Sydney Beaches : A History 9781742246840, 9781742232898

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Caroline Ford has been reading and writing about the history of beaches and beach cultures for over ten years. An Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney’s Department of History, Caroline has worked as a research historian at Surf Life Saving Australia and as a cultural heritage researcher for the NSW Government where she now provides policy advice. Caroline was awarded the 2009 NSW Archival Research Fellowship to write this book.  Caroline was first captivated by the beach at Cronulla, and later developed a connection to Bondi, Gordons Bay and more recently Coogee. Her next challenge is to overcome her fear of the surf.

The American heavyweight wrestler Jim Browning poses on Manly Beach with two bathing beauties in 1929. He was one of many international tourists to Sydney for whom a visit to the beach was essential.

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There it was, the whole Pacific, cobalt, glittering richly, tossing itself in foam-laced breakers … It was magnificent and lonely, and the very essence of all blueness and sunshine. Ruth Park The Harp in the South

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Caroline Ford

Sydney

Beaches A history

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Contents Introduction: Making waves 1 Battle for the beach 2 Surf city

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3 A canvas sea change

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4 Castles in the sand

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5 The shark menace

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6 A military invasion

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7 Young and restless

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8 Surfing in sewage

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9 A shifting shoreline

254

Epilogue: Beyond the breakers Acknowledgments Notes

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Picture credits

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Selected bibliography

Index

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A NewSouth book Published by NewSouth Publishing University of New South Wales Press Ltd University of New South Wales Sydney NSW 2052 AUSTRALIA newsouthpublishing.com © Caroline Ford 2014 First published 2014 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Author: Ford, Caroline. Title: Sydney beaches: a history/Caroline Ford. ISBN: 9781742232898 (paperback) ISBN: 9781742246840 (ePDF) Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Subjects: Beaches – New South Wales – Sydney – History. Beaches – Australia – History. Recreation – Australia – History. Sydney (N.S.W.) – History. Dewey Number: 994.41

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body, and by the NSW Government through Arts NSW and State Records NSW. Design Di Quick Cover design Sandy Cull Cover images Olive Cotton, ‘Beach Snapshot’, 1938, courtesy Olive Cotton Family and Josef Lebovic Gallery, Sydney Map David Atkinson, handmademaps.com Permission to quote from The Harp in the South by Ruth Park courtesy of copyright owner Kemalde Pty Ltd, c/ Tim Curnow, Literary Agent, Sydney. Printer 1010 Printing Group, China All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard. This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests. Sutherland Shire Council has assisted the author of this publication with funding through its 2014 Heritage Publications Grants Program for the purpose of enabling authors to contribute to scholarship concerning the history and development of the Sutherland Shire. However, the facts, opinions and imputations contained in this work are not those of Council and are not in any way endorsed by Council in respect of accuracy or otherwise. Council expressly disclaims and accepts no liability of any kind in respect of this work or its contents.

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An artist’s reflection (ca 1880) captures the transformation of the Tamarama gully from untamed scrub into carefully landscaped ‘pleasure grounds’ under the auspices of the Royal Bondi Aquarium. The fish and marine creatures on display here captivated visitors.

An idyllic portrayal of Bronte Beach by Charles Conder, depicting people on the sand just a few years after the beach had been reclaimed for public use. Nearby Coogee Beach had also been the muse of artists including Conder, Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton in the late 19th century.

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A sensational balloon ascent up to 900 metres by the daring French Canadian, Alphonse Stewart, before he cut himself free and descended by parachute. In January 1908, his terrifying tricks brought new crowds to Wonderland City at Tamarama.

Right Real estate advertisements featuring the beach entice Sydney’s wealthy residents to purchase a holiday home at Palm Beach on the northern tip of the Barrenjoey Peninsula in the 1920s.

Left The Warringah Council’s optimistic plans for the Long Reef headland long before it was a golf course included sporting fields, tearooms and camping and residential leases. But the latter conflicted with the government’s intentions for this ‘people’s park’.

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Bronzed, healthy and attractive young men and women – surf lifesavers and ‘beach girls’ – were fodder for local marketing campaigns from the 1920s, used to represent Australia in international tourism and immigration campaigns by the government and corporate bodies.

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Marketing posters depicting new coastal subdivisions in the 1930s emphasise the appeal of beachfront living. Blocks like these at Cronulla were hot property and also gave councils the opportunity to resume essential beachfront land. The Australian Women’s Weekly romanticises the presence of the military on Australia’s beaches during World War II. The soldiers and the barbed wire fortifications did little to deter recreational beachgoers.

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Once the preserve of surf lifesavers, ocean swims have become a popular part of Sydney’s summer calendar. Swimmers of all ages and levels of fitness compete against each other and test themselves against the ocean.

Signs like this one near Dee Why lagoon confronted beachgoers across the Sydney coast during the 1980s. Gradually, greater scrutiny of sewage pollution and scientific evidence of health risks compelled governments to act on pollution incidents more often.

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Only their hold on a chain stops these daring young men from being swept away by giant waves over jagged rocks at Bronte Baths.

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A little girl skips along the sand unconcerned about the dominating presence of police on the beach in the wake of the 2005 Cronulla riots.

Thousands of Sydneysiders and tourists flock to the stretch of coast between Tamarama and Bondi each year for the annual Sculpture by the Sea exhibition, a free outdoor art event for which the ocean and coastline offer a spectacular backdrop.

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Introduction: Making waves

In 1867, Sydney journalist FS Wilson strode out from Sydney’s South Head for Bondi Beach.

This was no leisurely stroll along concrete footpaths and manicured lawns. It was a ‘scramble … of rough excitement’: Heading abrupt, precipitous bays, sliding down cavities, and ‘barking’ your limbs over rocks and boulders, threading old watercourses, and pushing sturdily through no less sturdy masses of scrub, are the varieties of a walk, toilsome enough it is true, but rendered pleasant by the bright sky overhead, the healthy salt wind blowing lusty and strong from the ocean, and the sonorous boom of the breakers beneath the cliffs.

Wilson arrived at Bondi to a stunning scene of ‘milk-white’ sand and ‘myriads of delicate shells’ that contrasted against an ocean that ‘rolls and roars, and frets and fumes’. On the northern headland, he wrote, the ‘heavy rollers dash madly

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on the rocky basement of the cliff, and up shoots a silvery shower of spray; and as the sun is now at our backs, we see rainbow after rainbow disporting in the floating mist’. This was a place of fishers, metal-stone quarries, quiet moss pools, lovers, ‘pleasant nooks and picnic parties’. Gazing on the beach, Wilson fondly recalled the Bondi of his youth, when on this same shore, ‘we had an arm round the form of one we loved,’ and saw their glowing reflections in the glassy surface of the rockpools.1 The beach Wilson described seems a world away from the Sydney coast of the 21st century. This beach had no surfers, no surf lifesavers, and certainly no sunbathers. It was a privately owned space on which Wilson and his fellow beachgoers were technically trespassing. The beach was enclosed by seemingly endless sandhills that soared high above the surf. Cattle grazed on this vital reservoir of sand that has now virtually disappeared. And it is not only the sandhills that have gone. Across Sydney, many of the lagoons and swamps that flowed into the surf have vanished too, replaced by suburbia, parks, golf courses and car parks for beachgoers. The occasional fisher can still be found but they are no longer lonely figures on the beach. They have been crowded out by surfers and swimmers, exercise classes, ocean swimmers and pram pushers. The beaches may have changed but our relationship to the ocean, the beaches and the coast is not so different. Walking along cliff tops and beaches remains popular across Sydney, as a form of exercise and an opportunity to enjoy the coastal scenery and reflect on life. The beach also continues to be seen as a healthy space and swimming in the surf as a healthy activity. Wilson’s lovers and picnic parties would not be out of place on today’s Bondi Beach, nor would the children of his friends, the Fitzfubbs, who were keen to enjoy a ‘dabble in the surf’. Would the wish of Wilson’s pale-faced former companion, Lizzie Cottenham, ‘that she might take her last long rest within sound of the ocean, and within the shadow of its headlands’, be so different to wishing that one’s ashes be scattered in the surf of a favourite beach or buried in Waverley cemetery overlooking the ocean south of Bronte? It is these and countless other continuities between past and present ways of

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using and imagining our beaches that shape and enrich the fabric of Sydney’s modern beach culture. In the century and a half since Wilson’s Bondi ramble, Sydney’s beaches have become legendary. To an international audience, they are synonymous with the city and nation, a reputation that inspired the construction of an Olympic beach volleyball stadium on Bondi Beach in 2000. The broad-reaching fame of our beaches lured the makers of the television series Baywatch to try and create an Australian franchise on Avalon Beach, and ensured the international success of one of Australia’s longest running television ‘soap operas’, Home and Away, filmed partly on Palm Beach. Among surfers, Sydney’s beaches earned international acclaim long before Victoria’s Bells Beach became a household name. The first international surfing championship was held on Manly Beach and, in perhaps a higher honour, North Narrabeen was the only non-American stretch of surf to be named in the 1963 Beach Boys classic, ‘Surfin’ USA’. Bondi epitomises Sydney’s beaches and is the best known here and abroad. But each of Sydney’s beaches has its own appeal, its own local culture and its own story to tell. Sydney beaches are popularly imagined as glorious places where there is a celebration of sun, sand and surf, where surf lifesavers keep watch over swimmers, sunbathers gently fry on the sand, surfers tear up the waves and busloads of tourists roll up their pants to wade. But peer a little closer and Sydney’s famed beach culture is not so harmonious. Residents and beachgoers fought to stop the Olympic volleyball stadium from being built at Bondi Beach, and chased the Baywatch crew and its money out of Sydney. In recent decades surf lifesavers faced increasing threats of litigation, a group of Maroubra surfers became more famous out of the surf than in, an altercation between lifesavers and visitors to Cronulla led to alcohol-fuelled race riots and conflicts arose over fitness addicts’ apparent domination of the early morning sand. And sunbathers, even away from the beach, face a barrage of confronting images warning of the potentially mortal consequences of tanning. The myth of the beach is undermined in other ways. Not all Sydneysiders

Introduction: Making waves

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love the beach enough to fight over it. For some it’s too far away from home or it is less convenient than the local municipal pool. Many people (myself included, I must confess) prefer sheltered harbour and bay beaches where the waves roll in on gentle undulating swells, to the heavy surf of the city’s ocean beaches. The beach can also be distinctly unpleasant for even its most ardent fans: bluebottles, masses of seaweed in the surf, wind-blown sand whipping against bare limbs, ‘dumping’ surf, rips, sunburn, nippy sea breezes, shark alarms, polluted water or, at its extreme, a syringe in the sand. All of these have the potential to ruin a day at the beach. Dark shadows in the water may play on the mind of those sensitive to the presence of sharks. People also sometimes die or are severely injured on Sydney’s beaches, although there are fewer fatal drownings in the surf than there were a century ago and the occurrence of shark attacks has also been reduced. This is a side to Sydney’s beaches that is more likely to feature in a Bill Bryson travel story than in any home-grown tourism campaigns.2 Despite these hazards, the beach continues to stand as a symbol not just of Australia, but of Sydney. Central to our beloved beach culture is the assumption that beaches are free and open to all, and that there is a particular character to the Australian beach ethos that sets it apart from the experience overseas. This book explores how and why that character emerged.

The evolution of a modern Australian beach culture, and a modern Australian beachscape, is more complex than often realised. Historians have pointed to the legalisation of daylight bathing on Sydney’s beaches in the early 20th century as the birth of modern Australian beach culture, and to the hedonistic interwar years as the heyday of the beach in the making of Australia. The beaches

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of the 19th century, in contrast, are sometimes presumed to be relics of British traditions, awkwardly imported to Australian shores only to be shrugged off when we awakened to the possibilities of sun and surf in the years following federation. Yet even in the 19th century a particularly local beach culture was beginning to emerge. In Sydney the beach was not for holidays but for the day. The easy accessibility of Sydney’s coast from the city, and the shorter Australian working hours, also meant there has been a longer tradition of mingling of the classes at Sydney beaches than at many beaches elsewhere. The beach really did seem to be there for everyone. At the same time, some of the most treasured Australian ways of using and understanding the beaches are rooted in British and European ideas about the coast. The colonists brought with them a strong faith in the inherent healthiness of the coast, a view still strongly held. The British public parks movement, which advocated open recreation spaces for urban workers, was similarly important. When Sydneysiders dived into the surf en masse in the early 20th century they did so with an eye on the health benefits of their new favourite activity and an absolute conviction that they had a right to enjoy the city’s beaches, sentiments echoed through bipartisan political support. As the century progressed, Sydney’s beaches became synonymous with a culture firmly based in the surf rather than on the sand. Surf lifesavers came into being in 1907, locally conceived saviours to the new beach sport. They would soon assume greater significance as an ideal national type in an era when the hedonistic attitudes and healthy bodies on the nation’s beaches were celebrated as representing Australia. This is a well-known narrative of Australian beach history but other equally important elements were always there, too, if not at the forefront. The beach had to be fought for – against pollution from sewage and cheap rubbish disposal and against the encroachment of Surfers Paradise-style development – battles that continue. It also had to be claimed back from private ownership and from agricultural and industrial uses.

Introduction: Making waves

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Although barely reflected in the documentary record, Aboriginal people’s continuing use of Sydney’s beaches – as a place where they lived, played, travelled and harvested food and shells for making commercial souvenirs – is also an important part of the history and ongoing story of Sydney’s beaches that is thousands of years old. That many of Sydney’s beaches have Aboriginal names should serve as just one reminder that Aboriginal people’s connections with the Sydney coast did not end with the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, or with colonial coastal settlement over the 19th century, but continue to be part of a shared culture of the beach. Sydney’s geography and geology also distinguished its beaches from other urban beach cultures around Australia. With its relatively small beaches divided by cliffy headlands, Sydney’s coast is unlike the long surf beaches of Queensland and Western Australia, or the gentle bay beaches close to Melbourne and Adelaide. Perth is the only other Australian capital to boast glittering surf beaches within just a few kilometres of the metropolitan centre. What is often thought of as Australia’s beach culture is really found only in Sydney and Perth.

From their love of the beach, Sydneysiders have developed an attachment to their beaches that has a political dimension.3 It has led to community action and continues to challenge governments at all levels. This side to the history of Sydney’s beaches offers new context for properly understanding the issues intrinsic to coastal zone management – principally, the likely impact of development and managing public beach access and private property rights, which means finding a way through the clouded legal basis for the ‘right’ to public beach access. As this book will show, the sense of a public right to the beach is

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founded on a shared cultural understanding, developed and fought for over the late 19th and early 20th centuries, rather than embedded in a foundation of law. Sydney Beaches probes the political, cultural, economic, environmental and social forces that have shaped Sydney’s beaches over the past two centuries. The focus is three-fold. Firstly it explores the people who shaped the beaches, emphasising the ways in which these very public spaces have become intertwined with individual lives, including stories of loss and grief. The contributions individual beachgoers, local communities and organisations made to changing the political landscape – largely untold stories – are central to the story. Secondly, this book scrutinises the issues that have concerned those who battled over the beaches. Perhaps the most influential was the drive for public access to the beaches. First voiced in the early 1860s in a fight to retain Crown ownership of Bronte Beach, the insistence by beachgoers that they had a right to access all of the city’s beaches for free shaped popular and official perspectives towards the beach. It ultimately secured free public access to all Sydney’s ocean beaches. Other battles took place over the limits of that free access. And then there have always been those who have recognised in Australia’s beaches relatively untapped commercial potential. The environment, too, has been a continuing concern, the use and misuse of Sydney’s beaches over a century and a half dividing coastal communities, beachgoers and governments. Thirdly, the book examines the two-way relationship between nature and culture as it has played out on the beach – how the environment affects use and how use affects the beaches themselves. Sydney’s beaches may appear to be largely natural spaces but they are cultural landscapes. They have been shaped by, and are artefacts of, a long history of use by the settler society. The rockpools, seawalls, pathways and parks have been shaped, built and rebuilt to create a coastal landscape that caters to the recreation of a city. But what has this meant for the beach? Sydney Beaches delves into all the beaches of Sydney’s ocean coast from Palm Beach in the north to the Cronulla beaches in the south – those surf

Introduction: Making waves

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beaches that define the Australian beach. It is not a comprehensive history of each beach but rather an account of past lives, events and experiences across the coast. It is the story of how a city’s coastline became shaped by a shared idea about what a beach should be.

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1 Battle for the beach Nestled between high sandstone cliffs roughly midway between Bondi and Bronte beaches on Sydney’s east coast, Tamarama Beach, with just 80 metres of shoreline, is one of the city’s smallest and most dangerous beaches.

Perched on the northern headland guarding the beach, the Tamarama Surf Life Saving Club (SLSC) building doubles as a yoga studio. The beach is home to some of Sydney’s most serious surf-swimmers, surfers and sunbathers. A park behind the beach, roughly three hectares in size, hosts picnickers, café visitors and exercise enthusiasts who ‘run the stairs’. But the park is more commonly viewed from above, by the thousands who tread the path along the coast between Bondi and Coogee each week and who watch for migrating whales from there during the winter months. Each spring the beach, park and headlands are transformed into an outdoor exhibition space by an annual art event, Sculpture by the Sea, which attracts dense and chaotic crowds of school-groups, families and tourists, to the frustration of locals who find

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‘their’ space temporarily invaded by people who are not even interested in the beach. Although the lack of nearby parking restricts visitors, Tamarama Beach is, like all Sydney beaches, open to all. This is despite the sense of exclusivity that surrounds the beach, inspiring the tag ‘Glamarama’, which referred to the renowned beauty of the regulars in the 1990s. Access is free, as are the toilets, changing facilities and lifesaving services. But this freedom has a surprisingly complex history. It should not be taken for granted. In the late 19th century, this same space was not freely accessible. From 1887, Tamarama’s northern headland and the beach and gully below were occupied by the self-proclaimed ‘Royal’ Bondi Aquarium and Pleasure Grounds, a commercial enterprise that took its name from the beach’s more famous northern neighbour in a confusing, but effective, marketing strategy. A fence that locked out all but paying customers enclosed the grounds, including the Crown reserve that encompassed the beach. The dramatic coastal setting was part of the Aquarium’s appeal, but few would have paid the entry fee purely for the privilege of standing on the beach. Rather, they came to see the sharks and other fish and marine creatures on display in what in the late 19th century remained an important educational experience, and to enjoy other novelties including a skating rink, merry-go-round and electric lighting at night. This was not just an aquarium: it was Sydney’s first coastal amusement park. The Bondi Aquarium at Tamarama was constructed in an era of significant commercial investment in coastal entertainment. It was the second to be opened in Sydney. About nine months earlier the Manly Aquarium, a far more modest but immediately popular venture, was built between the ocean and harbour beaches. Two months after crowds first flocked through the turnstiles at Tamarama a third, the Coogee Palace Aquarium, was opened. All three aquariums were inspired by similar enterprises on the British coast. They were built on the edge of beaches so that fresh salt water could be pumped into the baths and tanks, but also because it was expected that a coastal locale would guarantee success for this type of leisure destination.

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The NSW Premier Sir Henry Parkes had opened the Bondi Aquarium to great acclaim. He and fellow politicians praised all three aquariums for their educational value and promises of ‘intellectual amusement’. But the government was more interested in their contribution to the local economy and celebrated them as symbols of colonial progress. In this perspective the changes the Royal Aquarium Company had made to Tamarama – landscaping the gully, building pathways and ‘summer houses’ and installing seats – had ‘improved’ the beach by transforming it from a ‘nearly useless’ area to a ‘pleasant place for public amusement’. It had also improved the land value. Despite initial criticism from the Minister for Lands, Thomas Garrett, that the Royal Aquarium Company had locked ‘large numbers of all classes of the community’ off a beach they had long enjoyed, the government looked favourably on the company’s use of the beach reserve and soon rewarded its investment. In 1888 it issued a retrospective permissive occupancy that formalised the company’s rights to use and enclose the beach and enabled the company to keep its illegally erected pumping house – needed to keep water circulating through the shark tank – on the beach.1 The local Waverley Council was outraged at the government’s readiness to trade public access to the Crown reserve and protested the Aquarium’s occupation of Tamarama Beach. Here, and in earlier battles for public access to neighbouring Bronte and Bondi beaches, the council claimed to act on behalf of a local community interest in preserving the existing traditions of free public use of these beaches. Certainly there was a local expectation that the city’s beaches should remain free and open to all. But the council’s interest in its beaches extended from the altruistic to the economic. It understood that free public access to local beaches would drive local development and attract new residents to the area. It also sought control of the beaches and any associated leisure economy. At tiny Tamarama Beach in the late 1880s the colonial government stood firm, reiterating its commitment to commercial enterprise over universal access to the city’s beaches. The battle for free public access to Sydney’s beaches was heating up.

