath, as fashionable leisure destinations, but they also were shaped by an ubiquitous knowledge of class, gender, moral and health dynamics.

According to Jeans (1990: 277) the aristocracy followed royalty to the seaside ‘beginning with the Prince Regent at Brighton’. In 1783, the prince was first taken to the coast to ‘sample’ the benefits of salt water and sea air. In the late 18th century the working beach of Brighthelmstone fishers was transformed into the medical beach of Brighton. The medical beach from which the gentry bathed became a temporarily domesticated space through the rituals of serving tea and picnicking. Bathing could occur among the medical gaze of others without sexuality by virtue of how bodies were framed and policed through carefully constructed codes of behaviour.

Drawing on Butler’s (1990) concept of the embodied performative subject, the body is performed along the lines of highly stylised codes of behaviour which stabilise the semblance of subjecthood. Health practitioners produced one such way of performing and viewing the bathing subject. A whole genre of medical manuscripts advocated sea water. For example, Sir John Floyer, author of History of Cold Bathing, ‘recommended the cold bath for nearly every malady in the medical dictionary’ (Booth, 2001: 23). First published in 1702, Floyer’s work reached its fifth edition by 1722 (Walton, 1983). According to Walton (1983: 11–12) a treatise written by Dr Richard Russell ‘on the uses of sea-water as a near-panacea’, took sea water ‘from the status of an uncertain fringe medicine to that of a sovereign remedy’. In the context of bathing resorts, the medicalised discourse of the quality of sea water and sea air as a ‘cure-all’, as a match for any ‘disorder’ worked against the relationship between bathing subjects and bathing resort erotics. Instead, medical discourses framed how the bathing body was dressed, looked at, spoken about and publically made visible as a ‘patient’.

From the late 1700s, bathing machines appeared as essential part of sea bathing etiquette at fashionable bathing resorts in England and elsewhere in Europe. The bathing machine was a wooden dressing-shed on wheels. Normally, horses were employed to roll the bathing machine into the ocean. In Europe, the bathing machine was a popular response to the circulation of narratives of feminine vulnerability and respectability. Women’s access to public space was restricted by narratives that suggested ‘the public’ was an inherently dangerous place and reiterated the domestic as being safe. Hence, if women were to have access to feminine respectability, they either had to stay in the domestic realm, or be careful how they moved and appeared in public.

The ritualistic behaviours of the bathing machine worked to constrain the performative body so women could access feminine respectability. Working within a framework of heterosexuality, restriction of sexual arousal or activity was assumed to occur through gender segregation. Men and women were therefore normally segregated. Furthermore, disciplined by codes of respectable femininity, women bathed fully clothed to prevent even the barest glimpse of naked flesh.

The codes and rituals that inform the embodied performative subject of the bathing machine can be understood as efforts to ensure that ocean bathing, nor gazing upon bathing bodies were construed as sexual. The production of ‘the respectable’ was also bound up with restriction of mobility and the authorisation of the private spaces of bathing machine as legitimate spaces to bathe. Despite the codes and conventions that worked to separate bathing and bathing resorts from the sexual, there was always difficulty in preventing slippage between the sexual and non-sexual frames. Indeed, the unfolding popularity and pleasures of the bathing resort can in part be attributed to the instability of maintaining the discrete separation of the sexual and non-sexual.

By the mid-1850s the discursive framing of the medical beach was replaced by the pleasure beach (Shields, 1991). As Shields (1991); Urry (1990); Walton (1983); and Ward and Hardy (1986) all concurred, the regular visits of the Prince Regent (who became King George IV in 1820) to Brighthelmstone (Brighton) and the building of the Royal Pavilion to entertain Regency society, helped make visiting the beach both fashionable and pleasurable. As Rob Shields pointed out, the aristocrats fleeing the French Revolution bolstered the Prince’s entourage, transforming ‘the Brighthelmstone summers into a round of social events which rivalled the “Seasons” at Bath, not to mention those earlier in the century at Versailles’ (Shields, 1991: 76). In the 1800s the gentry living in London visited Brighton as a weekend retreat. Pleasure resorts were about seeing and being seen. Many men and women travelled to bathing resorts to put themselves on display. Indeed, promenading gave rise in the 1800s to fashions only to be worn during a visit to a bathing resort (Haug, 2005). The way promenading was performed under the gaze of others operated to play with the boundaries of moral and immoral heterosexualities. As Debbie Ann Doyle argued, pleasure resorts of the mid- and late 1800s were ‘complicated moral landscapes where people flirted with the line between playful sensuality and improper behaviour’ (Doyle, 2005: 95).

Shields (1991) argued that Brighton as a pleasure resort became a place of sanctioned bodily excess, whereas Sally Munt (1995: 114) positioned Brighton as a site of sexual ambiguity, noting the ‘camp, effeminate façades … the orbicular tits of King George’s Pavilion’. Both agree that the pleasure beach of Brighton in the late 1800s was a space where conventional moral regulations of the social order were temporarily suspended. The 1800s permissiveness facilitated the presence of pornography, prostitution, free love and homosexuality. Shields argued that accepted codes of public visibility could be challenged in Brighton in comparison with ‘the more closely governed realms of the nation – the productive industrial areas, the “serious” world of London and the Parliament, or the “innocent” arcadian spaces of the agricultural counties’ (Shields, 1991: 74). Consequently, he positioned Brighton as a marginal and liminal space, where cultural, social and spatial boundaries dissolve. Sue Morgan (2007) explored how the work of one evangelical religious association – The Ladies’ Associations for the Care of Friendless Girls(LACFGs) was to reconfigure the cultural boundaries of feminine respectability in Victorian Brighton. She discussed how LACFGs sought out ‘immoral’ behaviour in Brighton, offering lectures in chastity education. By drawing upon dominant Victorian ideologies of women as the spiritual and moral superior of men, the LACFG movement reappropriated Christian forms of respectable femininity bounded up in the reproduction of domestic space: virtue, pious motherhood, sanctity of the family, purity of the home, sacredness of marriage and loftiness of romantic heterosexual love.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Tourism and Australian Beach Cultures by Christine Metusela, Gordon Waitt. Copyright © 2012 Christine Metusela and Gordon Waitt. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.