Robert Drewe has spent much of his career as an author writing about the beach in one way or another. Siboney Duff reviews his latest book, which explores the intense relationship Australians have with their coast-line.
The Beach: An Australian Passion by Robert Drewe; National Library of Australia, 244pp, rrp $39.99
Few things are as quintessentially Australian as our relationship with those strips of sandy shore that separate this great land from its oceanic surrounds. Whether of the golden and grainy variety or one so finely powdered it squeals underfoot, it is to the beach that we as a nation are invariably drawn, to frolic and laze, to fish and commune, to swim and stroll and simply be.
Robert Drewe, one of Australia’s most prominent and critically-acclaimed literary authors, knows this only too well. Growing up on Australia’s western coast, he fell prey to the lure of salt air and sun-kissed beaches as a child and young man. When he moved across the continent to settle at Australia’s most easterly point, the love affair continued. And a love affair it is, imbued with the adoration, seduction, and deep respect that marks all good and lasting love affairs. Read any one of the stories peppered throughout The Beach: An Australian Passion and you’ll get a sense of what I’m referring to. Read them all, and you’ll fall as deeply in love with our beaches as Drewe so clearly has – that’s if you’re not already a devotee.
I jumped at the chance to review this book. It contains everything I adore – astute and lyrical prose, brilliant photography, and a specific focus on our beaches. I knew I was in for a treat; what I didn’t expect was an education. From the opening pages, I was transported into an Australian landscape and context that was alien to me. I thought I knew our beaches and their significance in terms of our national psyche. But, like photographing a floating slab of Antarctica and thinking you’ve captured an iceberg, what I knew was but my own (distinctly limited) experience of our coast.
I wasn’t alive at the height of Australia’s whaling industry; nor was I around when Australia’s 17th Prime Minister, Harold Holt, disappeared in 1967 off Cheviot Beach, Victoria. I’ve never fished for tuna in a boat barely large enough to carry one man and the only umbrellas I see on the beach these days are made of nylon and spring into shape like mass-produced neon igloos. I’ve never stepped inside the shed of an early 20th century pearl diver, and – to my great regret – I’ve never seen men wearing one piece bathers. Yet as I poured through The Beach I was entranced. Each page contained a new story, a new perspective on our relationship with our watery border. And despite the dozens of stories that were new to me, many others were so replete with my own brand of nostalgia – the denim flares, the long boards, the string bikinis – that memories of my own sand-encrusted childhood came swimming back to me, smelling of the sea.
In writing the stories and collating the images for this book, Drewe’s love of the beach is apparent. Indeed, I cannot think of a man better placed to trace the trajectory of our cultural fascination with the coast, bringing to it as he does both a deep fascination with our beaches and an irreverent take on the Australian culture that dwells at our island fringe.
Picture Collection, National Library of Australia.
Our beaches have become as iconic a feature of our landscape as our flat and arid outback – perhaps even more so. It is to our beaches that residents and tourists alike flock, towels draped over shoulders, smiles already beaming, salt air wending its way through loose locks and across crimson shoulders. Known even to those who have never stepped foot on our shores, our beaches are synonymous with our national identity and intricately woven into our social fabric. In The Beach: An Australian Passion, Robert Drewe manages to enrich this relationship, to pay homage to the rich tapestry that is our mottled history with the beach, and to reinvigorate a life-long love affair with sand and salt water.