Battle for the beach

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A day at the beach

When the aquariums were constructed in the mid1880s a leisure-based culture had already been established on the Sydney coast, centred primarily on Manly and Coogee and to a lesser extent Bondi and Bronte. The aquarium investors were therefore tapping into a demand for coastal amusement that already existed in Sydney. Like the aquariums

themselves, this was a culture that initially mimicked British seaside traditions. For several decades, Sydneysiders had danced at the hotels near the beaches, played games and sports including quoits, rounders and chasing a pig with a greasy tail for cash prizes. They enjoyed picnics, walked along the sand, clambered over rocks and bathed in hot and cold seawater baths. But there were important differences between Australian and British cultures. Sydney’s beachgoers were predominantly daytrippers, not holidaymakers like so many of their British counterparts – an important distinction between the two seaside cultures. In bad weather Sydneysiders simply stayed at home. Saturday was still a working day in Australia and active recreation on Sundays was frowned upon, although towards the end of the century attitudes

and

behaviours

were shifting.2 Days such as Boxing Day, New Year’s Day and Empire Day therefore remained the most

popular

for

trips to the beach.

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From the late 1850s visitors to Manly streamed across to the ocean beach where they enjoyed picnics, walks and ‘rambles’ around Fairy Bower.

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Just as forms of recreation had been transported to Australia from Britain, ways of understanding the beaches were also heavily influenced by British custom. Several centuries of specific medical instruction prescribing seaside activities to treat or cure ‘invalids’ had led to a general sense in Britain and the colonies that the seaside was an inherently healthy space, where people’s health and wellbeing would benefit from access to the healthy sea air or ‘ozone’, salt water and just by being away from congested and polluted urban areas. The location of Sydney’s Coast Hospital, which opened in 1881 at Little Bay south of Maroubra, was a practical manifestation of a medical consensus that ocean air in particular was beneficial rather than detrimental to invalids – although in that case its isolation was equally critical.

Manly Beach in the 1870s, a popular tourist attraction with hotels and boarding houses nestled along the pristine coastline. Norfolk Island pines would later transform the beach into an iconic tourist landscape.

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For urban Australians the beach and the countryside were each regarded as healthy natural landscapes in contrast to the artificial city. For rural Australians, who knew the reality of the bush as opposed to the romantic ideal, the beach was a place of escape from the hardships – the physical and emotional strains – of their lives. The beach consequently occupied a space of its own in the Australian psyche: it was differentiated from both country and city as a place of leisure, of universal escape and a source of mental and physical rejuvenation. By the turn of the century the fad for ‘ozone’ was fading: there was some debate over the medicinal benefits of ocean air as it related to specific ailments and Australian doctors were starting to question the extent of its value. But the popular faith in the health of sea air and of the coast more generally, based on centuries of belief, was not diminished.3 The earliest marketing campaigns by coastal businesses emphasised their health benefits, simultaneously reinforcing popular cultural faith and helping to justify a day at the beach. In the mid-1850s, the enterprising colonist Henry Gilbert Smith purchased more than 200 acres of land on the Manly peninsula. He transformed it from farmland to a tourist suburb, citing the improvements to his own health in his promotion of this new ‘health resort’. By the early 1860s leisure seekers from Sydney were crossing the harbour on steamers in their thousands each public holiday, spilling off the ferry and onto Manly’s harbour and ocean beaches for picnics, walks and visits to the local hotels and teahouses, all in the name of ‘healthy’ recreation. Traditions of picnicking on the beaches closer to the city were even older. This was a way of enjoying the beach that suited local traditions. Historians place picnickers at Bondi and Coogee from the 1830s although their number is uncertain, especially given the distance from town and difficult access across the swamps and dunes that are now covered by shops and houses.4 Coogee’s popularity escalated following the completion of the road through Randwick in the late 1850s, and after the newly established Randwick Council – the colony’s first municipal council – cleared scrub to create a park with pathways and seats on the northern end of that beach in 1860. The crowds going to Bondi

Battle for the beach

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and Bronte also grew following Waverley Council’s construction of a road and path respectively to those beaches in the 1860s, a significant achievement in the face of landowner resistance at both locales. Although Bondi and Bronte beaches lacked the hotels and other structured amusements offered at Manly and Coogee, Waverley Council encouraged land purchases in the area in 1864, suggesting that access to the beach was one of the ‘principal inducements’.5 The crowds who took advantage of the new roads and improved reserves from the 1860s were largely made up of family groups, but could also include large social gatherings. On Anniversary Day in 1864 the Sydney Morning Herald

Respite from the rough surf in 1930, at the Avalon ocean pool. Sydney’s first ocean baths had been built to provide safe, gender-segregated and private places to bathe – essential requirements in the late 19th century.

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reported that a 500-strong crowd of brickworkers and their families travelled through the city from Newtown to Coogee in a procession of nearly 30 wagons with flags flying and bells clanging on their way to a picnic. But groups of this size were slightly less common. The picnickers regularly provided fodder for the press, which published detailed reports of the numbers and activities of the thousands of Sydneysiders who took to the beaches – and other local pleasure spots – on special occasions. On New Year’s Day 1874, the Sydney Morning Herald reported, beachgoers at Bondi and Coogee: dispersed in different directions to seek amusement in such fashions as suited their several predilections. Games of cricket, croquet, rounders, football, and quoits were instituted in suitable localities, and rambles were indulged in either by the seashore or in the bush. Many of the youngsters found amusement in wading in the pools among the rocks, while others employed themselves in climbing the most precipitous places they could find.

All this energetic activity bears some resemblance to 20th-century beach culture, but the major difference was the relative silence around surf bathing. Officially, bathing in public during daylight hours was banned in Sydney. An 1833 ban on daylight bathing in Sydney Cove – made to protect public decency – had been extended in 1838 to all other towns in New South Wales, and incorporated into the Colony’s Police Act. But while these regulations may have kept some beachgoers out of the water they did not, contrary to popular views, prevent bathing. An 1864 reference by the Waverley Council to the importance of the beach at Nelson Bay (later known as Bronte) for bathing provides rare but important insight into the existence of a surf-centred beach culture at that time. Few other records exist of Sydney’s ocean-bathing culture in the 19th century since references only appeared in press reports when someone drowned. But it was taken for granted that beaches were for bathing. Officially confined to early mornings, bathing in the surf was an important if discreet element of Sydney’s colonial beach culture at any time of day. Towards the end of the century coastal residents in particular were becoming increasingly familiar with the surf.

Battle for the beach

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Ocean baths were also a critical part of the 19th-century leisure economy, helped largely by the geology of Sydney’s coast: rock platforms on the edges of the beaches could be easily excavated by councils and enterprising individuals to provide safe, sheltered – and concealed – bathing places. The Randwick Council created Sydney’s first formal ocean pool at Coogee in the early 1860s, but over the following decades more would be opened at Coogee, Bondi, Bronte and elsewhere. In these gender-segregated baths, and those in the harbour, many 19th-century Sydneysiders perfected the aquatic arts. More than a century later, they may no longer have the same role but ocean baths remain integral to Sydney’s beach culture. They are sought out by beachgoers who seek a different experience to the surf, and provide a relatively calm place for swimming during heavy seas. They’re an intrinsic part of Sydney’s beaches.

Gazing out to sea

Whether bathing, picnicking, playing, strolling or exploring rockpools, Sydneysiders made time for the beach in the second half of the 19th century. When politician Robert Lowe and his wife Georgiana first saw Nelson Bay in 1845, however, the coastal picnicking culture was yet to take hold. Much of Sydney’s coast was an extension of the agricultural

and pastoral belt around Sydney. Bondi, to the north, was part of a 200-acre estate, its vast dunes home to grazing cattle. Coogee to the south had been subdivided and gazetted as a village in 1838 but the Colonial Secretary’s vision of a suburb of marine villas had not been realised. Many of the lots remained unsold and the ‘village’ was reportedly occupied by just a handful of ‘poor labouring men’. North of Manly, the stretch of coast between Curl Curl and Palm Beach was divided into a handful of large working properties. They were accessible via boat or a ‘bush track’ that ran parallel with the coast over lagoons and creeks, past swamps and seemingly endless sand dunes and along Narrabeen Beach. The scenery remained wild and untamed, home only to isolated farms

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and fishing huts and indigenous communities. The district was dismissed by one observer as ‘irreclaimably and hopelessly sterile’, although the landowners tried their hands at growing maize and tobacco, among other crops. One landowner established a vineyard at Mona Vale while another attempted to make salt at Long Reef.6 Robert and Georgiana’s creation of a 42-acre private marine retreat at Nelson Bay was therefore a novel use of coastal property for the time. The Lowes were high-profile names in an emerging group of people who would purchase land along the coast not for economic gain or food production, but for a home with a pleasant coastal aesthetic. This was a distinctly modern romantic aesthetic: in Britain homes in former fishing villages were only just beginning to face the sea.7 Robert, a radical politician ‘of great intellect and integrity with a commanding power of eloquence’ was suffering from deteriorating eyesight on account of his albinism – a condition that had influenced the couple’s decision to travel to Australia – but his wife adored the location and the view.8 Her sketchbook from the period, held now in Sydney’s Mitchell Library, contains sketches of scenes from around the property including the beach. Soon after moving in she wrote to her mother that their ‘property on the sea’ was ‘lovely beyond conception’: We have a beautiful bay to ourselves – I may say it is our own – the trees line the shore with drives through them; we have a waterfall of sixty feet, and this runs through a fine valley; it is a most romantic spot and just suits my tastes.9

Perched high on the hill about 400 metres from the water’s edge the Lowes built ‘Bronte House’. Standing on its back steps today the view towards the beach is obscured by Moreton Bay fig trees and towering bamboo plants, the latter reportedly planted by Georgiana herself. But glimpsing the ocean horizon through the leaves, hearing the waves lap the shore and feeling the sea breeze, one can imagine the pure ambience and isolation of the scene 160 years ago. In

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their drawing room overlooking the sea the Lowes hosted high-profile guests including the Surveyor General Thomas Mitchell, the scholar and naturalist William Sharpe Macleay and the chief justice Sir Alfred Stephen.10 Yet although the beach was intrinsic to the Lowes’ attachment to their property, and despite Robert claiming to attack two men, ‘hulking larrikins’, for ‘trespassing’ on his beach while walking with Alexander Macleay (an unlikely action by a near-blind politician), the Lowes knew they did not own the beach at Nelson Bay. Their title to the land that surrounded the beach excluded a strip of the shoreline 100 feet in width, measured from the high-water mark, which remained Crown land. The Nelson Bay Estate was therefore not just different from the nearby Bondi Estate because of the way the Lowes thought of and used the space; it was different because at Bronte, like neighbouring Tamarama, the beach itself had been reserved for the Crown. The existence of a beach reserve also distinguished Bronte and Tamarama from most properties adjacent to the coast on the northern beaches. There, the titles extended to an undefined beach or to the waters of the Pacific Ocean. The source of this discrepancy lay in an 1828 order by Governor Ralph Darling to reserve for the Crown ‘all land within one hundred feet of high water mark, on the sea coast, creeks, harbours and inlets’ as part of his contentious reforms of the Lands system. Consequently, while most coastal and riverfront land granted in New South Wales prior to this order – including Bondi, Manly and much of the northern beaches – included title to the foreshores, that granted after 1828 did not. Darling did not explain in the pages of the NSW Government Gazette (where the order was published) the reasons for his decision. Navigation, or the ability to land boats was almost certainly primary in his mind, but it is likely he imagined a range of uses for these spaces, including defence, access to resources and possibly recreation. The ongoing challenge of defining or conclusively measuring such an elusive and poorly defined boundary created uncertainty for later governments and landowners. The distinctly different boundaries of coastal properties alienated prior to and after the order was made compounded future confusions, as did the lack of clarity

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around the purpose of these reserves. Nevertheless, this decision, far-sighted or inadvertent, laid the foundation for the tradition of public access to the beach in Australia.11 The Lowes returned to Britain in January 1850 with their two adopted children – the son and daughter of a young woman shopkeeper whose murderer Lowe had unsuccessfully defended in court – where Robert would continue an illustrious political career as a Tory. They left behind a beloved property that would become the site of contests between public and private interests, in which the public demand for coastal recreation ultimately won out.

Contested foreshores

After a handful of owners, JB Holdsworth purchased the Nelson Bay Estate in 1861 with the intention of subdividing the property. It may have been Crown land, but Holdsworth was adamant that he alone held rights to the beach reserve. He applied for it to be incorporated into his property to formalise an exclusivity of access he argued the Lowes had established

and protected. More than just a perceived ‘right’, ownership of the foreshores would increase the value of beachfront allotments in his planned subdivision. John Robertson’s liberal government, swept to a resounding majority in 1860 on a platform of pro-property land reform, had created the legislation that enabled property owners to apply for the rescission of adjacent foreshores (in the Crown Lands Alienation Act 1861). As Minister for Lands from 1861, he now unflinchingly supported Holdsworth’s bid. A public notice published in March 1864 drew the Waverley Council’s attention to the proposed rescission of the beach at Nelson Bay for the first time. The council instantly protested on behalf of nearby residents who used the beach and who, it argued, had purchased their property in the expectation the Crown reserve would always be accessible.12 But it was a petition against the rescission from 54 landholders and residents of the Waverley area that

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Vast rolling sandhills up to 20 metres high once dominated the landscape around Bondi. The drifting sand irritated beachgoers and covered local roads and buildings. In the early 1900s the government constructed fences and planted the dunes with grass but had little success at containing the sand.

ultimately persuaded the government, by now under the leadership of James Martin, to reconsider privatising this small strip of sand. This petition was the first evidence that the Crown reserve at Nelson Bay, despite being wholly enclosed by private land, was part of the local leisure landscape and that there was a genuine community interest in retaining public beach spaces on the coast east of Sydney. In light of this strong public sentiment the government briefly considered dedicating the beach to public recreation, but was dissuaded by a heated letter from Holdsworth’s solicitors. In an attempt to appease both parties, the government chose to defer its decision until a road to the beach could be secured. The compromise created a stalemate. The beach was neither rescinded to private ownership nor dedicated to public recreation; it remained an ambiguous Crown

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space enclosed by private land. But the episode held deeper significance: in this brief battle for Nelson Bay, the Waverley Council and ratepayers learnt that they could not assume a right of access to beaches not reserved for public recreation, particularly if landholders had an interest in these same spaces. The government learnt an important lesson too. Suddenly, what it had considered to be a simple land-right issue was becoming a matter of public interest in having access to the beach. The Waverley Council’s intervention in the rescission of the beach at Nelson Bay was not purely altruistic. It feared that a win by Holdsworth would have repercussions at nearby Bondi Beach, setting a precedent for the landowner there to make similar claims to exclusive use. This was ironic, given that Francis O’Brien’s title of the Bondi Estate did not exclude but rather extended to the rather ambiguously defined ‘beach’ on its south-eastern side. The council had already fought and lost a battle to have Bondi Beach resumed for public use in the early 1860s, as had the far-sighted and irascible Surveyor General Thomas Mitchell. He had insisted, in an 1854 report, that public ownership of Bondi Beach was ‘indispensable … for the health and recreation of the inhabitants of Sydney’,13 and urged resumption ‘if necessary at the public expense’. But his superiors had seen little value in such a transaction. When the Waverley Council echoed Mitchell’s request six years later it met similar resistance. But the government did now acknowledge that a tradition of public use had been established at this beach and that this was important. In its attempt to acquire Bondi Beach, the Waverley Council hoped to secure rights to the lucrative blue-metal mines O’Brien had established beneath his sandhills. But even when it was apparent this would not occur, the Council still pursued, and ultimately secured, the possibility of constructing a road to the beach. It may have been a secondary prize, but the Waverley Council was dedicated to providing public access to Bondi Beach. In allowing the council to construct a road to the beach through O’Brien’s property – against his will – the government indicated that the arguments for public access and recreation were increasingly being heard.14

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Beaches for the people

Sydney’s coastline in the mid-19th century was a poorly defined space, shaped by diverse interpretations, land tenures and values. It was therefore a landscape framed by paradoxes: Manly and Coogee were promoted as health resorts while the ocean nearby would soon be selected as a repository for the city’s sewage; cows grazed on the dunes of the northern

beaches while the Randwick and Manly councils constructed walls to hold in the sand and created landscaped parks for the comfort of beachgoers; those beaches which had been part of land granted prior to 1828 remained private property, while others were subject to Crown reserves measured 100 feet from the high-water mark; and beachgoers, it appears, freely used Bondi, Tamarama and Bronte beaches, unaware or uncaring that they had no legal right to do so. By the 1880s, among all the other forces shaping the beaches, recreation was beginning to solidify its claim on the coast, unsettling the claims to exclusive rights of access that coastal landowners had previously enjoyed. The impact was felt at the beaches of the eastern suburbs, which were closest to the city, more than anywhere else. Here, the ambiguity surrounding the original purpose of coastal reserves in 1828 meant that 50 years later they were vulnerable to new interpretations. So while the government and landowners argued that the beach reservations at Bronte and Tamarama were not made for recreational purposes, they could not deny that the Waverley Council and the broader public imagined them to be recreation spaces. Ongoing informal use of these beaches, and the legal access that people enjoyed to Coogee and Manly, reinforced the public sense that they had a right to enjoy all the city’s ocean beaches. The appropriateness of the tenure of these beaches was therefore not tested in the court of law but in the court of public opinion and, ultimately, the Waverley Council’s relentless campaign paid off. The most significant victory for those arguing for access was the resumption of Bondi Beach and creation of the 25-acre Bondi Park by the Parkes government in 1881. The beach, which would become Australia’s most famous,

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was the first on the Sydney coast to be forcibly resumed for public recreation. O’Brien strongly resisted the resumption and was eventually awarded £6000 in damages – a small price for the government to pay, some might suggest, for public ownership of this particular stretch of sand. But the government recognised that one beach was not enough. Four years later, a government committee inspected Bronte and Tamarama to select a site for another ocean beach within easy reach of the city that could be made accessible to the public. Following a land value assessment, it dedicated the reserve at Bronte to public recreation in 1886. It also purchased portions of dozens of adjoining subdivided lots to create a 14-acre park, consolidating this extraordinary investment in Sydney’s beach culture.15 At both Bondi and Bronte, the Waverley Council had continued to lobby for public ownership of the foreshores since the mid-1860s, seeing benefits both to its ratepayers and its own fortunes. An 1880 petition, in which close to 100 people demanded a reserve and road to Bronte Beach, had also signalled to the government that this continued to be an important local recreational space, and that the public demand would not disappear. The pressure paid off. The creation of Bondi Park was the first admission at the colonial government level that the public benefit from access to the beach was more important than A photograph of the southern corner of Bondi Beach in 1885, tendered to the court as evidence in local landholder Francis O’Brien’s compensation bid. O’Brien, who had fought the government’s resumption of Bondi Beach from his property, now argued the government valuations had not considered the land’s development potential.

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the property rights of landowners. In this respect, it reflected broader trends towards providing ‘healthy’ open spaces for urban residents. This was part of a movement for public parks that also saw the creation of the National Park south of Port Hacking, Centennial Park on the city’s east and the establishment of public recreation reserves on the beaches at Curl Curl and Cronulla, and throughout the city.16 It is also possible that this government, which in later manifestations would so fervently support the coastal aquariums, recognised that the new commercial opportunities of a leisure culture were potentially more lucrative than private ownership. Whatever the motivation, the creation of Bondi and Bronte parks appeared to legitimise the claims of residents of the Waverley district that they had a genuine ‘right’ to access the beaches. It also set an important precedent for later coastal resumptions. But while coastal landowners may have been concerned about the future of their properties, they had little to fear: elsewhere the government continued to favour private interests, arguing that in these two reservations public requirements for beaches had been met. So while the government had come round to the view that the public should have some access to the beach, it had not yet conceded as a principle that all beaches should be free. At Tamarama too, commercial interests won out. Following the erection of the aquarium fences in 1886 the Waverley Council was relentless in its demands for their removal, undoubtedly buoyed by its recent wins at neighbouring Bronte and Bondi beaches. But the lure of commercial success and the potential for a profitable tourism industry – together with the open availability of two neighbouring beaches – meant the government would not compromise on Tamarama Beach. The subsequent battle for free public access to this tiny patch of sand, which pitted the Waverley Council and local residents against successive aquarium owners and governments, would take another two decades to resolve. The battle for Tamarama Beach is significant for two reasons. Firstly, it was during this contest that a NSW government finally agreed that the principle of a public right to free beach access existed, and that such a right took

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precedence over claims of commercial interests. Secondly, the fate of the aquarium is emblematic of broader shifts in Sydney’s beach culture in the early 20th century. An independent surf-based culture was evolving in distinct ways, shedding the British origins of a strongly commercial seaside scene in favour of local circumstances, factors and desires. Soon, the simple bodily pleasures of sun, sand and surf would take their place at the heart of the Australian experience of the beach.

