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Tourism and Australian Beach Cultures: Revealing Bodies
Author(s): Christine Metusela (Author), Gordon Waitt (Author)
- Publisher: Channel View Publications
- Publication Date: 15 April 2012
- Edition: Illustrated
- Language: English
- Print length: 192 pages
- ISBN-10: 1845412850
- ISBN-13: 9781845412852
Book Description
This book explores the ever-changing interconnections between bodies, subjectivities, space, beach cultures and tourism, engaging with the geographies of the beach: its makings, boundaries and meanings for the West. Drawing on feminist scholarship, Christine Metusela and Gordon Waitt explore the reciprocal relationship between bodies and beaches, focusing on the shifting intersection between age, race, class, sex, gender and national discourses that naturalise particular bodies as belonging on the beach. The authors critically examine how subjectivities of bodies are produced under specific circumstances - the Illawarra beaches from 1830-1940, some 80 kilometres beyond the metropolitan centre of Sydney. Drawing on modernisation and nation building discourses, the paradoxical qualities of the Illawarra are highlighted; imagined as both the New Brighton of Australia and the Sheffield of the South.
Editorial Reviews
Review
The book is an insightful contribution to this area and the authors are to be congratulated on the informed research and analysis this book makes to the study of leisure, tourism and geography.
The insights into the sexualization of the beach and attempts to control that process make Tourism and Australian Beach Cultures an enriching and worthwhile read.
This book is an engaging synthesis of social theories that draws on well-chosen and exciting historical examples from the Illawarra, New South Wales. Explaining the ways in which gendered, sexualised, classed, and racialised bodies and beaches are intimately related, the book is full of ideas and fabulous images, and is at once accessible and challenging. Body politics are shown to be integral to the tourism spaces of beach resorts. Crucially, Christine Metusela and Gordon Waitt's book is a key intervention into the limited critical historical and geographical analyses and practices of beach resorts. It will be of interest to social and cultural geographers, tourism scholars, as well as historians who need to enrich their geographical imaginations.
This book picks up from feminist discourse on bodies and processes of marginalization to enhance tourism studies and cultural geography approaches to the Illawarra between 1830 and 1940. It describes the related contested sexual politics of the time, and how individual bodies became included or excluded from the beach, depending on how they were sexualized, gendered, racialized, and classed. This not only provides a good introduction to the historical development of Australian beach culture. The example of the beach also makes the works of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler and their particular notions of gender trouble, here 'beach trouble', and governmentality accessible to a wider readership. The book provides a good introduction for students and other people interested in these topics.
Tourism and Australian Beach Cultures is an original, sophisticated and revealing history of the 'geographical imaginary' of the Australian beach, which carefully maps the cultural and spatial politics which helped to shape the bodies displayed on it.
About the Author
Christine Metusela is an early career researcher currently conducting research for Neuroscience Research Australia and the University of New South Wales on projects funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council that address key questions about Aboriginal health and ageing and improving service provision for early onset dementia. Her PhD thesis explored social geographies of the beach. In particular, it focused on the transformations of the social relationships that forged the Illawarra beaches in NSW, Australia as a leisure and tourism space.
Gordon Waitt is Associate Professor in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Wollongong, New South Wales. He is part of a larger team of researchers at the Australian Centre for Cultural Environmental Research (AUSCCER). His research interests include gender, sexuality, place, cultures and tourism. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters he co-authored Introducing Human Geography (Longman-Pearson Education Australia, 2000) and Gay Tourism: Culture and Context (Haworth Press, 2006).
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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: 978-1-84541-285-2
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...