Fa d i n g amusements

At first the aquariums at Manly, Tamarama and Coogee attracted good numbers. They had curiosity value to citizens who had never before seen seals, sharks or even live fish, and thousands of daytrippers came to experience a completely new type of colonial entertainment. Few visitors would have appreciated the risk the Royal Aquarium Company had taken in

placing penguins in the seal pond – when the aquarium opened in September 1887 just one rather anxious penguin remained in the enclosure.17 Selling itself as a place of ‘instruction’, the Manly Aquarium offered respectable entertainment. But the Bondi and Coogee Aquariums were pitched at a broader audience. For the price of one shilling (sixpence for children), visitors viewed the fish tanks and seal ponds, danced – although the Waverley Council soon banned dancing in its Borough, including the Aquarium grounds – walked through the grounds (at Tamarama) and enjoyed unique and not-sounique novelty acts: a ‘serio-comic vocalist’, ‘acrobatic clown’, aerial gymnast, American Clog Dancer and plate spinner at Coogee and the ‘Australian Negro’ Comedian, comic song-man, and later blondins, illusionists, minstrels, acrobats, and wire walking ‘from cliff to cliff over the raging pacific ocean’ at Tamarama. For most visitors the balance of a day at the aquarium tipped more towards amusement than education. For most visitors, the novelty soon wore off. After their initial popularity

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numbers had declined and despite – or perhaps partly because of – the attempts by aquarium owners to rejuvenate their attractions, takings failed to justify the outlay. The Manly Aquarium, the first to open, was also the first to empty its tanks, no longer displaying fish or marine objects by 1889. The Bondi Aquarium nearly suffered a similar fate, saved from financial annihilation only by a fire that destroyed most of the complex but facilitated a complete overhaul of the site through the propitious insurance payout. In the early 1890s it changed hands several times. The Coogee Aquarium was also rebuilt in mid1891 following destruction of the original building by winds, including the construction of its distinctive blue and white dome. Although the newly constructed aquariums initially enjoyed a boost in popularity, the crowds again dissipated over time. No doubt this was partly attributable to the Depression of the 1890s, but Sydney’s beach crowds were mostly made up of repeat visitors for whom one visit to an aquarium was enough. By the turn of the century the aquariums’ daily visitors would be counted in the hundreds, not thousands, and the Bondi Aquarium soon closed again.18 In 1906 the theatrical manager William Anderson purchased and rebuilt the Bondi Aquarium site, investing in a new amusement park he named Wonderland City. Wonderland City occupied a much larger portion of the Tamarama gully than the Bondi Aquarium had. It offered a combination of old and new attractions in a conscious attempt to replicate American, rather than British, models of seaside entertainment: a double storey merry-go-round, a switchback railway spanning the valley, a waxworks chamber, optical illusions, an aquarium and skating rink, ‘a fun factory, a helter-skelter, a Katzajammer castle, and numerous other novel excitements for those delighting in the spice of sensationalism’. The 800-seat theatre hosted vaudeville and circus entertainment, music and theatre, boxing and wrestling bouts and ‘Alice the elephant’ whom Anderson had bought at a Melbourne auction specifically for his Tamarama enterprise. Anderson placed advertisements in Sydney newspapers declaring Wonderland City to be ‘Australia’s Coney Island’, the ‘Greatest Amusement Resort on Earth’ and the ‘Federal Capital of Merriment’. He

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The exciting ‘airem scarem’ airship was added to Tamarama’s Wonderland City in late 1907 to boost flagging crowds. Now a public reserve, visitors to Tamarama no longer needed to pay an entry fee to use the beach and could watch the fun-park’s novelties for free.

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promised visitors ‘gasping, high-pitched excitement’, at a destination where ‘you can help yourself to enjoyment till your smile won’t wear off’: Never before in the history of Sydney has been presented such variety and high standard of attraction … While it changes the whole scheme of popular diversion, it is simply a recognition of popular habits. What is more sane, decorous, and healthful than to enjoy the delights of music and merriment in the open air? … WONDERLAND CITY, at Bondi by the sea, where the ocean breezes blow.

Anderson’s enticing advertisements lured an estimated 20  000 people to opening night in December 1906. Newspapers reported that the crowd surged and swayed as one, gasping at the sight of ‘brightly lit rest houses and tea shelters’ which dotted the gully, and the ‘thousands of light points (that) floated high above the head’. Anderson had claimed that Wonderland City would cater to Australians’ desire for open-air amusements, and address a ‘day and night boredom for those whose time is made up of leisure hours’. But like others before him, Anderson had misjudged the mood of the city’s beachgoers and their willingness to pay for repeat entertainment. It is also likely he misjudged the expense of continual improvements, a requirement in keeping a largely local crowd coming back.19 Anderson boasted that the crowds exceeded his expectations, but they were too small to sustain the investment. Despite its fame – then and now – Wonderland City lived an even shorter life than its predecessor, closing its gates for the final time in 1911 less than five years after it had opened. Having nearly ruined Anderson financially, Wonderland City would be the last major amusement park to be built on the sands of Sydney. Attempts to replicate other models of seaside amusement in the opening decade of the 20th century, albeit on smaller scales, were similarly short-lived. A 16-metre high water slide and associated amusements opposite Manly ocean beach was constructed in 1903 but lasted just three years. A ‘figure-8 railway’ 800 metres long, which opened in 1907 at Coogee, had an even shorter life. Built in the late-1920s and demolished in 1934, a large amusement pier, which

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jutted out from the centre of Coogee Beach, was among the most prominent of failed attempts to replicate British seaside amusement enterprises on the Sydney coast. Facing excessive competition, many of the British and American seaside resorts and entertainment complexes on which these Australian enterprises based their expectations of success had also been short-lived, although in both countries the culture of amusement parks itself was far more lasting. Sydney had neither the population to sustain multiple amusement complexes like New York’s Coney Island nor the influx of summer holidaymakers seeking artificial entertainment to while away weeks at British seaside resorts such as Blackpool. But more importantly, Sydney’s beachgoers were more interested in the sand and surf, which, unlike patrons of Coney Island, they could access for free. They had little interest in paying entry to an amusement park offering barely more than cheap thrills.20 Sydney’s beachfront entertainment ventures also faced backlash over their presence on or near the sand. Anderson had unwittingly invested in Wonderland City at a critical moment of transition in local beach politics. By the time his amusement park introduced the ‘airem scairem’ in December 1907 – an airship conveying passengers between the two headlands high above the beach – the city’s attention was on the surf on its doorstep; local governments were waking up to the potentials of a new kind of leisure economy; and state governments were becoming more sympathetic to the demands of the surf-loving beachgoers.

Amusementfree beaches

Speaking at the opening of Wonderland City, Premier Joseph Carruthers echoed Henry Parkes’ enthusiasm at the same site 19 years earlier, congratulating Anderson ‘on his pluck and enterprise’ and wishing him success. He noted that enterprising citizens like Anderson were rare and ‘when we get them in Australia we should keep them by appreciating

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their efforts’.21 Anderson could therefore be forgiven for expecting to retain the exclusive beach privileges enjoyed by his predecessors at Tamarama. He repaired the corrugated iron and barbed wire fence that blocked access to the beach to all but paying visitors (and which local swimmers had broken through in 1904 to cut a path to the beach) and restored the pumping station on the beach. He also daringly built a summer house, bathing house and dressing sheds on the beach, all without permission, to capitalise on the beachfront location and the popular desire for surf.22 But as Anderson soon discovered, the Waverley Council had not tired in its campaign for public access to Tamarama Beach and, to his frustration, he could no longer rely on a government willing to sacrifice a small beach to commercial interests. The matter of free public access to Tamarama Beach had been subject to constant enquiry by the Department of Lands throughout the 1890s – at the repeated instigation of the council – and a matter of vigorous political debate since 1904. In all that time the department had maintained its position that the fences were on private land and therefore legal; and that since the beach was not dedicated to public recreation the government was not compelled to provide public access. By 1906 however, the demands for this beach by local residents increasingly keen to spend their days in the surf – helped by the legalisation of all-day bathing – were finding a sympathetic ear in government. It permitted the pumping station to remain, undoubtedly aware of its importance in keeping the water in the shark tanks on the headland above refreshed. It also permitted the dressing sheds to remain ‘on sufferance’ on the condition that the public was granted free use. But James Ashton, Minister for Lands, ordered Anderson to remove the remaining structures he had erected on the beach, fearing ‘resentment if public rights to the reserve are interfered with’. The resentment had always been there, but now the government was listening. The government also converted the beach into a recreation reserve, vested in the Waverley Council. In 1907, the public won its coveted access to Tamarama Beach when the government purchased a strip of land from the

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neighbouring McKenzie property for a pathway. When the now-illegal fencing was finally removed five months later, free public access to the beach was secured, at the expense of Wonderland City’s greatest asset. The battle for this beach had been won.23

Securing rights to the beach

Despite their apparent consensus over providing public access to Tamarama Beach, state and local governments struggled to find a balance between appeasing commercial interests and an increasingly vocal demand, particularly by surf bathers, for unrestricted access to sand and surf. The two interests were incompatible. In both the council and state

government there was a mix of arguments and concerns. Politicians and civic leaders now agreed on the principle of free public access to public beaches, but the economic burden of providing that access and maintaining these public spaces fell largely on the shoulders of local government. Leasing portions of beachfront parks to commercial amusements was one of few revenue options, and probably one the Waverley Council had eagerly anticipated as it fought for control of Bondi, Bronte and Tamarama beaches over previous decades. A 1906 proposal by proprietor AJ Metcalfe to erect an ‘amusement building’ on Bondi Park presented new challenges to the council. It aligned with the new beach economy that Ashton encouraged Waverley and Manly councils to pursue. But to some Waverley Aldermen, Metcalfe’s and similar proposals seemed an infringement of the people’s rights to enjoy the entire park, which had been dedicated to their recreation.24 Following rigorous debate, the divided Waverley Council voted in favour of Metcalfe’s proposal, led by the Mayor who emphasised – as Parkes had 19 years earlier – the opportunity for ‘progress’. He also pointed out that Metcalfe would save the council ‘much expense’ in maintaining and even improving a small portion of the park.25 Metcalfe’s modest amusements building is clearly

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visible in the background of the first group photo of the Bondi Surf Bathers Life Saving Club taken in March 1907, its members standing proudly behind their new reel. But such buildings would not stay on the beaches for long. Governments and councils soon discovered that coastal residents did not just want free public access to the beaches; they had definite ideas about, and wanted a say in, how these new public spaces would be used. To the local residents who preferred their beaches devoid of both commercial structures and the types of people they attracted to ‘their’ shores, the leasing of small portions of public parks for amusement purposes was not a compromise – it was a crime, a calamity, an infringement of their rights and of the heritage of future generations. They condemned amusements from the proposed merry-go-round at Manly Beach in 1901 to the ‘Gold Rush’ at that same beach 15 years later – an enclosed area of sand in which people would pay to dig for money – for desecrating the beach, creating ‘eyesores’ and interfering with views of and access to the beach. They feared they would attract less desirable types of people and cause far too much noise. Free public access to the city’s The wreck of the Hereward caught in the breakers at Maroubra Beach in 1898 drew curious crowds. Parts of this magnificent ship lay concealed for many decades, a well-known hazard among local surfers.

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beaches, once won, required vigilance to protect those spaces from new forms of commercialisation.26 The Harbour Foreshores Vigilance Committee, established in 1905 to secure public parks on harbour foreshores, had played an important role in promoting the ideals on which this fight was waged. It had driven a public discussion through which the concept of public rights to both ocean and harbour foreshores was cemented in the public and political mind. The idea had always informed the campaigns for the beaches of the eastern suburbs. But a new language now emerged as newspapers published passionate letters and editorials that declared both harbour and ocean beaches to be ‘the people’s birthright’, places of ‘national importance’, and the ‘rightful heritage’ of the people of Sydney.27 This language gave strength to the fight against beachfront amusements. As the government welcomed the public onto Tamarama Beach in 1907, the battle for other privately owned beaches was just beginning. Commercial amusements were a lesser concern here. The legalisation of daylight bathing along Sydney’s coast between 1902 and 1905 and subsequent transformation of beaches like Manly and Bondi from ‘health resorts’ to ‘surf resorts’ further bolstered the campaign for public beaches. Corresponding coastal real estate booms demonstrated to governments that public access to surf beaches could contribute to higher local land values. The economic boom of the beaches translated directly into rate income for councils and land sales for the state government. The perceived health benefits of access to the surf and sea air for the city’s workers were also valued by governments of all political persuasions. Through a combination of these factors the movement for more public beaches gathered pace. The rising land values and local demand had compelled Charles Wade’s Liberal government to purchase the area surrounding Maroubra Beach and parts of Collaroy Beach for public reserves in 1909. Two years later, conceding to growing public pressure – particularly from the Harbour Foreshores Vigilance Committee – the McGowen Labor government made a number of

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well publicised waterfront resumptions to create ‘parks for the people’ through its 1911, £150 000 Foreshores Resumption Scheme. Along the harbour it included places like Vaucluse, where Nielsen Park was named in honour of the Minister for Lands credited with the parks’ scheme. But it is less well known that it extended along the coast too, at Cronulla to the south and Long Reef to the north. The Foreshores Resumption Scheme marked the first formal government acknowledgment that resumptions of private land were both required and justified because the foreshores ‘belonged’ to the people of New South Wales.28 But bathers also needed to get to the surf and the Labor government’s foreshores resumptions were coupled with the construction of new tramways to Cronulla and Collaroy in 1911 and 1912 respectively. The new public transport routes were part of the same conscious attempt to bring the city’s workers to the beach and to encourage land purchases in these new districts.

Free access for all

Just a decade into the 20th century, the idea of a universal public right to the beach had gained legitimacy. The campaigns had been so effective that NSW Premier William Holman was stunned to discover in 1917 that the ocean and bay beaches on the edges of a new subdivision at Palm Beach on the northernmost tip of the northern beaches, were pri-

vately owned. Assuming it to be a recent decision, he demanded to know why the Crown had parted with these foreshores. He was even more surprised to learn the beaches had been part of a 400-acre grant issued to James Napper a century earlier, prior to the custom of reserving foreshores: they had never been the property of the Crown. Keen to right past wrongs and awakened to the existence of privately owned beaches, Holman commissioned an investigation into the tenure of all foreshores within 50 miles of Sydney. His intention was to acquire remainingprivate foreshores for public use. But the Department of Lands, unwilling to

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spend the department’s limited wartime funds on resuming beaches, assured him that ample public spaces existed along the coast in the vicinity of Sydney.29 Palm Beach soon became reserved for public recreation, but only at the instigation of the local developer. In the decades since Francis O’Brien had fought the resumption of Bondi because it would damage local property values, it had become apparent that the economic return on the sale of subdivided properties with open access to the beaches outweighed that gained by limiting beach access to just a handful of properties. Four years later the Labor Minister for Lands, Peter Loughlin, renewed the state’s commitment to reserving the beaches. He directed that a strip of land at least 100 feet wide be reserved in future alienations and land disposals so that: the people of the State may secure for all time what should have been regarded from the outset as their natural heritage, viz. free access along the banks of tidal and navigable rivers, and the foreshores of the sea and all inlets thereof. 30

Close to a century since Governor Darling’s instructions had created the city’s first coastal Crown reserves, this was a new commitment to public ownership of the coast framed not by defence or navigation but recreation. It was made in the spirit of an agreed right to public access to the beach.31 The ‘right’ for which so many people had fought for so long, had been won.

Sun, sand and surf

In 1929 the Waverley Council sought consent to lease a portion of Bondi Park for the establishment of a public amusement park. With the failures of Wonderland City and earlier aquariums a fading memory, in debt following a major redevelopment of Bondi Park, and with the British-style commercial amusement pier about to open at Coogee Beach,

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an amusement park along the lines of Melbourne’s popular Luna Park on the bay at St Kilda seemed an obvious attraction. There was no lack of interested parties. Local investors welcomed the potential to boost the suburb’s appeal at night through a transition that promised to turn Bondi ‘from a morgue into a place of amusement’. But opponents were fierce in their defence of the beach. Sydney’s The Truth published an exposé with the headline ‘Hands off Bondi!’.32 The local community was again divided, mobilised by the same fears that had motivated an earlier generation of beachlovers to fight against commercial amusements. The battle over a Luna Park would continue for another four years. Finally in 1933, a Land Board Inquiry ordered by the Minister for Lands confirmed widespread opposition to the construction of any commercial amusements in Bondi Park. Those who opposed it were concerned about noise and light pollution and the type of people it might attract to the beach. Many cited environmental concerns about potential damage to the park’s 50 Norfolk Island pines. The government’s primary concern however – by then under the conservative Bertram Stevens – was that such a park would be another ‘alienation of the people’s preserve’. On this basis alone, it refused to grant the council its special lease. The tables had turned in the 45 years since the Bondi Aquarium first took over Tamarama Beach. The Waverley Council now sought out commercial investment in its beachfronts but at the state level, both parties were now committed to the principle that the public should have free access to a non-commercialised beach.33

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At a conference I went to on international beach cultures held at Blackpool – site of the extreme form of the British tradition – a British woman who had visited Bondi during a trip to Sydney remarked to me her astonishment that there was nothing to do there: she couldn’t understand the tourist appeal of a strip of sand and surf with no amusement parks, no piers, no gaming parlours. But this was precisely what distinguished Sydney’s beaches. Sydneysiders had fought long and hard for the right not to do anything at the beach. The beach was to be natural, free of industry, pollution, private ownership or commercial activity. Nothing to do except lie on the sand, soak up the sun and enjoy the surf.

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2 Surf city In January 1902 Sydney residents read of the shocking deaths of a young woman and a father of three in ‘treacherous’ Manly surf.

Frederick Smalpage, a 37-year-old brewery owner from Broken Hill in far western New South Wales, had attempted to rescue Mabel Thorpe, a local woman in her early 20s who was struggling in the surf. In the process, the Evening News reported, he himself was apparently ‘drawn into the vortex and carried away’. A group of local men grabbed a lifeline and swam to the pair’s aid, but the rope broke under the strain. To the horror of onlookers, including Frederick’s wife and children, both bathers disappeared into the breakers. A little over a year later, newspapers reported that 17-year-old Eda Jackson had become ‘another victim of the undertow’ at Manly, after she and a friend, Maud Mitchell, were ‘carried off their feet by an advancing wave, and taken out to the breakers by the backwash whose force they were powerless to resist’. Well-known local surf swimmer Frederick Williams was among the three men

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who pulled the unconscious girls from the surf but, sadly, Eda could not be resuscitated.1 Mabel, Frederick and Eda were the unlucky few amongst an increasing number of early morning bathers rescued from the Manly surf in the opening years of the 20th century. A boom in coastal tourism had brought more people to the beach where they showed a clear desire for the surf. But many of Manly’s new surf bathers could not swim or, like Mabel Thorpe, unknowingly swam in dangerous places. The authorities were bewildered by this growing preference for the buffeting surf over the comparatively still water of the ocean and harbour baths and were unsure how to discourage bathers from the surf. Other Sydney beaches were also experiencing an influx of ocean bathers. By 1901, enough people were diving into the surf at Coogee to warrant new dressing accommodation and a special bathers’ tram on Sunday mornings. At Bondi the Waverley Council considered improving the lifesaving apparatus and had extended its ocean baths in an attempt to steer bathers out of the surf. Bathing in open areas in daylight hours was still illegal but greater numbers of people were defying the regulations. The movement for change had been building for some time. In 1894 Newcastle Council, north of Sydney, had permitted all-day bathing on its beaches. The same year the NSW Legislative Council considered the merits of daylight bathing but ultimately voted against repealing the law.2 By 1902 police along Sydney’s coast, perceiving that the law no longer reflected social mores, were increasingly reluctant to prosecute bathers dressed in ‘appropriate’ costume – although once bathing was allowed, what was considered ‘appropriate’ costume became a bone of contention. The small, protected bay of Little Coogee (now Clovelly), between Coogee and Bronte, was the first of Sydney’s ocean beaches where daylight bathing was tolerated by the local government authority in Randwick Council. Despite police assurances that no inappropriate behaviour was occurring at the beach, the neighbouring and more conservative Waverley Council remained critical. Randwick Council, so often at the forefront when it came to managing challenging coastal issues, was also the first of Sydney’s councils to legalise

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daylight bathing on its beaches. It changed its by-laws accordingly in October 1902, eight months after first considering the motion. Despite members’ concerns about the compromised morality of exposing the public to bathers’ bodies, Manly Council passed a by-law to allow daylight bathing in November 1903, and Waverley Council did the same two years after that. These decisions were not taken lightly – each was preceded by long debates on the merits of permitting all-day bathing, and solemn consideration of ways of ensuring decency in preparation for the change. The editor of a local Manly newspaper, William Gocher, has long been attributed the honour of leading this change. But he mounted his well-known public challenge of the daylight bathing bans just as they were being overturned on Randwick’s beaches and long after the local police had made their position known. The transition to daylight bathing on Sydney’s coast was therefore not caused by one individual at a single beach: it was a response to a broad cultural shift taking place across Sydney, which the councils could no longer ignore. Soon activities in the surf began to play a more prominent role in shaping Sydney’s beach culture. The transition to a culture with a far greater emphasis on activities in the surf was neither instant nor simple. The legalisation of daylight bathing drew from the shadows a practice that had already been enjoyed by some Europeans on Sydney’s beaches, in differing degrees of concealment, for close to a century. But as historian Douglas Booth has shown, the overt public display of bathers’ bodies remained an affront to many, particularly when they extended their stay at the beach to not just swim but also expose their bodies to the sun. It took many years of careful image-making and municipal investment to win over the harshest critics.3 The new by-laws also contributed to a rapid influx of surf bathers who were not familiar with the surf and in many cases could not even swim, putting their own safety and that of their rescuers in danger. Despite the best intentions of some councils none of them was prepared for the new wave of bathers their actions had brought to the beaches. The opening decade of the 20th century brought new tensions and challenges, as well as innovative new solutions and a new wave of community action, to Sydney’s beaches.

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Selling the surf

In the summer of 1905–06 more Sydneysiders took to the surf than ever before. With daylight bathing now legal from Maroubra to Manly for the first time, Sydney’s new passion for the surf spread along the coast. A special issue of the Sydney Mail dedicated to ‘the summer seaside carnival’ published in March 1906 declared that surf bathing would soon be a per-

manent summer fixture on Sydney’s beaches: We are beginning at last to wake up in earnest to our good fortune in having the Pacific at our doors and such a long spell of warm sunny weather in which to play in it or on it … thousands now find their way where hundreds went a few years ago. Today every curving crescent of white sea sand is crowded by visitors, and every acre of surf is alive with bathers fascinated by the healthy and invigorating exercise. Crowds at Little Coogee (now Clovelly) delighting in mixed daylight bathing. This protected bay was the first beach in Sydney where the local council and police chose to overlook mixed daylight bathing in early 20th century.

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The beach had changed forever. The Mail published technical instructions on ‘shooting the breakers’ – now known as ‘bodysurfing’ – which it described as ‘utilising an incoming wave as a force of propulsion for the body’. Many readers learnt here for the first time of ‘the moment of suspense before the rush of waters comes, the buoyant uplifting and tossing on the foaming crest, the resistless drive up the shining beach until the sand is strewn with panting bodies of bathers like blown leaves’. But it was through the paper’s glorification of surf bathing rather than its descriptions of surf shooting that it contributed most to the burst in popularity of the sport. Surf bathing, according to the Sydney Mail, was ‘the cleanest, merriest, healthiest sport that has ever been devised for

countries with a sea-front’. A second special ‘seaside issue’ of the same paper published the following summer reiterated the appeal of the surf and implored readers to join the growing crowds in the breakers. Among those who contributed articles comparing the surf at different beaches, providing tips on shooting the breakers and advising bathers fearing sharks not to venture too far out, was Fred Williams, Secretary of the East Sydney Swimming Club. He was described as the ‘recognised champion “surf-shooter” of the Sydney beaches’ and had also assisted in the attempted rescue of Eda Jackson. Another contributor, Arthur Rosenthal, was a trained lifesaver from Manly credited with having ‘saved nine lives’. In the wake of the drowning death of George Baker at Tamarama and numerous near-drownings, Rosenthal addressed what must have been considerable anxiety about the dangers of the surf. He advised swimmers who found themselves in a ‘hole or channel’ to avoid fighting against the current and instead ‘go to the sea with the current, and either await rescue or endeavour to return to the beach by a course outside the current’. It is remarkable that over a century later, the official advice to surf swimmers by Surf Life Saving Australia (SLSA) has barely changed. Articles in which experienced surf swimmers shared their wisdom helped build public confidence in the surf. Such affirmations of surf bathing legitimised and demystified an activity that was still foreign to, and feared by, most

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People travelling further afield from the best-known beaches discovered new stretches of surf. This 1907 photo was taken at Narrabeen, which had been better known for its protected lagoon than its ocean beach.

Sydney residents. Advice about how to approach breaking waves and how to stay safe in the surf – second nature to many Sydney residents a century later – was particularly important in this respect. The extensive media coverage of surf bathing in the opening decade of the century created awareness and excitement about the new beach sport, and drew more people into the surf. As surf bathers gradually became a majority among beachgoers, the activity’s detractors found it increasingly difficult to find a sympathetic audience for their claims of moral improprieties. The early surf promoters exploited Australians’ cultural faith in the general healthiness of the beach that had been established in the previous century. So-called experts like Williams and Rosenthal confidently claimed that the ‘buffeting’ waves enhanced the inherent healthy qualities of sea water. Arthur Relph, co-founder and inaugural secretary of the Manly Surf Club, was among

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Max Dupain’s iconic photo of the start of a surf race at Manly Beach in 1940 captures the glistening physique of Sydney’s surf lifesavers. These men, respected for their selflessness in rescuing people from the surf, were also admired for their robust ‘Australianness’.

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the most vocal proponents of the healthy surf. Over several pieces in local newspapers he exploited anxieties about the health of the urban and industrialised populations and championed the surf’s potential contribution to ‘the general improvement of the physique and stamina of our race’. According to Relph, surf bathing was ‘helping our youth to grow up fine, strong, hardy, shapely men and women’. In echoes of eugenic theories, it was building a ‘vigorous race’ of youth.4 Such perspectives had a strong influence on the ways supporters of surf bathing talked about the activity. It became common to claim that the surf ‘invigorated’ and ‘rejuvenated’ bathers. Bathers themselves wrote to the editors of Sydney newspapers affirming the health benefits they believed they experienced from the surf. According to the Sydney Mail, the surf turned ordinary men into art: ‘the sinewy, muscular forms of strong swimmers fighting the breakers in the flashing sea and sunlight give always a picture of force and health and energy gratifying to the artistic eye’.5 Soon, high-profile figures including politicians were attributing improvements in their own health to bathing in the surf. In 1907, James Ashton the Minister for Lands publicly declared that ‘owing to heavy Parliamentary duties, his nerves had suffered, but a course of battling with the breakers completely restored him to his natural condition’. A 1910 endorsement of the healthy beach by the Premier, Charles Wade, demonstrated the extent to which health had become part of the mainstream rhetoric of the surf within less than a decade and was overwhelming any lingering moral anxieties. ‘There was no better tonic for the weary man, and no better form of exercise to develop the muscular, courageous and other qualities of young men’, he declared. More than affirming existing associations between the beach and health, their public advocacy also reassured Sydneysiders that surf bathing in proper attire did not compromise morality, a critical factor in extending the sport’s appeal among the city’s middle class population.6

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Protecting decency on the beach

Bathing may have become more acceptable, but as more people dived into the surf, the challenge of providing appropriate and sufficient dressing accommodation overwhelmed coastal councils. They were unaccustomed to providing for large numbers of surf bathers and were still partly unconvinced of the desirability of attracting surf bathers to their shores. They

expected the state government to bear the financial burden, arguing that most surf bathers came from greater Sydney: they did not contribute to rates and therefore did not deserve municipal expenditure. For some councils, the perils of the surf and provision of amenities for bathers were intertwined – providing or expanding places to change would only encourage inexperienced bathers to enter the surf, might encourage immoral public displays of wet bodies, and would detract from their baths income.7 The Waverley Council was the most conservative, reluctantly providing dressing sheds at Bondi Beach in 1906 to protect the ‘decency’ of persistent bathers rather than encourage more to the beach. Elsewhere, attitudes were starting to shift. Manly’s Mayor, Ellison Quirk, was among the first to acknowledge, in 1903, that surf bathing should be encouraged as a way of building the tourist appeal of his suburb. Randwick Council followed, investing (with some government support) in extending and improving Coogee’s bathing sheds and other parts of the beach in 1907 in an attempt to lure beachgoers away from Manly. Local progress associations led the charge for improved access to the beaches to attract new residents and tourists to their local areas. An unofficial rivalry between coastal councils had begun and would escalate with the lavish beach beautification schemes of the 1920s and ’30s.8 By 1907 suggestions that surf bathing was directly responsible for increases in land values along the city’s coast echoed across the media and were repeated by surf bathing promoters and politicians alike. More than ever before, people wanted to live near the beach. The Minister for Lands and confessed surf bather James Ashton was a powerful ally, claiming early in 1907 that land ‘had

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increased over 100 per cent in value in proximity to a much favoured bathing resort’. Ashton also admitted what those campaigning for greater financial support had been claiming for several years, that the government benefited from ‘increased tramway and other traffic’ induced by surf bathing.9 The Liberal Reform governments of Joseph Carruthers and Charles Wade, which spanned the years 1904 to 1910, were economically rather than socially conservative and they proved influential advocates of bathers and beachgoers. Their support was motivated partly by the enjoyment Wade and key ministers themselves derived from the surf, partly by financial incentives and most strongly by the community health benefits they associated with the beaches. They had helped the city’s workers enjoy beach recreation by creating new beach reserves at Tamarama in 1907 and Maroubra and Collaroy in 1909. But they refused to accept responsibility for the comfort or safety of beachgoers, offering only to subsidise councils up to 50 per cent of the cost of building or improving dressing sheds. The principle of free access to amenities as well as beaches was nonetheless safe with these governments. James Ashton set an important precedent by approving financial assistance for construction of the first Bondi surf sheds in 1905 on the condition entry remained free. His successor as Minister for Lands, Samuel Moore, also fought against commercialisation of dressing sheds, refusing an offer from a ‘wealthy gentleman’ to construct large sheds in the centre of Bondi Beach for fear of commercialising a beach service and allowing buildings so large they would ‘detract from the natural beauty of the beach’. When the Waverley Council leased the Bondi kiosk, drill shed and surrounding land to the Bondi Surf Bathers’ Life Saving Club (SBLSC) in 1908, Moore fought that too – albeit unsuccessfully – arguing that the arrangement ‘look(ed) like handing over the practical control of one of the most important public bathing beaches to an irresponsible (though otherwise very worthy) body’.10 These politicians recognised that the right to a free beach extended to a right to free bathing. But despite their good intentions, councils struggled to provide the kind of amenities bathers demanded, without charge.

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Shedding clothes

As state and local governments tussled over responsibility, the amenities on most beaches remained inadequate, fuelling surf bathers’ resentment of government as well as complaints about bathers’ inappropriate public exposure. ‘John Freshwater’ offered helpful advice to Sydney Morning Herald readers who were faced with a lack of dressing accommoda-

tion on the beaches by suggesting that ‘the simple placing of a towel round the loins while adjusting the costume is all that is necessary’ – a method of concealment that continues to be practised daily. Outside of Sydney too, the popularity of surf bathing spread more quickly than local governments could

Passers-by may have been able to see into some men’s dressing sheds, but extra care was taken for women. Here, at Manly in 1907, the women’s dressing sheds were fitted with 5 8planks toS ensure ydney additional towering passing strollers could not spy on women getting changed.

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accommodate, leading to situations like that at Kiama on the south coast where male bathers horrified other beachgoers by changing in pig pens in the adjacent showground.11 Even some purpose-built surf sheds barely protected the modesty of bathers. Bondi’s first surf sheds, erected in 1906 through joint funding from local and state governments and the local progress association, had been deliberately minimal to save costs. They consisted of a c-shaped fence adorned with hooks for clothing and a bench and footboard along its length. They had no roof coverings, save for a small awning that followed the line of the fence to protect clothes from the rain. The enclosures were concealed on their open sides by chest-high screens, but these barely protected occupants from the gaze of passers-by. With a clear line of sight directly into the men’s enclosure from both the tram waiting shed and the path from the women’s sheds, one Sydney newspaper condemned the sheds as offensive from both a moral and sanitary perspective.12 The growth in numbers of new surf bathers heading into the surf each summer tested the amenities further. By January 1909, Manly Council had provided men’s and ladies’ dressing sheds at each end of the beach but there were still no changing amenities on Maroubra Beach or Bronte, where bathers created their own ‘primitive’ facilities ‘under the rocks at the northern end’.13 Bathers condemned those amenities that did exist as ‘dogbox structures’, ‘the same old pigsties on the beaches’, where ‘the crowds congregated in foul-smelling sheds like sardines in boxes’, and where possessions were stolen by ‘land sharks’. At least one bather derided them as emblematic of the ‘puerile’ lack of council support for surf bathing more generally. They argued that the sheds that catered to 500 men and 300 women at Coogee, and over half as many at Little Coogee, were grossly insufficient on busy summer days. The state of undress on the beaches so concerned the state government it briefly considered stripping trusts from local councils and vesting power in a new authority ‘to properly safeguard the public morals’. But it continued to provide financial support to any council willing to improve their amenities and contributed

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up to £1250 for new dressing sheds on Bondi Beach. These sheds would accommodate 250 women and triple the capacity of the men’s sheds, bringing it to 750.14 Despite growing complaints about the inadequacy of beach facilities, local and state governments knew they could not provide the level of service the beach-going public demanded without charging them to use the amenities. In 1911 the government appointed a Surf Bathing Committee to investigate beach accommodation. The committee heard evidence from councillors that the appointment of paid caretakers was necessary to provide clean, adequate amenities for bathers and to protect their belongings from theft. Predominantly middle-class surf lifesavers and prominent surf bathers testified that they would be willing to pay for such a service, although many others were opposed. Insisting that ‘the cost of providing accommodation should be borne by those who benefit by its use’, the committee ruled in favour of charging fees.15 On the committee’s advice, it was a Labor government that overturned the tradition of free ocean bathing in Sydney. The fact that a committee was required to resolve issues around bathing amenities showed how embedded the principle of free access was. The aldermen who argued that free entry to dressing sheds was unsustainable remained adamant that the principles of the ‘free’ beach would not be interfered with under their proposal; they would not charge beachgoers to bathe, merely to use their facilities.16 But in a period when bathers were legally required to change in the sheds, the difference was trivial. Bathers were divided. The normally conservative Sydney Morning Herald condemned the committee on behalf of those who did not want, or could not afford, to pay. It demanded the free beach be preserved: The people who cannot afford to pay the few pence that would be demanded are precisely those whose interests have to be conserved. The beach offers them at present a healthy outing at the cost of a tram fare … The leading principle should be that the ocean beach is free to all.

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Yet others, as the lifesavers had indicated, were willing to spend a small sum to ensure their belongings were secure and they could change away from the gaze of passers-by. The new funding model for beach amenities created additional income for coastal councils and brought a new face to the beaches: the surf-shed attendant. Those bathers who could afford it benefited from the safer and cleaner facilities that he oversaw. Councils became so accustomed to the revenue from dressing sheds that cultural shifts in the 1930s, through which it became more acceptable to arrive at the beach in swimwear or change in cars, had a substantial financial impact. Within just a few decades bathers were again leading a change, not only in the way beaches were used but also in the economic opportunities associated with their recreation.

Finding a lifeline

Local and state governments had been primarily concerned about ensuring the decency of surf bathing. Bathers were just as concerned with issues of safety. During the 1890s and early 1900s councils had provided basic lifesaving equipment on some beaches, but the Royal Shipwreck Relief and Humane Society and the Royal Life Saving Society, two organisations

that supported people who rescued drowning swimmers, had been more reliable in providing lifelines and buoys on the beaches to aid in the rescue of bathers in difficulty. These pieces of equipment were now proving inadequate in the face of greater demand. They had been vandalised, frayed over time or were too short – and too often they broke at critical times during rescues such as that of Mabel Thorpe and Frederick Smalpage. In the letters and opinion pages of Sydney’s newspapers, editors echoed bathers’ repeated calls for ‘something to be done’. Yet most coastal councils were even less inclined to invest in bathers’ safety, beyond lifelines and ropes, than they had been to invest in their decency. They argued that the municipal

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boundary ended at the water line, and that this was a state responsibility.17 Some aldermen were incredulous that people would want to risk their own safety by bathing in the surf rather than the municipal baths built into nearby rocky headlands. The Waverley Council made a point of informing the parents of a ‘lad’ who had drowned at Tamarama in early 1906 that the council bore no responsibility for his decision to swim at an unsafe beach. Meanwhile surf bathers at Bondi and Bronte purchased their own lifesaving equipment. At Manly, local residents had raised funds to employ local fishermen to patrol the beach in their boat in 1903 and, from 1904, they employed Edward ‘Appy’ Eyre, Manly’s first ‘professional lifesaver’, to patrol the beach.18 By the summer of 1906–07, with more people diving into the sea and dramatic accounts of surf rescues featuring regularly in the Sydney press, safety in the surf was at the forefront of public consciousness. The Daily Telegraph implored the state government to invest in the safety of bathers, arguing that ‘the beaches are the property of the whole community, and the use of them for surf-bathing purposes is to be encouraged in the interests of public health and happiness, which it is the first business of civilised government to promote’.19 But the issue failed to attract a sympathetic ear from state or local authorities. Some of the more enterprising bathers designed and proposed their own surf-safety solutions, including an ominous-sounding ‘rocket line throwing apparatus’ and a net stretched across the beach. One regular bather, John Hume, wrote to the Minister for Lands suggesting a complicated scheme involving ropes tied from a steel cable behind the breakers to pegs in the sand at 20–30-foot intervals, so that a bather in trouble ‘could never be more than 10 or 15 feet away from a rope’, possibly to their own detriment if they were flying down the face of a wave. Bondi resident PD McCormick proposed driving piles into the seabed in the surf zone for bathers to cling to, while others suggested models that were already in use overseas, such as a system of ropes apparently in use in Atlantic City. Neither the Waverley Council nor the state government took any interest in such proposals, each referring Hume and McCormick to the other on the basis of the financial benefits the other apparently obtained

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from surf bathers. The government’s hardline stance was summarised by a senior public servant who suggested that ‘the occasional loss of life’ in the surf, while regrettable, was to be expected, and that schemes to improve the safety of the beach would only encourage inexperienced swimmers to take unnecessary risks.20 In the face of ongoing government inaction the most regular and adept surf bathers – who were already rescuing inexperienced swimmers for no reward – found their own way of making the beaches safer. They organised themselves into formal surf lifesaving clubs and sought councils’ permission to take control of protecting and rescuing bathers in the surf. This was a far more community-driven outcome than the government might have foreseen, and was welcomed by councils that hoped it would stem the flow of drownings and near-drownings and appease the aggressive media. Because of the iconic status the surf lifesaver would acquire in Australian culture, there would be considerable, and often angry, controversy about how the idea emerged. But as historian Sean Brawley has shown, the Bondi Surf Bathers’ Life Saving Club (SBLSC) was Australia’s first. It was formed at a local hotel in February 1907 in the wake of the drowning death of 16-year-old Reginald Bourne. Local aldermen, federal politicians, members of the Bondi Amateur Swimming Club and men from the group of amateur wrestlers and boxers who often camped and swam at the northern end of the beach, were among those who attended the inaugural meeting and assumed honorary and committee positions in the new club. These were respectable men. At Manly, Bronte and elsewhere swimmers were already training themselves in methods of rescue and resuscitation. But the club at Bondi was the first in Sydney, and Australia, to not only train its members in lifesaving techniques, but also to obtain formal council support for its role on the beach and use of council equipment. This civic endorsement ensured the club’s success. A month after the formation of the Bondi SBLSC club members unveiled the ‘surf reel’, a new piece of lifesaving equipment that transformed local lifesaving techniques.21 Contrary to popular mythology it is unlikely the pioneering

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A lone lifesaver watches for swimmers in trouble. Behind him is the line and reel. First invented by Bondi surf lifesavers in 1907, the surf reel has become an icon of the Australian beach. For more than 50 years surf reels were common at most Australian beaches.

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aviator Charles Kingsford Smith was the first person to be rescued by use of a surf reel. Although the young ‘Chas Smith’ and another boy, Rupert Swallow, were rescued in the Bondi surf, likely by future lifesavers, their rescue, recorded in the Sydney Morning Herald, occurred in early January 1907, six weeks before the club was formed, and long before the first reel appeared. But the reel would soon assume an iconic status of its own. The club model pioneered at Bondi proved popular. Surf lifesaving clubs were formed along similar lines at Bronte in April, Manly in August, and Cronulla in January 1908 – all consisting solely of men, unlike the still-water Royal Life Saving Society clubs which permitted female membership. Councils were generally quick to lend their support although tensions were initially high between the Manly Council and Manly Surf Club, with the former unwilling to hand over control of the beach to an unproven body.22 Eventually, though, it too saw the merit in supporting a group of volunteers to provide a rescue service on the beach. Surf lifesavers’ willingness to volunteer their time to train themselves in methods of lifesaving and to patrol the beaches was irresistible to councils. The spirit of volunteerism that underpinned the movement also strengthened lifesavers’ popular appeal.23 Surf lifesaving clubs created a much sought-after solution to the problem of safety on the beaches. In exchange for the right to lease a small piece of land for clubhouses, and the recognition of select groups as sole custodians of beach safety, councils could ensure the relative safety of bathers with minimal financial outlay.

Creating a hero

In February 1908, just a year after the Bondi SBLSC was formed, William Anderson threw open his Wonderland City amusement park in Tamarama to around 15 000 people who came to see surf lifesavers from Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong compete in a ‘surf gymkhana’. Although novel at the time, some of the events performed that day are still

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Lifesavers in action, exercising their skills using the line and reel at a surf carnival at Manly. Surf carnivals helped to spread an understanding of the vital role surf lifesaving clubs played in keeping beaches safe.

familiar a century later, particularly the reel race, the land drill competition and the rescue and resuscitation competition, although the method of resuscitation involved massaging the victim’s back rather than simulating breathing air into his lungs. The spectators who flooded onto the sand and swarmed, ‘bee-like’,24 along the cliffs and headlands also witnessed feats of masculine competitiveness less familiar to a 21st-century surf sports audience: a tug of war, an exhibition of shooting the breakers (then still a novelty) and a ‘brown man competition’, in which the darkest men were awarded honours. Perhaps the most unexpected event from a modern perspective was the fancy-dress parade.25 Other early surf lifesaving carnivals included egg and spoon races, wheelbarrow races, foot races, ‘cock-fights’ and pillow fights. Surf lifesaving carnivals on Perth’s beaches were renowned for their gymnastic displays. Events such as these fused the types of

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activities traditionally found in British and Australian seaside festivals with new performances related specifically to the special skills of local lifesavers. Initially conceived as fundraisers, the appearance of club members in public displays and competitions like the Tamarama gymkhana became an important visual confirmation that these men were physically superior, disciplined and proficient in the surf.26 The size of the crowd on Tamarama Beach that day was a testament to the air of excitement that had emerged around surf lifesavers. In just a year, Sydney’s surf lifesavers had carefully crafted a heroic public image that emphasised their superior physical strength and skills born of training and discipline. Some lifesavers engaged in deliberate myth-making through Sydney papers. Garnering the support of local councillors and politicians was also crucial in attracting broader social standing. Described as ‘our boy soldiers’, lifesavers were held to represent Australia’s ‘national characteristics’ at a time when people were debating what kind of nation the newly minted Australia might be.27 As early as 1908 one NSW politician even proposed that films depicting surf bathing and the work of the lifesavers should be used to promote New South Wales at the Franco–British Exhibition.28 Although they did not immediately end the wave of drownings, the reassuring presence of surf lifesavers ‘facilitated leisure’ on the Australian beach.29 The surf, once seen as the hostile gateway to the violent, dangerous and longfeared ocean, had been tamed: it was seen to have been made safe – save the ever-present shark threat – by the surf lifesaver. He also helped to combat moral opposition to surf and sun bathers by embodying respectability: bronzed, healthy and selfless, lifesavers provided a positive and socially acceptable model for other beachgoers to emulate. They may have enjoyed positive press, but Sydney’s surf lifesavers were not entirely altruistic. Driven by personal politics, many volunteered their services in an attempt to legitimise their favourite pastime. In a climate of ongoing criticism of the public display of bathers’ bodies they were keen to reassure the non-believers that surf bathing could be conducted in a safe and morally

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acceptable way.30 Their interests were therefore far broader than providing for the safety of bathers; indeed one of the five founding objectives of the Bondi SBLSC had been to improve beach amenities ‘and otherwise promote and encourage the sport’.31 In October 1907, seven surf lifesaving clubs and associated bodies joined forces to form the Surf Bathing Association of NSW (SBA), with the aim of establishing themselves as a formal authority on all beach matters. The catalyst was a shared outrage at proposed by-laws that would impose greater restrictions on bathing costumes and, in particular, would force men to wear tunics (derided as ‘skirts’) over their neck-to-knee costumes. In the same week, male bathers had been so outraged by the proposal they paraded along Bondi Beach in women’s clothing in protest. Manly’s Frank Donovan, chairman and inaugural president of the new body, condemned the ‘interference’ of local government in costume regulation. He saw the Association, the antecedent to Surf Members of the North Steyne Surf Life Saving Club, assisted by young helpers, return the heavy boat to its shed after a day in the surf. Surfboats crashing down the face of a wave are a favourite with carnival crowds but they were also important surf lifesaving equipment.

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Life Saving Australia, as a body that would ‘do everything necessary to make surf bathing above reproach’. It would be a forum for promoting surf lifesavers’ representations to government as ‘the best and most competent persons to know what was good or bad for the pastime’.32 Surf lifesavers would not just protect bathers in the surf, but would promote their interests out of the water too. The plan worked. Against so much opposition the idea of tunics was dropped. Surf lifesavers assumed new influence as the recognised and respected spokespeople on all beach-related matters. Often appointed as beach inspectors, surf lifesavers became responsible for policing decency on the beach. They lobbied councils and government on all matters ranging from

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bathing costumes and sunbaking regulations to sand mining, coastal pollution, beachfront amusement parks and camping regulations. The Association not only represented surf bathers on official government committees but its representatives chaired the 1911 Surf Bathing Committee and the 1934 Shark Menace Advisory Committee. In 1916, they were invited by the Premier to participate in a conference on permanent seaside camps for country families.33 Their authority as spokesmen for the beach remained unrivalled for more than half a century, and reinforced their legitimacy as unofficial policemen on the beach. In the inter-war period the surf lifesaver – able-bodied, tanned, heroic – became a powerful symbol of Australianness. His association with the beach was integral to his widespread appeal as many Australians’ love of the beach was expressed in him. But the interconnection between the two symbols became self-perpetuating: the beach created the surf lifesaver, and he drew strength from his association with the nation’s glittering beaches.34 It is little wonder the surf lifesaver was featured in the national image Australians projected to the world.

Seeking the sun

Samuel Mills was among the small group of Sydney surf bathers who shaped popular thinking about the beaches and the emerging surf culture through the pages of the Sydney press in the opening decade of the 20th century. Unlike other writers like Arthur Relph and Arthur Rosenthal who emphasised bathers’ prowess in the surf, he was particularly captivated by

the colour of bathers’ skin. In the 1906 special issue of the Sydney Mail, Mills had celebrated surf shooting and described surf bathers as ‘sun boys, whose hair is full of sand … (and) whose religion every summer is to get a brown pelt, or rather a brown hide with a real good outside cake of salt’. He also wrote a fictional short story about a young woman visiting Manly from the bush who fell in love with her surf-rescuer. On Mills’ Manly Beach,

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a good many of the men had skins of brown, and against these the white-skinned men looked weak and sickly … A man feels he’s a man when his skin is a real good brown. And though the girl couldn’t tell why, she agreed that this was right, and that the best fellows were the brownest.

At Manly, Mills wrote, ‘the spirit of holiday is everywhere, of holiday and frisky humanity, of brown men half-dressed, walking bareheaded and barefooted along the streets and sands’.35 This was a romanticised account of the beaches of 1906 that reflected Mills’ own self-image. It is difficult to verify his claims that tanned skin increased mens’ sexual appeal. But through articles such as this the suntan was becoming closely linked in the public mind with surf bathers, with health and with attractive bodies. Mills was not the first to write about this distinctive physical feature of the regular bathers; a report in the Sydney Morning Herald of 1904 had described the groups of men on the beaches who ‘show rich brown bodies carefully toasted by many Saturdays and Sundays of deliberate basking on frizzling rocks’. But in 1906 Mills was part of a growing chorus who consciously glorified the ‘brown backs’ who conducted surf rescues, the young men who rubbed oil into each other’s skin ‘so that the sun may give them a healthy tan’, and who were reportedly so ‘intensely proud of their colour’, they would ‘again willingly undergo the tortures of sunburn’ to secure it. The idea that exposure to the sun improved one’s health was explicit in his and other accounts, and critical to fostering acceptance of the tanned body as an object of desire for both men and women.36 Yet the city’s beachgoers were far from unanimous in their affection for sunbathers. In a new nation that prided itself on – and legislated for – its whiteness, some Australians likened tanned men to dogs and ‘half-castes’.37 The other sources of opposition to sunbathing derived not from skin colour but from the perceived impropriety of the activity; primarily, that innocent beachgoers might see male bathers sitting or lying on the sand in bathing costumes or rolling down their tops. In an era of racial intolerance towards Aboriginal

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people and Pacific Islanders, sunbathers retorted by likening themselves favourably to a romanticised Pacific Islander, tapping into the ‘Nimble Savage’ stereotype in which Pacific Islanders were reified for their apparent aquatic abilities,38 and were thought of as a group of people who had a natural affinity with sun and surf.39 The colour of bathers’ skin had deeper connotations that had to be overcome before they would be fully accepted. Again, councils were required to mediate, providing roped off ‘enclosures’ to segregate sunbathers from other beachgoers. The 1911 Surf Bathing Committee reinforced an earlier rule instructing bathers to walk directly between water and sheds, and recommended that sunbathing, defined as ‘loitering on the beach, clad only in bathing costume’ be banned outside dedicated enclosures,40 a rule the Waverley Council was still reminding wayward sunbathers of two years later.41 Thanks to the work of people like Mills, the appeal of tanned skin as a physical marker of health and vitality remained strong, even in the face of personal attacks on sunbathers. A neat irony consequently emerged in which the tanned body earned respect, and was generally agreed to be ‘healthy’, but the exposed body itself, which was necessary to build a tan, remained an offensive sight. Soon, the suntan came to symbolise time spent on the beach and quickly became more closely associated with surf lifesavers than any other group. In the movement’s early years, as complaints about the immorality of public sunbathing continued to pour in to Sydney’s newspapers, those same publications eulogised surf lifesavers. In January 1908 the Sydney Morning Herald described them as the ‘sun-tanned

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At Manly Beach in 1907, the surf sheds doubled as a space for men to change and to sunbathe away from the sensitive eyes of women and children.

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men who patrol the ocean beaches from Maroubra to Manly looking for whom they may save’; and the ‘brown men’ who ‘carried out their sports in the white water in defiance of undertow and lurking sharks’. Surf lifesavers worked consciously to build these associations through their tanning competitions, laying the foundations for an enduring physical presence in national mythology. Many Australians assume the tanned beach body originated in the 1920s and ’30s when a ‘cult’ of the tan and of the surf transformed local beach cultures. This is a timeline that acknowledges the important place of the Australian World War I digger in creating an association between the sun-browned body and an Australian national type. It is also influenced by the theory that the fashion of tanned skin originated on the beaches of the Meditteranean in the 1920s. But on Sydney’s beaches, prior to World War I, this association had already begun.42 The Australian cult of the tan was born on the Sydney beach. The appeal of sun-tanned skin was more complex for women, however. They were told through the media both to seek the health and invigoration of sun and surf, and to avoid sunshine as ‘the complexion’s enemy’.43 In striking a balance between femininity and a healthy appearance, the suntan posed particular challenges for women. The surf bather as he was popularly conceptualised in the early 20th century, like the surf lifesaver and the bushman before him, was solely a male figure. Towards the end of the 20th century, attitudes about sunbathing – in time replaced by sunbaking – and tanned skin began to shift. The tan remains associated with healthiness and continues to be a desirable physical feature among many. But it has been marred by more sinister associations with skin cancer. Beachgoers continue to lie on the sand to soak up the sun but Australians are now more likely to cover parts of their bodies – not for modesty as a century ago, but for sun protection. The suntan has spawned a wide range of commercial products that help people protect their skin against sun damage or build the appearance of a ‘healthy’ – if often artificial – tan. The suntan therefore remains a complex cultural symbol of the beach and leisure in Australia.

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Nationalising the beach

In the wake of Frederick Smalpage and Mabel Thorpe’s deaths in January 1902 one Manly resident, urging improved lifesaving facilities, had predicted surf bathing would become ‘a healthy national exercise’ in Australia.44 A decade later this lone voice had turned into a chorus as surf-bathing promoters and advocates across Sydney confidently declared the

‘national importance’ of surf bathing: it was a ‘national recreation’, a ‘national pastime’, even a ‘national instinct’. The city’s beaches too had become ‘national’ spaces, occasionally said to be representative of ‘typical’ Australia.45 Ironically, Sydney’s coastal councils had themselves inadvertently contributed to the popular belief in the broader significance of the beaches. They had justified requests for state assistance by citing the ‘national’ significance of their beaches, a reasoning which the Wade government of 1907–10 soon itself agreed to. Echoed by bathers and sympathetic parliamentarians alike, the idea that the beach could represent Australians and Australia took hold in the post-federation continuation of a search for a national type and national culture – at least in parts of Sydney. Of course the reality was that surf bathing was anything but ‘national’. On the nation’s west coast, Perth’s residents were also starting to enjoy the surf on that city’s doorstep at around the same time, and formed their first surf lifesaving club at Cottesloe in 1909. North and south of Sydney too, surf bathing was popular at Newcastle and Illawarra beaches.46 Within the rest of Australia the craze was yet to reach national proportions; beyond Australian shores it was anything but rare. Surf bathing was well established on the North American east coast by the time it emerged as a dominant force in Sydney early in the 20th century. In Europe, Mediterranean and North Atlantic fishing communities had been bathing in the sea (if not the surf) for centuries and the practice was popularised by British tourists and northern Europeans in the 19th century. Nor was surf lifesaving an entirely local invention, as Australian lifesavers and their admirers might have liked to think.47

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But Sydney’s beach-lovers were not shy in declaring a broader significance of their new-found local beach cultures. The city’s newspapers from the early 20th century identified and promoted a shared excitement about the beaches, surf bathers and surf lifesavers. By the end of that decade, Sydney’s beaches were being ‘seen’ and talked about in new ways. Old ideas about health, nature and public ‘rights’ continued to influence perceptions of the beach; but they were being given new associations. Eugenic links between the surf and health from this period, in which surf bathing was imbued with an apparent ability to improve the ‘Australian race’, were particularly influential, just as eugenicists overseas were citing local factors in the improvement of their own ‘race’.48 People like Arthur Relph who drew on eugenic concepts to promote surf bathing therefore engaged in and contributed to a discussion about the nation: about the nature of ‘Australian recreation’, and the ‘Australian type’. Again, women on the beach were only part-participants, seen by some as an embodiment of national purity and by others as a threat to it.49

Settling into the surf

Some time in the middle of the first decade of the 20th century surf bathers gained credibility as a group of beach users who had equal political importance and influence as any other. By the start of World War I, Sydney’s new surf culture had become embedded in the fabric of the city. In just a decade, surf bathing, sunbathing and beach-going had become naturalised,

part of a regular summer for so many Sydney residents. Surfboard riding, first performed on Sydney beaches as early as 1912, was also gaining broader appeal. In 1914 the Sydney Morning Herald’s ‘Women’s page’ described a cityscape dominated by thoughts of the beach: Sydney is herself again when surfing begins … The majority of our population run into the sea as inevitably as if they were rivers … The towel brigade occupy the early trams in great force, wherever

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the said tram is running on a surf beach route. That is one of the characteristics of our city that mark it out like no other city in the world.

Once in the surf, according to this account, men and women of all ages and walks of life ‘wash away the war and all worries of this work-a-day world … and emerge with some of the strength of old ocean invigorating their limbs and heartening up their minds and spirits’.50 The city looked different to just a decade earlier. The beaches were attracting tens of thousands of visitors on summer weekends, many drawn by expectations of a dip in the sea. Trams now brought people directly to the sand at Cronulla and the beaches between Manly and Collaroy, and the Maroubra regulars were being tormented by unfulfilled promises of tram transport to their beach. Public access had been secured to Tamarama and public reserves created at Maroubra, Long Reef, Cronulla and Bongin Bongin (now Mona Vale) specifically to cater to the new surf-bathing crowds. Earlier anecdotal evidence of the influence surf bathing had on the land values along many of Sydney’s coastal suburbs had been confirmed, although it was part of a larger real estate boom across Sydney.51 Land at Cronulla, which had reportedly sold for £15 per acre around 1903, was subdivided and sold in 1911 for £3600 per acre. Undoubtedly the train and tram access to the city contributed substantially to the rise, but land values rose elsewhere along the coast too. At Maroubra and Long Bay, for example, land values rose from 5 shillings per foot to £5 and £6 per foot within five years, a 20-fold increase.52 In 1910 the Premier, Charles Wade, had attributed the ‘great progress in settlement’ in the district near Bondi to the popularity of surf bathing and of the beaches more generally.53 Four years later the Government Land Valuer confirmed that the coastal land boom was still taking effect: There has been a phenomenal boom in the last twelve months in all the land at the northern end of Bondi Beach, and the market

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value has risen, to my mind, out of all reason … The extraordinary demand of the general public for these water frontage sites in favourite bathing resorts about Sydney has had the effect of changing values almost monthly, and estimates made one year may be fifty per cent out within twelve months.54

But not everyone wanted or could afford to live by the sea. Surf bathing and a greater focus on the beaches also fostered a boom in a culture of coastal camping at beaches such as Freshwater and Maroubra that were beyond the reach of most daytrippers. These beaches became home to groups of predominantly young male campers on summer weekends, which as we will see brought new challenges for the authorities.

A person who visited a Sydney beach in 1900 might have been surprised, should they return a decade later, by how quickly the transition to a surf-based culture had occurred. But the ways of thinking about the beach – as a healthy place, a place of leisure and of escape – had not changed. These concepts had just gained broader appeal, and attracted greater political and media attention. The surf has lost none of its lustre. Sydneysiders instinctively flock to the beach each summer to strip down, dive into the surf and lie on the sand to soak up the sun. More than a century since these same activities attracted so much attention – and condemnation – our beach culture has continued to evolve. But our love affair with the surf persists.

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3 A canvas sea change In the summer of late 1912, on the southern corner of the Long Reef headland where the Dee Why Lagoon meets the ocean, Sydney workers looking for a temporary escape from the city began to erect tents.

Among them was Cecil Hartt, a freelance cartoonist who published in The Bulletin, and his wife Ruby. Cecil would later achieve fame through his caricatures of Australian diggers in World War I, but in the summer of 1912–13 Cecil and Ruby travelled from their home in Sydney north to Long Reef to set up a weekend camp. According to Cecil, the beach was the only place where Ruby, who suffered from asthma, felt healthy and the couple, having recently arrived from Melbourne, were considering buying land at nearby Dee Why. Camping at Long Reef was a free way to enjoy a summer at the beach until then. The Hartts shared the northern shore of the lagoon with eight other weekend camps, occupied by journalists, a railway ganger, a mariner, a labourer and their wives and friends. Dressed only in bathing costumes (according to

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one disapproving passer-by), the campers treated the park as if it were their own, reportedly damaging and ringbarking trees and cutting down shrubs to build windbreaks for their tents. Some of the camps closer to the lagoon were fenced with barbed wire; protection against theft or damage while their occupants returned to Sydney for the working week. The campers travelled to Griffith Park – named after the Minister for Works, Arthur Griffith, who had initiated its creation earlier in 1912 – on the Collaroy tram, which Griffith had also commissioned to bring workers to this stretch of the coast. Operating on the widely shared principle that ‘camping was allowed anywhere it was not expressly forbidden’ – a principle that had underpinned recreational camping along Australian beaches and riverbanks since at least the 1890s – they expected little resistance to their activities. Prior to the park’s establishment, the Warringah Council had even hoped to lease part of Griffith Park for 50 residences and 67 camp sites, which are clearly marked out on its original park plan. But the government refused to tolerate holiday campers at Long Reef.1 Not only was the government concerned by the campers’ apparent wilful damage to the park, but it deemed the camps an ‘eyesore’, surrounded by litter and without the benefit of toilets or other amenities. It was also troubled by the handful of fishermen who camped permanently at The Basin on the northern shore of the headland, and the two pensioners who also made Long Reef their home. The government that had invested in this ‘people’s park’ as part of its acclaimed foreshores resumption program deemed the campers’ presence the ultimate defiance against its fundamental principles of public reserves: that they ‘shall be free to all, rich and poor alike, subject only to [regulations] … decreed for the common good’. In a paradox at the heart of this and later battles over beachfront camping, James McGowen’s Labor government wanted the campers gone so that workers from Sydney could enjoy unrestricted access to the park for what it considered to be more ‘appropriate’ coastal recreation.2 Campers who colonised other beaches along the Sydney coastline during this period also attracted criticism. In the opening decade of the 20th century,

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A family enjoying the outdoor life, camped at Cronulla’s Shelly Beach in 1906. Whether enjoying a weekend by the beach, camping for the whole summer, or living under canvas out of desperation, beachside campers would soon be displaced by a new wave of coastal residents.

the influx of beachgoers to Manly, Bondi, Bronte and Coogee had sent others searching for more secluded stretches of sand. Summer holidaymakers pitched their tents at the further-afield Cronulla, Curl Curl, Freshwater and Maroubra – beaches within reach of the city but far from the crowds. Camping at these beaches was so common that Maroubra’s first surf lifesaving clubs are said to have found their membership amongst the regular weekend campers, and a 1910 advertisement promoted subdivided lots at Curl Curl as ‘choice campers’ sites’.3

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Freshwater, still relatively secluded from the busier Manly Beach, became so synonymous with campers over the opening decades of the 20th century that buses travelling to the suburb bore the destination ‘Camp City’. The Freshwater campers tended to be young working-class men from the inner suburbs of Sydney, including a number of wharf labourers, who pitched tents or leased structures erected around the beach on private land. They formed clubs with names such as ‘High Jinks’, ‘The Puritans’ and ‘Idle a While’, and ordered casks of beer that were delivered directly to the camps from the Steyne Hotel at Manly. They inevitably attracted a poor reputation: the ‘doubtful and riotous character’ of the summer campers prompted the appointment of the suburb’s first policeman in 1910 and, more than a decade later, inspired the suburb’s name change from Freshwater to Harbord. This was a conscious attempt by the council and local progress association to eradicate the ‘stigma’ the campers had brought to the suburb – a fresh start to attract new homebuyers to this expanding coastal district.4 The campers at Long Reef were similarly poorly regarded and the tension between campers and the authorities continued through the 1910s. The Hartts and their friends had been evicted – despite their protests and a high-profile character reference – but the spot had become so popular that new groups were constantly arriving to take the place of those removed. The new arrivals included workers from the Sydney suburbs of Manly, Mosman, Leichhardt, Marrickville and Erskineville. As World War I progressed, Griffith Park was transformed into the summer home of wives and children of soldiers on duty who ‘had been conveyed to the camping ground by good friends from various suburbs who promised, after the holidays, to return and take the campers back to their homes’. According to the local press ‘they were a good class of people’. However internal government reports suggested they were ‘poor families from the crowded districts of Sydney not able to afford the luxury of a weekend cottage at the seaside’. Regardless of their social standing, their presence complicated the government’s previous hardline stance against recreational summer campers. Like the weekender campers of 1913, these were the very people the

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park had been reserved for, but they used the space in ways that challenged the initial philosophy behind the creation of the park. By 1917, after four years of ongoing evictions, camping on Griffith Park at Long Reef was so rife – by fishermen, soldiers’ families and weekenders – that the government conceded defeat in the battle against private occupation of this public space. Twenty tents had been removed during the Christmas holidays but many more remained. Finally the government admitted that ‘in a case such as this where it is very difficult to wholly prevent camping, and there is a liberal area available to public use, it would apparently be better to allow camping on a restricted area, with provision of sanitary conveniences and under supervision, than to contend with unauthorised camping’. The fishers who camped at the other end of the park, on land formerly owned by the Salvation Army, also earned a reprieve. Some had lived there for up to 15 years, beneficiaries of the Salvation Army’s mission to use the land to help the ‘fallen and needy’. They had long enjoyed the support of local residents who appreciated their services and defended their occupation of part of the park on the basis they sold fresh, affordable local seafood, rescued stricken leisure boats and caught sharks. By May 1917 there were 25 men and 4 women occupying 16 sites at the fishermen’s camp. They lived in tents and small huts built of old iron boards: an eyesore and with no sanitary conveniences. Huddled closely together they were said to resemble an ‘Aboriginal camp’. Four years after it had threatened to prosecute them for trespassing, in 1917 in the face of overwhelming public support, the government agreed with a council request to let the fishers stay. They would pay a small rent and improve their accommodation, and the married couples would be separated from the single men. But they would continue to live on the park. The campers’ apparent victory was made at the instigation of the park Trustee, the Warringah Council, which had persuaded the government to change its policy on economic grounds. The creation of the new council camping ground served the dual purpose of ‘cleaning up’ persistent campers while creating a new source of income for the council. It was consistent with

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the council’s commercial vision for the park, which had seen it briefly consider permitting a coursing ground and which would lead to the leasing of about one-third of the park to a golf links in 1920. In their new, sanctioned surroundings, campers at Long Reef and along the northern beaches continued to pitch their tents by the beach for several decades, despite the resentment of a growing suburban and weekender population who did not want to share their public reserves with primarily working-class campers. Collaroy landowners were increasingly critical of the campers in Griffith Park, but they considered the golf course to be an investment in the district’s development and one that would attract the ‘right type’ of people to the northern beaches. Their concerns about campers were broader, therefore, than an issue of park usage. This was the start of a battle the campers ultimately could not win.5

Bringing the bush to the beach

As part of its commitment to improving the health and wellbeing of Sydney’s working classes, the McGowen Labor government supported philanthropic initiatives to bring the working poor to Sydney’s beaches – even while it was trying to evict working campers from those spaces. In 1913 it granted the Seaside Camp Association a permissive occupancy over three

acres at The Basin at Long Reef, from where it was seeking to evict fishermen from their camps at the time. But despite generous financial support from a public sympathetic to her cause, the Association’s founder, Alice Currie, never realised her utopian dream of lines upon lines of neat white tents, or wooden cottages, in close proximity to the shore, and happy crowds, chiefly of children, pouring out from them in the morning sunlight for the live-long day to be spent in paddling, bathing, castle-building in the sand, and laying in stores of health and happy memories, to last them in their

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bush homes in the back-blocks for all the year, till summer and tent city time come round once more.6

In the 1920s, eugenicists became increasingly active and influential in promoting Sydney’s beach culture for its perceived contributions to the physical improvement of the Australian race and to mental hygiene. As a result, initiatives designed to increase working class opportunities to get to the beach, like that promoted by Curry, received popular and bipartisan political support.7 Walter Wearne, the Minister for Lands from 1922 to 1925 in George Fuller’s nationalist government, was among the more influential supporters. He looked favourably on a 1923 application from the newly formed Country Women’s Association (CWA) for coastal land in Sydney for a rest home for women and children from country New South Wales. Securing seaside accommodation along the NSW coast and cheaper railway fares so that ‘women who otherwise would not be able to enjoy a rest would be able to spend a holiday at the seaside’, was one of the CWA’s two founding goals. Mrs H Munro, the CWA’s founding president argued that the ‘simple and wholesome enjoyments’ offered by a stay at the beach would give women ‘something to look forward to’ in what were otherwise lives of ‘drudgery’. These were the women and children of New South Wales, it was said with pity, who had never seen the sea. Wearne, a country man himself, who advocated on other occasions for the need for workers to have access to ‘healthy’ outdoor recreation in places like the National Park south of Sydney, agreed that the proposed home would improve the health of country people and give them a ‘larger outlook in life’.8 Wearne initially offered the Association land at Bilgola and Maroubra before securing a site at Dee Why, on which it built Keera House in 1923. Within just a few years demand for Keera House was so high the CWA extended the building, doubling its capacity to 50 guests and opening new seaside homes at Newcastle, Port Macquarie, Evans Head and Sawtell on the north coast, and Bermagui in the south.9 More than just bringing people to the beach, the CWA and similar initiatives inadvertently fostered new cultural connections and holiday traditions between rural communities and the state’s beaches.

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Children staying at Curl Curl’s Stewart House demonstrate their swimming actions to senior education officials. Stewart House was among inter-war philanthropic ventures to improve the health of underprivileged children by bringing them to the beach.

Keera House was among several seaside homes conceived and built on the northern beaches in the post-war period to bring underprivileged people to Sydney for beach holidays. Furlough House opened at Narrabeen in 1918 for the wives and widows of servicemen and their children and from 1931 Stewart House (initially named ‘Wangoona’) at Curl Curl opened to care for malnourished children who were presumed to be ‘starved of sunshine and healthy recreation’ as well as food. Attempts had already been made to establish a country police convalescent home and Agricultural Bureau co-operative seaside camps on the site where Stewart House was eventually built, indicating a broad interest

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in beach-front holiday camps.10 The Far West Children’s Scheme also brought children from the ‘outback’ to camps at Collaroy and Cronulla beaches in the mid-1920s. Later a large ‘home’ was built at Manly to house country children in need of medical attention in the city. Hundreds of women and children stayed at these homes for a rare holiday by the beach each year. The emphasis on the healthiness of beach recreation has diminished but the homes’ charitable presence continues. The Far West Children’s Home and Stewart House continue to provide health and education services for sick and disadvantaged children from across New South Wales, while Furlough House has become a retirement village for ex-servicemen and their families.11 Wearne’s parliamentary colleague and future Minister for Public Health Richard Arthur, provided critical support for the establishment of each of these homes. A doctor and eugenicist who was deeply concerned about the conditions of poverty, Arthur initiated a number of schemes to improve the health and welfare of the state’s poorest people – rural and urban – in the late 1920s. Popularly dubbed ‘the little doctor’, Arthur believed strongly in the health-giving qualities of surf and sunshine: in 1906, he had been among the first politicians to publicly advocate the health benefits of surf bathing. It was this faith in the intrinsic benefits of the beach, not just to individual health but to the fitness of the nation, that compelled Arthur to create and support opportunities for the state’s underprivileged children to spend time at the beach. Arthur had been instrumental in assisting the CWA to establish Keera House, and was a founding Vice President of the AIF Wives and Children’s Holiday Association, which built Furlough House. Together with fellow parliamentarian Alfred Hunt he also arranged free transport for Far West Children’s Scheme participants and made numerous appeals for funds, food, bathing costumes and voluntary female labour to support the first camps. By March 1925, they had received £876/6/9 in subscriptions, bringing 200 women and children to Collaroy and Cronulla that summer from Bourke, Brewarrina, Cobar, Walgett, Mungindi and Hay. Arthur also selected and applied for the land on which Stewart House would be built, which was granted in his and three others’

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names. He enlisted 80 boy scouts to clear the land in preparation for building and, in a move that would today be unthinkable, issued a call in the Sydney press for any motorists in the area with spare seats to drop by South Curl Curl Beach and drive some of the boys home.12 Arthur and his fellow founders of these homes appealed for funds and support by reminding Sydneysiders that they owed a ‘duty’ to outback people, whose ‘monotonous and trying existence we are only beginning to realise’. They produced images of ‘wildly happy and healthy looking children’ in the

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Children from country New South Wales experience the joy of the Bondi surf for the first time, courtesy of the Far West Children’s Scheme which later set up a permanent home at Manly.

Sydney surf as evidence of the importance of time spent on the beach, and delighted in the knowledge that the children and their ‘tired weary’ mothers would return the outback ‘refreshed and ready to take up their burdens once more’.13 They worked on the belief that outback children were just as deprived as the urban poor, and that the beach was the ideal environment for physical and mental healing. These ideas were firmly rooted in contemporary eugenic thought but they built on earlier associations between the beach and bodily and mental health.14

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As purely philanthropic ventures, these homes were distinct from later commercial camps such as Butlins on the British coast and American summer camps, but they were built on the same principles – that outdoor recreation, particularly on the coast, was inherently healthy. In Sydney, they were seen to be different from the informal camps at Long Reef and Freshwater because they were institutional spaces where accommodation and recreation were supervised and morally acceptable behaviour was ensured. Gender may have also influenced public perception: these were places for women and children, rather than men who dominated camp sites like Freshwater, although union and corporate holiday camps would later cater to men and their families. However, despite the public sympathy for their cause, local support was not guaranteed. When the government briefly considered leasing the CWA a site on Griffith Park prior to the construction of Keera House, 60 Collaroy residents and ratepayers had signed a petition against the proposal and the local progress association also lodged a protest. They may have agreed that deprived women and children needed seaside holidays, but were not willing to share their prized public space with this group.15

Depressionera camps

While the vacant land between new homes on the northern beaches was becoming occupied by recreational weekend campers and children’s holiday homes, on the beaches south of Coogee the city’s poorest citizens were creating their own shelters. Spaces like the dunes and scrubland south of Maroubra remained on the margins of suburbia.

Here there were vast swaths of vacant Crown land that governments had set aside in anticipation of a residential boom that was yet to happen, and in which they otherwise took little interest. For nearly 50 years the area between Maroubra and La Perouse had been home to Sydney’s only gazetted Aboriginal reserve, its residents themselves

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marginalised and pushed to the edges of the city where they fought for the right to continue living in this space. Aboriginal people also camped on vacant land outside the reserve, as they did along beaches and riverbanks across the state. In the second half of the 19th century Sydney’s Aboriginal residents had lived in other remote parts of the eastern suburbs, including in areas close to beaches. Archaeologist Paul Irish and Dharawal man Michael Ingray have shown they lived with a degree of choice and freedom. They selected living places that were rich in resources where they could maintain cultural obligations. Aboriginal camps on the outskirts of Sydney were a normal part of the city into the 20th century and were unremarkable to most other residents.16 For some of the city’s poorest non-Aboriginal residents too, the coastal areas south of Maroubra had long been home. Unable to pay rents, about 30 families from Surry Hills and Waterloo had built a town of huts on ‘the hills’ near Long Bay earlier in the century, in an area known as ‘Eucalyptus Town’.17 For these and other individuals living in the district, camping by the beach was not about healthy recreation, it was a matter of survival. In the early 1930s thousands of unemployed workers and their families, victims of the Great Depression who were unable to pay their rents, were evicted from their homes. With nowhere else to go, many found sanctuary on the fringes of the city. South of the city, unemployment camps sprang up throughout the still sparsely settled Sutherland Shire. The council set aside land at Cronulla to host the unemployed, but substantial camps also emerged along the coast at Kurnell, along the Port Hacking River and foreshores of Botany Bay, and the edges of the National Park. To the north, homeless people camped on the foreshores of Middle Harbour at Clontarf and Pearl Bay, prompting the Mosman Council to request the government to set aside land at Frenchs Forest, beyond the city’s periphery and away from suburban homes.18 Some unemployed families also joined the recreational campers at Long Reef. One of the best-known camps – then and now – was Happy Valley at La Perouse. A 1931 article in the Sunday Sun brought the plight of this ‘misery camp’ to the city’s – and the government’s – attention, describing between 50

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and 60 families living ‘in the sandhills of La Perouse’. The men came from every corner of Sydney, and from ‘every profession and trade’, from theatre managers, musicians and clerks to carpenters, painters and bricklayers. ‘Some live among the natural caves in the rocks, others were able to secure tents, while some have erected shanties of scrap-heap timber, tin, hessian, or of branches of trees’, the paper reported.19 At nearby Yarra Bay, on the northern shore of Botany Bay, new families were arriving almost daily at an even larger camp known colloquially as ‘Frog Hollow’, a name it shared with an infamous slum area of Surry Hills. Happy Valley had been constructed on Commonwealth defence land recently leased to the NSW Golf Company. It was away from people, unlike the Yarra Bay camp, which slowly crept across a recreation reserve that had been created in happier times for users of the bay beach. Adjacent to a Girls’ Industrial School and the Aboriginal Reserve, the government was concerned about the presence of unsupervised men and families in the camp. Its neighbour, Mrs Howe, who leased public land for weekender cottages and sporting fields, was also critical and complained about the potential impact on her business. But as the camps grew, it seemed there was little the government could do. At the height of the crisis in 1932, more than 1000 men, women and children were living in 300 camps at Yarra Bay, in shacks cobbled together from old iron and other materials or in tents supplied by the government, in this distant corner of the city. The camps were well organised, run by executives who decided how to distribute donations amongst the campers – money for vegetables and meat at Yarra Bay and freely delivered milk, fruit and vegetables at Happy Valley. Both camps had libraries and fishing boats, and Happy Valley had a marquee ‘for meeting and recreation purposes’. Many of the children attended the Yarra Bay primary school. In their set-up and organisation they were reminiscent of the shearers’ strike camps of the 1890s.20 Happy Valley and Yarra Bay were the largest and best known of several Depression camps scattered throughout the area north of Botany Bay but smaller camps also emerged. Some were set up near the tramline at Long Bay,

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A family, cast out of their home during the Depression, craft a precarious new living space on the edge of a cliff at Kurnell. Thousands of Sydney families were forced to seek temporary shelter during the Depression, most camping in groups on vacant Crown land.

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others on the south-western corner of what is now the Randwick Rifle Range and more across Botany Bay at the mouth of the Cooks River. Campers here initially supplemented their rations by digging and selling shells and shell grit, until the resource disappeared. At Maroubra Bay, one of several small ‘odd camps’ that had existed since long before the Depression had turned into a camp of 80 people by late 1932. The camps’ inspector ranked Long Bay as the ‘best conducted camp of the lot’ and noted the campers at Maroubra Bay appeared to be particularly healthy, with no serious cases of sickness and less danger of disease breaking out than at some of the more congested camps.21 Residents and the Randwick Council complained about the camps, which the council considered to be a ‘menace to the public health of the neighbourhood’. Ironically the council was most concerned about the smaller and apparently healthier Long Bay and Maroubra camps and criticised campers for disturbing the vegetation on the dunes and leaving faeces in the scrub. It also implied they were involved in cases of theft in the district – although it was careful not to directly accuse. These may have been the healthiest and cleanest camps but they were also the closest to residential areas and like all Depression camps around Australia, they made locals uncomfortable.22 More significantly, the campers’ occupation of a public reserve on the edge of a large ocean beach counted strongly against them. The campers at La Perouse were out of the way and could be ignored; those at Maroubra and Yarra Bay were highly visible, occupying public reserves in ways deemed offensive to public sensibilities and contrary to the purpose of those parks. The Depression campers in the National Park had been similarly criticised for encroaching on the amenity of a public space, as had the Long Reef campers two decades earlier.23 The council’s complaints failed to sway a government which, resigned to the camps’ necessity while trying to address the housing disaster that had gripped the city, favoured the area between Maroubra and La Perouse over other locations. On the far edge of town but on a tramline into the city, they were away from the most populated areas of the city, close to the ocean and bay beaches for bathing and had a natural water source. These beaches may have

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been popular among locals but crucially they were among those least used by the mainstream public. At the state level, the health benefits associated with the coastal location of the camps also counted in their favour. Even in the context of people living in tents and hastily constructed shacks, ideas of the healthiness of ocean air and access to the surf continued to inform official perspectives. The NSW Director of Public Health attributed the ‘surprisingly good’ health of Sydney and Newcastle’s unemployed campers to ‘Australians’ adaptability to outdoor life’, as well as the influences of the camps’ governing bodies. As he saw it, ‘the child life of the camps was particularly good, and it was much better that the children should be reared under open-air conditions than in one- or tworoomed tenements in the city’. The philosophy that had inspired the creation of children’s seaside homes was now being used to rationalise the living conditions of the state’s poorest people. As the housing situation worsened in the early 1930s and more families found refuge in the sandhills around La Perouse, the government looked locally for a solution. It granted a number of special leases for houses in the immediate district, including, eventually, on the camp site at Yarra Bay. It also considered the vacant Crown lands between Long Bay and La Perouse to be the most suitable in the metropolitan district for a Housing Scheme for the Unemployed. This scheme would transform the district in the post-war decades. It was not until the late 1930s, long past the worst of the Depression, that many of the campers around La Perouse had re-entered the workforce and some of these spaces were claimed back for public use. In 1940 the council sought the removal of a small number of people still camping behind Maroubra Beach on the park now known as Broadarrow Reserve. The following year just seven illegal camps remained at each of Happy Valley and Yarra Bay, and these were soon gone too. The land that had been home to hundreds of people for the past decade was returned to the wider population to be used for what most considered more appropriate forms of coastal recreation: golf, swimming and sunbathing, bushwalking and general tourist activities. The pressing concerns

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of national defence soon occupied some of the coastal spaces in this district and the area around La Perouse continued to be the living and working landscape of an Aboriginal community.24 But the city’s beaches and coastal areas had been critical in providing safe and available spaces for the city’s most desperate people to pitch their tents when they needed it most. Coastal camping in Sydney did not end with the rehousing of the longterm unemployed. The Depression-era camps may have transformed pockets of the coast and riverbanks for much of the 1930s but recreational camping in the tradition of the Hartts at Long Reef had never ceased in some places, and in others it quickly resumed. In Griffith Park, a small handful of unemployed campers who appeared in the early 1930s (and who had also attracted the ire of residents and the council) had been joined by around 1000 feepaying, and therefore more acceptable, recreational campers at Christmas 1931. In the following decades weekend, holiday and more permanent camps proliferated along the northern beaches on public and private land. For some, faced with the wartime and post-war housing shortage, living in camps on the northern beaches was driven by necessity rather than choice. For many more who pitched their tents along this stretch of the coast, camping at the beach continued to be about the quintessential weekend away, or summer holiday – a temporary escape from the heat and congestion of the city. The ongoing presence of both these groups caused tension in holiday communities. They challenged landowners’ assumptions that they had purchased a right to have a say about who shared ‘their’ beaches.

We e k e n d e r s

In the early 1920s, DH Lawrence’s Richard Lovat and Harriet Somers, characters in his novel Kangaroo, boarded the tram at Manly and headed north to Collaroy. Along the journey they observed thousands of small promiscuous bungalows, built of everything from patchwork of kerosene

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A captivated crowd enjoys the spectacle of two men wrestling at the Bronte Baths. During the 1930s the beach was also an escape from the hard reality of the Depression.

tin up to fine red brick and stucco, like Margate. Not far off the Pacific boomed. But fifty yards inland started these bits of swamp, and endless promiscuity of ‘cottages’.25

These cottages were homes, holiday homes and boarding houses. They were owned by investors and people from Sydney and country New South Wales who wanted their own slice of beachfront living. The properties were in demand each summer but more affordable to rent in the colder months when beachfront living was less appealing.

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Yet had Richard and Harriet travelled beyond Narrabeen they would have discovered a landscape virtually undeveloped except for the foundations of some fairly exclusive seaside suburbs. The subdivisions of Palm Beach in 1912 and Whale Beach and Newport soon afterwards had been marketed as holiday blocks for summer cottages. As the land was around 40 kilometres from Sydney, few could afford to make the area their permanent home and neither did they want the seclusion of the winter months. So the area, like that south of Coogee, took time to develop. In the mid-1920s, residential development in the area had been so slow that a recreation reserve created in 1910 on ‘Bongin Bongin Beach’ (now Mona Vale) to cater for future growth was deemed not required and an application to build a ‘modern residential hotel’ at Palm Beach was refused due to an anticipated lack of demand. A decade later, Palm Beach was still described in government documents as ‘mainly a holiday resort’. Cattle from nearby dairies roamed the streets and beaches of the peninsula, causing a nuisance for the increasingly heavy motor traffic and disrupting picnics, reportedly ‘cran(ing) their heads into cars in search of food’. It was not until the 1950s – and the construction of the Wakehurst Parkway – that the sporadic settlements between Mona Vale and Palm Beach were consolidated into wellpopulated suburbs and the local dairies gradually disappeared.26 From the very first subdivisions, Palm Beach and Whale Beach attracted the city’s most wealthy residents who had the time, money and cars to properly enjoy them. As early as 1922, Walter Wearne cited the wealth of Palm Beach’s residents as a reason not to support the Warringah Council’s bid for a resumption of the Pittwater foreshore, fearing that critics would cry ‘you can find money for Palm Beach, where the rich people go in their motor cars, but you cannot find money to provide spaces for the poor in the congested city’. The class distinctions of the Sydney coastline were therefore established relatively early in the history of these suburbs. While in the decades following the Depression the area around Maroubra and Long Bay would be built up to house workers, the peninsula north of Newport was already the summer playground of Sydney’s elite.27

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Two stylish socialites pose in the latest beach fashions on the sands of Palm Beach in the 1930s. Palm Beach holidaymakers were the envy of many fashion-conscious Sydney women and the subject of feature articles in magazines and newspapers.

Here, nestled below the Barrenjoey Headland, Palm Beach homeowners hosted high-profile guests, held lavish house parties and leased their properties to wealthy colleagues and friends each summer. The summer activities at Palm Beach dominated the social and fashion pages of the Sydney papers. This was Sydney’s answer to Melbourne’s Portsea, the exclusive coastal suburb at the western point of the Mornington Peninsula. A 1930 serial novel published in the Sydney Morning Herald depicted the Palm Beach set as affluent eastern suburbs and north shore residents who judged each other by appearances and bloodlines rather than on their personal qualities, and who spent all

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year planning house parties that would be the envy of neighbours. This was Palm Beach as imagined by the rest of Sydney.28 The author Ethel Turner and her family were typical of Palm Beach’s summer residents of the 1920s and ’30s. Ethel, her husband Herbert Curlewis, a District Court Judge, and their children Adrian and Jean migrated from their home in Mosman north to Palm Beach each summer from the early 1920s. The family loved the place and were part of the local community: Adrian, who would later become the longest-running president of the Surf Life Saving Association of Australia, was a founding member of the Palm Beach Surf Life Saving Club and recruited new members from amongst the law school and residential colleges of the University of Sydney. Ethel wrote at least one poem celebrating the beauty of Palm Beach, describing the headlands as ‘parted’ by God, ‘in a delicate mood’. And Jean’s 1923 novel Beach Beyond was set in a fictional seaside suburb twenty minutes past the ‘end of the world’ which closely resembled Palm Beach. It was a modern-day ark of high society – a close-knit community consisting of ‘the two best doctors in Sydney, the two best lawyers, editors and businessmen’ and their wives and children. Beach Beyond instantly captured the protagonist’s heart who, within an hour of arriving felt he would do anything to defend it against outsiders, in a likely reflection of Jean’s own attachment to Palm Beach.29 At the height of the Depression, with such wealthy and influential occupants, Palm Beach was a world away from some of the beaches and social problems closer to Sydney. Yet despite the community feel of Palm Beach and neighbouring Whale Beach, the wealthy holiday homeowners were not entirely alone. Palm Beach, like other beaches around Sydney, attracted daytrippers – large and small motoring picnic parties escaping the city for a day. Formal camps were also established along this stretch of the coast by groups such as the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) at Mona Vale in the early 1920s and the Workers Educational Association two decades later. In 1934, the National Roads and Motorists’ Association (NRMA) established a summer motor camp at Avalon Beach, which proved immediately popular with country

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visitors. These were respectable campers, people with cars who would take advantage of the NRMA’s offer of reduced fees at the local golf course and who were welcomed by the council.30 But by the 1920s the less-welcome campers who had slowly been creeping north from Freshwater via Long Reef and Narrabeen also discovered the coast around the Barrenjoey Peninsula. The people who camped along the beaches of the Warringah Shire in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s were a diverse group. At one end of the spectrum were the wealthy Sydney residents who camped prior to purchasing land at the northernmost suburbs of the shire, or who camped on their own land prior to building holiday homes. At the other end were victims of Sydney’s chronic housing shortage of the 1940s: people who had nowhere else to go and who made camping grounds their home, sometimes for years or even decades. Some were likely made homeless during the Depression. They lived in ‘more or less permanent’ tents and caravans, with annexes, floorboards, furniture and crockery and their children attended local schools. They paid a rental fee to the owners of the land – often the council – for the privilege of camping by the beach. The council camping ground on Palm Beach’s Governor Phillip Park was dominated by these semi-permanent camps. Residents at nearby Avalon in the mid-20th century also remember these structures in the camping ground behind the dunes ‘with small flower gardens out the front, even tomato and other vegetables’.31 Weekender campers also proliferated: people who like the Hartts decades earlier either could not afford, or chose not to purchase, holiday homes, but rather spent their summer weekends by the beach in a tent. The long distance from Sydney to the Barrenjoey Peninsula meant that many (although not all) were respectable middle-class people, like Ted Elvy, a Redfern Alderman who camped at Whale Beach in the early 1940s. Ted was one of many regular campers on whom the Whale Beach Surf Life Saving Club relied for its membership. Having been pushed off the beach by the council in 1929 they camped on private land immediately behind the beach reserve on a block that had two small cottages and fencing. Their tents dotted a well-grassed area overlooking

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Living in a tent on Palm Beach’s Governor Phillip Park, this couple surround themselves with the furniture and homewares of a more permanent home. This ca 1950 photo reflects the reality of life for many who were facing an uncertain future on coastal reserves.

the southern end of the beach that is now adjacent to multi-million dollar homes. The club’s secretary, Sidney Bacon, considered that ‘a more fine crowd of chaps would be very hard to find’ and described the campers as ‘a wonderfully homely community’. They were attached to these places, took ownership and secured annual leases so they could have a permanent spot on the beach. When ‘careless picnickers’ started a bushfire at Whale Beach in 1940, the campers and residents fought the blaze together.32 The Warringah Council did not initially object to camping, which it could see contributed to the development of the shire as a tourist and, potentially, residential district. The council also gained substantial revenue through camping fees from the sanctioned camping grounds on council-owned and managed land. Nonetheless in some areas, including Curl Curl Beach and the

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Barrenjoey Lighthouse Reserve at Palm Beach, the council was quick to ban camping altogether (responding to a request in the first instance from the Curl Curl Progress Association), reportedly to protect the public amenity of these reserves but also likely to protect the local suburbs from unwanted visitors.33 As the numbers of campers and holiday homeowners along the northern beaches grew, the latter became less tolerant and urged the council to control and remove campers from along the coast. They may have felt a part of the local community, but the weekender and more permanent campers found themselves under attack by those who owned land by the sea. Residents echoed the same complaints the government had made about the Long Reef campers prior to World War I, accusing them of being destructive and causing pollution. At Palm Beach, property owners complained about campers setting up tents on otherwise vacant private lands, which became overcrowded and often did not have sanitary arrangements. At Whale Beach the campers, who grew in number each year, were said to cut down trees and leave the beach in ‘a filthy and unsanitary state’ after each holiday. One Whale Beach resident, WE Tait, argued that camping interfered with the progress of the district and complained to the council in 1940 that ‘people will not buy land nor build residences at Whale Beach while camping is permitted’.34 This was a perspective likely shared by many of his neighbours. By 1940, the question of camping along the beaches of the Warringah Shire had become heated as the council tried to balance the strong demand for camping against a local resentment towards campers. In that year alone, the council reduced the area set aside for camping at Governor Phillip Park in Palm Beach to around 200 sites; considered permitting camping at Dee Why Lagoon and Bilgola Beach and extending the Avalon camping area; refused requests to ban camping on the headland at Harbord; responded to requests by landowners at Newport and Narrabeen to host campers; and declared the North Curl Curl Beach Reserve an ‘A Class camping ground’. Nearly 300 property owners and residents signed a petition opposing the establishment of a camping area on the banks of the Dee Why lagoon in that year and more than

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100 opposed the Newport plan. Campers were becoming less welcome on the beaches of the Warringah Shire.35 Resistance against coastal campers elsewhere was also driven by concerns about the amenity of public spaces. In Britain, large communities of shacks that appeared in the sand dunes of places like Lincolnshire attracted the ire of residents who could no longer access the beach as easily and conservationists concerned about potential damage to coastal heritage. North of New York, weekend campers, who had erected more than 300 tents and shacks on land they had leased around Orchard Beach since the turn of the century, were condemned by the press in the late 1920s for their ‘monopolisation of the park’. These campers were forcibly evicted in 1934, the courts allowing the City to break their leases so that the space could be developed in the creation of Pelham Bay Park. Over the past half-century, local and state governments have sought to remove ‘shack’ communities that have grown from similar camps around the Australian coast too, often to great resistance by people who have occupied these sites over several generations. The Royal National Park and, more recently, parts of the West Australian coast are notable examples where the ‘freedom and pleasure’ of campers and shack owners is perceived by others to threaten ‘other social values, such as environmental protection, public order or even public health’.36 In the mid-20th century, residents’ concerns about the threat campers made to ‘public health’ was perhaps a justified reference to the absence of sanitary facilities at many unsanctioned camping places along the coast. But many residents also wanted campers in the official coastal campgrounds, who had access to amenities, removed. Their criticisms directly contradicted the idea, still pervasive in the mid-20th century, that outdoor recreation and access to the beaches contributed to a healthy life. Despite several decades of camping tradition on the northern beaches in the name of healthy recreation, campers were forced to defend their presence against increasingly powerful political and social beliefs – first expressed at Long Reef decades earlier – in the importance of maintaining public reserves that were ‘empty’, clean, modernised spaces.

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The ratepayers who did not want to share their neighbourhoods and beaches with campers were particularly influential and by the mid-20th century were claiming back more coastal areas from the camping communities.

The end of camping on the beach

On the northernmost tip of the northern beaches, the campers at Whale Beach were the first to disappear. Although they rented private land, they camped on the edge of the beach, separated from the surf by only a small strip of public land, which the council considered ‘hardly sufficient for present requirements’, let alone future demands. Unsuccessful in its bid to

resume the properties adjoining the beach, and despite the surf club’s protests about the deprivations it would cause to ‘Sydney’s out-of-door public’, the council banned camping at Whale Beach altogether in 1941. It argued that campers and daytrippers ‘contribute nothing towards the coast, but put the council to a great deal of expense in providing facilities and conveniences for them’. The surf club gained a hard-fought reprieve for club members, which it instantly jeopardised by signing friends up to the club purely for camping privileges.37 At the more spacious Avalon, camping behind the beach and protests against campers endured throughout the 1940s and 1950s. The local progress association complained they were too close to houses and to the beach and that the campers, ‘holiday makers intent on amusing themselves to the utmost’, were often ‘noisy and objectionable in their behaviour, and inconsiderate of others’. The ‘unsightly canvas structions’ on the recreation reserve, they argued, depreciated the local property values. The disapproving critique of beachside campers had barely changed since Manly resident Mr WS Wilson first witnessed three teenage girls catching the tram to Long Reef to join a group of young men ‘who appear to spend most of the day in bathing costume’ four decades earlier. But by the late 1950s, the council could no longer ignore the pleas of the local progress association and it closed this camping ground too.38

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The campers in Palm Beach’s Governor Phillip Park suffered a similar fate. With much of the park already lost to a golf course, the campers occupied substantial space that residents, the NRMA, the Palm Beach Progress Association and state government argued would be better used for ‘parking, picnicking and playing’.39 Again, daytrippers and residents were favoured over campers. By the 1970s, after the neighbouring golf club had spent three decades trying to stop campers creeping onto its territory, the camps had gone. Those highly sought-after spaces where people had pitched their tents now function as a car park, servicing the fleeting day-visitors the local businesses and residents far preferred. Despite the scrutiny of campers and the volume of complaints throughout the district, the Warringah Council minutes of the mid-20th century are silent about the Aboriginal people who lived on the western side of Narrabeen Lagoon, in shacks very likely resembling those some of the permanent campers had erected on the coast. These families, who had been pushed to the fringes of settlement and society, were now subject to the same pressures of development, modernisation and suburbanisation that other coastal campers faced. With the expansion of beach recreation and thirst for coastal property in the early 20th century, Aboriginal people were being pushed back from the coast. The Aboriginal people who had lived on private property on the strip of land between Narrabeen Beach and Lagoon in the late 1930s are likely the same group who moved across Narrabeen Lagoon to its western edge after the council became concerned about their presence. Other Aboriginal people moved from the coast to Pittwater, and south of Sydney to Salt Pan Creek on the Georges River. The gazetted reserve at La Perouse may have seemed safe, but even that was under attack from the government’s Aborigines Protection Board. Until the late 1920s a small group of Aboriginal people had reportedly made the rocks around North Bondi Beach their home, but they too were now gone. In their wake the councils remodelled the beaches for the pleasure of a new wave of beachgoers.40 The displacement of Aboriginal groups from the coast in the first half

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of the 20th century in many ways paralleled the fleeting occupation by recreational and otherwise homeless non-indigenous campers. Yet in inspiring coastal tourism and development, the weekend campers of the northern beaches were also complicit in the processes that drove them, and particular Aboriginal groups, off the coast. As Sydney’s beaches strained under the weight of demand it was campers, rather than residents, who had to find new ways of enjoying the beach.

A time of transition

By the middle of the 20th century, camping was fading from the recreational culture of Sydney’s coast, confined to controlled and carefully selected and managed camping grounds, such as the holiday park at Narrabeen, which has now been managed as a popular summer camping spot for nearly a century. At around the same time, historian Peter Read tells

us, the Aboriginal living camp on the western edge of Narrabeen Lake disappeared, destroyed to make way for suburban development and infrastructure that would bring new residents and more beachgoers to the district. Its occupants were forced to find new places to live in a city steadily sprawling across the landscape. In some places, what had begun as temporary ‘camps’ along the coast evolved into more permanent structures. Canvas or hessian was replaced by tin, wood and metal ‘shacks’ domesticated by gardens, fences, footpaths, and sometimes allocated numbers. The shacks that remain along the beaches of the Royal National Park evolved out of this very process. These modernised structures remain home to a shack community, the survivors of an 80-year battle with park authorities and conservationist opponents that has recently resulted in a state heritage listing. But on most of Sydney’s coast, beachfront camps had a more fleeting existence, removed to create open recreation spaces, or replaced by surf clubs, amenity buildings, golf courses,

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car parks and houses. Few if any material traces of these structures remain. Although many battles were waged between coastal residents, local and state government authorities and campers along the coast, the end of this era in Sydney’s beach culture is not purely attributable to hostility towards the campers. Broader cultural changes and developments also played a role in the demise of Sydney’s beach-camping culture. The rise in car ownership after World War II enabled people to leave Sydney for their summer holidays, creating a boom in coastal camping grounds, caravan parks and holiday accommodation beyond the city. The opening of the Wakehurst Parkway led to the creation of a permanent residential population and brought the beaches of the northern peninsula within easy daytripping reach of Sydney’s northern and north-western suburbs, just as the train extension to Cronulla had catered to the south-western and western suburbs. The coast was no longer marked by empty spaces, and an overnight stay was no longer required for a day or weekend at the beach.

All these factors – and others – contributed to shifts in Sydney’s beach cultures during the second half of the 20th century. But they occurred long after the battle for free beach camping had been fought and lost. The state government wanted its public reserves used by daytrippers and from the councils’ perspective there was no room for campers, with their unsanitary habits and unsavoury behaviours, in the modern, clean and carefully landscaped beach parks of the inter-war period. For landowners, campers threatened the wealth and privilege that came with owning coastal property. Despite their claims to legitimate occupation of private and public coastal land, and regardless of how well they

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maintained their camps, or claimed to be enjoying better health, few campers – whether the homeless unemployed or middle-class weekenders – were able to maintain their hold on increasingly contested coastal landscapes. Campers may have paid fees but they did not pay rates. As Sydney’s beaches were transformed into suburban playgrounds, the campers had no voice in this renegotiation of the spaces on which they had pitched their tents.

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4 Castles in the sand High above the beach on the north-western edge of the Bronte gully, local residents Patrick and May McInerney purchased a small block of land in 1923.

Both Patrick and May had lived in Bronte for more than 30 years and their children were born and raised in the suburb. On their new block, Patrick built ‘May Cottage’, a weatherboard house with two rooms, a kitchen and an enclosed fibro veranda. He fenced the front of the house with galvanised iron, laid concrete paths and steps and planted ornamental trees. For a short time Patrick and May lived in the home with their nine young children. Patrick worked locally as a ganger for the Waverley Council, May received ten shillings worth of milk per week from nearby Bronte House and they were able to collect, without charge, all the firewood they required. They enjoyed living so close to the beach and the children joined the same swimming club May and Patrick had belonged to when they were young. Within 18 months of purchasing the land, the McInerneys learnt their

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home was to be resumed for the expansion of Bronte Park. The 14-acre park behind Bronte Beach had been more than substantial when it was first created in 1886, but by the early post-war years it was struggling to accommodate the many thousands who came to the beach. According to the Waverley Council, which lobbied for the park’s extension, Bronte was becoming so popular on summer weekends and holidays that ‘parties arrived at the park as early as six o’clock in order to secure a position for the day’. For Patrick and May, the news of the resumption was a severe blow. May claimed they had been ‘struggling all (their) married life to get a bit of a roof for (their) children’. They argued that the £400 (equivalent to some $30 000 in 2013) compensation the government had offered was insufficient to buy another property close to Patrick’s work, let alone land with a cottage on it. May wrote that she was ‘nearly out of my mind thinking about what I am to do’. She pleaded with the government, explaining that ‘it is not money we are after it is our home we want’. She pointed to other nearby families who were to lose their homes in the park expansion, and argued that it was a ‘crying shame to take a home from the children to make a park for pleasure for other people’.1 But despite their protests, the park was soon extended and the family was evicted. The McInerney family and their neighbours were not the only beachfront property owners to lose out to park expansion in the post-war years. In 1924, a year after Patrick and May purchased their block at Bronte, Josie Scrivener, a widow from Killara in Sydney’s north, had chosen Newport Beach on the northern beaches for an investment property. She purchased three blocks on the corner of the lagoon and ocean beach – just north of where the surf life saving club now stands – covering more than an acre in total. Here Josie built a large boarding house, a building she called a ‘large Cabaret’ and two shops next to Mr J Bulfin’s general store on Barrenjoey Road. In the early 1920s the lagoon was an ‘asset’ to the boarding house: it was easy to wade across and safe for children to swim in, and it attracted families to the beach. Not far from Josie Scrivener’s land, Rose Ann Berry, also from Sydney, owned two blocks on which she had also built a cottage, which she leased on a weekly tenancy. Most of the

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neighbouring blocks of land had been purchased but remained vacant plots.2 Like the McInerneys, Josie Scrivener’s Newport investment would be short-lived. Three years after purchasing the land, Josie and her neighbouring property owners were notified their land was to be resumed to create a park behind Newport Beach. The reservation of additional public space at Newport Beach, like so many coastal parks created in the 1920s, was a response by local and state governments to growing demands for coastal parks. The narrow strip of land between Newport Beach and Barrenjoey Road was converted into public space for the first time in more than a century. Resumptions the previous year at nearby Collaroy, which had created park space around the southern corner of that beach, had also displaced a number of landowners. At both Bronte and Newport, in its negotiations for compensation payments, the government acknowledged that the value of the properties was enhanced by their proximity to the beach. This was why it was interested in the properties after all. It agreed, for example, that the commercial business planned by Josie Scrivener’s neighbour Arthur Putnam for his property at Newport Beach would have surely succeeded given the popularity of beach resorts, and compensated him and several fellow Newport property owners for loss of income as well as for resumption of their properties. At Bronte, the government was also sensitive to the plight of Patrick McInerney and his family, acknowledging that land in the district was expensive and that Patrick was a poor man, but a hard worker. The Valuer General was particularly sympathetic to the family’s cause, arguing that ‘you can scarcely expect to turn this man out of his home without putting him in the position of acquiring another property in proximity to his work’. It agreed to allow the family to take the cottage with them, and offered a sum that enabled Patrick to repay his loan and gain new finance for a nearby property. But despite any personal concessions, no governments, neither Nationalist nor Labor, would compromise on the park expansions. The governments were determined to secure additional and essential spaces for Sydney’s beachgoing public before coastal real estate values escalated any further.3

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A city at play

The McInerneys and other coastal landowners were displaced by a beach fever that swept along the Australian coast – and across the western world – in the period after World War I. In America, Britain and along the Mediterranean coast, people flocked to the beaches. Seaside cultures were celebrated, symbolised by ‘lithe, bronzed bodies’. Beaches along the

Riviera were ‘cleaned up’, or had sand imported to create bigger and better spaces for sunbathing and to attract sun-seeking tourists. In Britain, the sea was coming to be seen as ‘something to paddle and play around in’, shedding the cloak of medicinal bathing that had embraced the coast for so long.4 Across America too, beaches boomed in the 1920s and hotels, apartment blocks, boardwalks and piers were built to cater to the huge crowds. Californian coastal resorts and Atlantic City on the New Jersey coast found fame in this period, the former becoming the playground of Hollywood, the latter attracting Fit young men proudly represent the North Steyne SLSC in a march-past during a surf carnival at Manly in the late 1920s. Demonstrating surf lifesavers’ discipline and physical prowess, such displays have always been a more serious part of the spectacle.

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An enthralled crowd at a Manly surf carnival cheers on the local team. Surf lifesaving carnivals were thrilling spectacles for crowds in the inter-war period, and an important source of funds for the clubs.

hundreds of thousands of white middle-class Americans every weekend. The working classes found their pleasure at beaches closer to the cities. One hot summer Sunday in 1925, New York’s Coney Island was packed with 750 000 people all vying for a space on the beach, boardwalks or in amusement parks.5 In the hedonistic years following the end of World War I and in the wake of the devastating influenza outbreak, Sydney’s beaches boomed. Those within easy reach of the city and accessible by public transport – particularly Bondi, Bronte, Coogee and Manly – attracted the largest crowds. In the mid-1930s, official estimates were that approximately 500 000 people – or around one-third of the city’s population – visited the beaches on summer weekends. One particularly hot Sunday in 1934 saw an estimated 60 000 people on Bondi Beach alone.6 This was the period before widespread car ownership took families

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Hoisted to glory, Phyllis Stroud is crowned Cronulla’s ‘surf queen’ in 1927. Seen here with members of North Cronulla SLSC, Phyllis became a local celebrity after winning this competition promoted by the Sun newspaper.

out of Sydney for summer holidays and before a multitude of suburban swimming pools – public or private – kept children cool. Surf lifesavers patrolled the length of Sydney’s coast, and established clubs elsewhere around Australia. The beaches defined the city at play in the 1920s and ’30s. The association between the beach and a particularly Australian brand of leisure, which had emerged in the opening decade of the 20th century, gained broader – and international – appeal. This far-reaching appeal made beaches effective marketing tools. Images of beaches, surfers, surf lifesavers and bathing beauties adorned travel posters and advertisements for products ranging from soap to beer – promotions that in turn reinforced the cultural power of the beach.7 Surf lifesavers were seen to embody all that was good about the beach. They became its most potent symbol in Australia and abroad.

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Swimwear fashion became integral to beach culture in the inter-war period, moving from merely a necessity for bathing to the fashion pages of women’s magazines. But the question of what constituted appropriate costume proved divisive and in the 1930s Sydney’s surf bathers pushed for briefer swimwear like that found on European beaches.8 Women’s bodies also came into focus in new ways. Across the coast young women displayed their healthy, sunbronzed bodies in beach-girl competitions, a local version of Hollywood on the beach. Councils that had previously sought to cover up female bodies on the beach, and men-only surf lifesaving clubs, both welcomed the fund-raising and promotional opportunities associated with female beach-beauty pageants.9 New homes scatter the sparsely populated hills surrounding Bronte beach around 1928. By the 1920s the land around Bronte was being snatched up by Sydney residents looking for a home by the beach.

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Along with the icon of the lifesaver, which epitomised virile masculine beauty at the beach, the beauty pageants were part of a public celebration of heterosexual bodies staged before a backdrop of sand and surf. Although this sexualisation of the beach still had some vocal conservative detractors it was enthusiastically embraced by the beachgoing community – beauty competitions could bring thousands of spectators to the beach. Less visible was the gay subculture of the beach. Gender-segregated baths and dressing sheds – present on every Sydney beach – had an important role in the hidden heritage of gay Sydney. The Bondi Pavilion’s dressing sheds and Giles’ sea baths at Coogee were known ‘beats’ during the inter-war period, where gay men knew they could meet for a discreet liaison in an erotic coastal setting.10 But of course gay people were not the only ones looking for a liaison at the beach. As Sydneysiders headed to the coast, the thirst for the beaches manifested itself in a greater demand for coastal housing. The eastern suburbs of Sydney – close to the beaches but easily accessible to the city by tram and bus – were at the forefront of an acceleration in home construction across the city. It was this real estate boom that had partly prompted the Waverley Council and state government to treat the Bronte resumptions as urgent. The construction of blocks of flats transformed the suburban landscape across the eastern suburbs more than any other stretch of the coast. Flats were an attractive investment option in an increasingly expensive market, and they enabled more people to enjoy ocean views. The Waverley Municipality experienced the largest boom in the building of flats across Sydney, with 32 per cent of housing comprising flats by 1933 (up from 9 per cent in 1921). With the boost in construction came increased populations. During the 1930s the Randwick and Waverley municipalities

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experienced the largest population increases across the city, with land values in Waverley more than doubling in the decade from 1922. Most residents here were tenants; most landowners were investors in the coastal dream. The transformation would be permanent: the unit blocks built during the 1920s continue to shape the urban form around Bondi and Coogee beaches in particular.11 North of the harbour, coastal real estate flourished too. The desire for coastal living and a reliable ferry and bus network brought more people to the stretch of the coast between Manly and Dee Why, especially with the opening of Spit Bridge over Middle Harbour in 1924 and the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932. Further north, towards the Barrenjoey Peninsula, coastal settlement was slower but picked up pace in the inter-war period. Development on the northern beaches was marked by investment properties and weekender cottages purchased by people particularly from Sydney’s northern suburbs, and wealthy rural landowners keen for an annual summer escape. Ella Louise Jackson is typical of these investors. The wife of an engineer from Chatswood on Sydney’s north shore, Ella Louise purchased land fronting Collaroy Beach in 1924, building and furnishing a weatherboard house with the intention of occupying it with her family during the warmer months and leasing it during winter.12 Sydney’s coastal councils welcomed the irrepressible popularity of the beaches. The councils scrambled to improve their own stretches of sand wherever they could to increase the tourist and residential appeal of their suburbs. They competed against each other to create bigger and better parks, provide more impressive amenities, and to open up new beaches to daytrippers and new coastal land to developers. They used their new powers under the Local Government Act to regulate building and subdivisions and to resume land where necessary.13 Beachgoers in turn demanded safe beaches with ample amenities, parks and car-parking spaces: an additional strain on already limited space and council finances. The competing demands of daytrippers and coastal residents placed increasing pressure on councils and state governments to find the right compromise for coastal land. As coastal land became more sought after, the unregulated spaces between parks and suburban development quickly

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disappeared and families like the McInerneys, who several decades earlier would have been occupying unwanted land, were losing their homes to parks, car parks, blocks of flats and large houses.

Reshaping the coast

As the real estate boom of the 1920s gathered pace, the demand for seaside living placed new pressures on the coastal environment. Sand, silt and soil was removed from the beds of lagoons and from beaches to form the foundation of this real estate dream. Along the northern beaches the large lagoons and swampy areas that dominated the coastal fringe were

particularly vulnerable. Elsewhere, sand dunes were removed to extend the limits of suburbia. At Newport, the lagoon that ran past Josie Scrivener’s boarding house, and which had offered children a safe paddling area, was targeted. In 1924 the local estate agent and developer Frederick Thomas Jeffery purchased land on the shores of Farrell’s Lagoon at Newport slightly further inland from Josie Scrivener’s purchase. He immediately applied for a permit to fill in low-lying swampland on the edges of the lagoon with sand from the beach so that he might build on it, a project he argued would ‘greatly add to the beauty of Newport, and remove what is at present a most unattractive spot and even a menace to the health of the residents’. The government agreed that the swampy parts of the lagoon that ran inland and south parallel to Barrenjoey Road were of no use to recreation and did indeed pose a threat to the health of residents during summer. So, despite its concerns about the ‘great damage’ dredging might do to Newport Beach, it approved the works. Over the next four years, the company dredged more than 30 000 cubic metres of sand from Newport Beach to fill in the lagoon. The dredging divided the tiny Newport community, pitting those who welcomed residential development against a few who were concerned by the damage it caused to the beach. Members of the Surf Life Saving Club, who cared more about the

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A contented family sits by the gently flowing Farrell’s Lagoon at Newport in 1910. The lagoon would later be filled in and the reclaimed land would become a solid foundation for local suburban development.

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tourist appeal of the beach and its suitability for bathing than the residential appeal of the suburb, were particularly vocal. In March 1926 the club requested the government stop the dredging altogether, citing fears it would destroy the ‘natural beauty of the beach’ as well as its suitability for surf bathing by creating a dangerous channel in the surf. While the government continued to defend the work, over time it became clear that the beach was being irreparably damaged. In late 1926 Sydney newspapers reported the appearance of a ‘big hole’ in the beach and repeated locals’ claims that ‘the beach is losing popularity in proportion as the hole grows greater’. By late 1927 the Cumberland Ranger (a government official) reported that ‘the danger line has been reached’: winter weather has considerably reduced this bank and it seems that the boundary instead of being on top of the bank is now actually below high water mark. The dredge has been operating for some time on the ocean side of the lagoon with the result that a very narrow strip of sand now separates the lagoon from the sea, so narrow that in my opinion at a very high tide and a good swell, the sea would wash into the lagoon.

Josie Scrivener also complained to the government about the changes to the lagoon and beach, and the damage the irritating noise of the dredging work was causing to her boarding house. She shared the Cumberland Ranger’s concerns that the dredging had removed a sandbank from the beach that had earlier provided a natural barrier between the lagoon and the surf. She also blamed the works for storm damage caused when waves broke onto her veranda and into her dining room at Easter 1927 – although having built on the edge of the beach storm damage was always possible. She sent photos to the Department of Lands highlighting the changes dredging had made to the beach and lagoon in an effort to persuade the government to cancel the permit. But while it admitted internally that the dredging’s interference with the ‘natural “lay”’ of the beach did pose a ‘considerable element of risk’ to adjacent properties, and despite an

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independent valuer’s warning that the hole was growing closer to the dressing sheds, the government did nothing to stop the dredging. Instead it granted the company an extension to complete the work. The rewards of development justified any environmental damage it may have caused.14 Elsewhere the impacts of dredging were less visible but no less damaging. The considerably larger Narrabeen lagoon was subject to multiple dredging licenses. Although the government issued clear instructions on dredging locations and depths to try and aid the construction of a navigable channel through the lagoon, dredgers preferred to dredge large amounts of sand from a single location close to shore, causing deep holes which were blamed for the drowning death of at least one person.15 Like Josie Scrivener, Narrabeen resident Elizabeth Orr complained in 1927 about the damage dredging was causing to her neighbouring property. She reported that her house was made ‘unfit for habitation’ by the ‘slush water and sludge sand slimes’ which had spilled into her property from the dredging of nearby Narrabeen Lagoon for the past two years. She blamed the sludge and slush water for the destruction of all the vegetation on her property and the death of her poultry and domestic animals. A number of Elizabeth’s neighbours made similar complaints to the Salvation Army, which was preparing its land on the shores of the lagoon for subdivision.16 Though motivated by fears of personal or financial losses rather than environmental concerns these property owners invoked an awareness of and concern for the impacts of suburban development on the coastal environment long before the global environmental movement began to shape debates in Australia.17 However the government and local councils were unswerving in their enthusiasm for extending suburbia across the previously under-utilised coastal districts. At Queenscliff on the northern end of Manly Beach, both the Manly Council and Catholic Church also dredged sand from the Curl Curl Lagoon (now Manly Lagoon) in the mid-1920s to reclaim swampland for a park and subdivision respectively. The work followed extended negotiations in which the church and council squabbled over rights to the shore of the lagoon adjacent

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to a former convent. As at Newport and Narrabeen, the dredging of Curl Curl Lagoon to reclaim swampy land for park and building developments was looked on favourably by an ideologically conservative government that emphasised the benefits to the community of transforming ‘unhealthy swampy land’ into a new building area and recreation ground. There was no question about whether the lagoon should be dredged or swampy land filled in; the only question was which body owned the right to conduct and benefit from the works.18 The government’s anxiety about the threats coastal lagoons and swamps posed to public health had helped to justify coastal development. It was a continuation of the Victorian obsession with health and hygiene, and fears that airborne diseases were transmitted by ‘miasma’, or unhealthy air. In an era when coastal wetlands were associated in the public mind with disease and ‘bad’ air – in direct contrast to the healthy ‘ozone’ associated with the ocean and beach – eradicating these aspects of the environment was deemed essential to building healthy, desirable suburbs in coastal areas. More significantly, dredging and filling lagoons was permitted and even welcomed by the government and councils because it was viewed as ‘improving’ useless spaces by increasing their utility and creating the foundations for coastal development. The creation of new parks on the edges of beaches and lagoons was also designed to increase local land values. Financial incentives, more than any other factor, therefore drove the reshaping of Sydney’s coastal landscape in the inter-war period.

Mountains of sand

South of the harbour, the push for new coastal development around Bondi and Maroubra was inhibited by mountains of sand rather than by lagoons. At the turn of the 20th century, the Bondi sandhills covered around 40 acres (or 16 hectares) of the area around North Bondi, and stretched up to 60 feet high (close to 20 metres) in some places. Residents considered

them a nuisance and blamed them for making Bondi unattractive and ‘positively

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unbearable on a windy day’. In 1900 the Department of Public Works had erected a double row of fascine fences similar to those used against drifting snow in Canada. They consisted of tea-tree or similar brushwood and were placed immediately behind the high-water mark at Bondi. Imported marram grass was also planted throughout the area in a bid to contain the troublesome sand drift. The work was effective in the short term, reducing some dunes by more than 20 feet, but drifting sand continued to irritate Bondi residents and visitors. At Coogee the nuisance caused by sand drifting off the beach onto nearby roads prompted the government to waive the licence requirement for sand carters to remove sand from the beach in 1904. The sand caused so much disturbance it considered the removal of thousands of cartloads a year to be ‘a service’ to the community.19 In the 1920s, the Bondi sandhills continued to be seen as a nuisance and barrier to development. Residents complained that ‘clouds of sand’ were ‘temporarily blinding’ children at the nearby public school during periods of high wind, and the Mayor of Waverley described the area as ‘simply a barren sandy waste, an eyesore’, which was ‘retarding the progress of the district’. Whereas in 1903 the government had refused to invest in a plan to level the sandhills and cover the area with soil, the project became more appealing in the prodevelopment 1920s. In place of the sandhills, the council planned a suburban development that would be a celebration of modernity in street planning and architecture, with new houses fronting concrete roads and footpaths, and a grand boulevard to access the beach from the north. The plan was welcomed by locals and by an enthusiastic press that celebrated the potential conversion of ‘the great sandy waste’ into a ‘fine residential area’ and ‘garden suburb’. More importantly, the council estimated the works would quadruple the land value.20 At Maroubra, the government had already invested in filling in and levelling parts of the sandhills behind the beach in preparation for subdivision. At both Bondi and Maroubra the government used unemployed labour to remove the sandhills, a source of employment which both helped to justify government involvement and minimise expenses. Later, during the Depression, 1000

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Members of the Manly SLSC catch a wave to shore in 1928. Until the 1950s, surfboards were long and heavy, and were mostly owned by surf lifesavers who could store them on the beach in the club rooms.

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The Bondi Pavilion, a marvel of modern design and the centrepiece of the spectacular Bondi Improvement Scheme, is opened to great fanfare in December 1929.

unemployed men were engaged in the levelling of the sandhills on Crown land at Bunnerong, inland from Maroubra. These Depression-era employment schemes transformed the coast elsewhere too, helping with the construction of the breakwater across Clovelly Bay – initially approved by the government on the basis it would create a shark-proof bathing area – the baths at Shelly Beach and Oak Park at Cronulla, and the surf lifesaving clubhouses at Bondi Beach among other initiatives along the coast.21 The expansion of suburbia into the coastal environment through the construction of houses, roads and parks on dunes and the edges of lagoons, would later be seen to cause irreparable damage to natural beach systems. It interfered with the ability of beaches to repair themselves after large storms. But governments and developers of the inter-war period did not understand that sand dunes and lagoons were part of the beach zone; they were simply regarded as unused and under-utilised spaces. They considered the process of reshaping the coastal landscape to be an improvement on the apparently unhealthy, often irritating and otherwise unusable natural beach environment.

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.

Beautifying Bondi

The idea of ‘improvement’ extended beyond taming nature. The removal of the Bondi sandhills was part of the ‘Bondi Improvement Scheme’ carried out by the Waverley Council in the 1920s to create an entirely new suburban landscape. The ‘Bondi Beautification’, was another part of the Bondi Improvement Scheme that focused on the beach. It involved constructing

a new bathing pavilion and surf lifesaving clubhouses, widening and reconstructing the Marine Parade to create more car-parking spaces, widening footpaths and re-erecting the seawall. Thirty-one acres of Bondi Park were also ‘improved’ with freshly laid lawn, flower gardens and rockeries. More than 200 Norfolk Island pines were planted throughout the park, possibly inspired by the row of Norfolk Island pines that made Manly Beach so distinctive. Concrete tables and seats were also installed for picnickers. The magnifcent new pavilion at the centre of the beach was designed so that as much of the building as possible would have ‘a clear outlook over the ocean’. It could accommodate 12 000 bathers – a substantial increase on the 1000-person capacity of the 1911 building it replaced. The dining room seated 350 people and the ballroom could host 400 guests on its brand new

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jarrah floor. Here, the council’s promotions promised, ‘the cooling breezes and moon-drenched glimpses of the Pacific, through open doors and windows, are romantic accompaniments to the pleasant pastime of dancing’. Upstairs in Palm Court, ‘delicious refreshment from the nearby soda fountain, soothing cigarette smoke, and interesting wireless programme may be enjoyed from the depths of a comfortable lounge chair’.22 Everything about the design was modern and luxurious, from the ‘palatial’ modern Mediterranean design of the pavilion in the centre of the beach with its ‘colonnade of graceful proportions’, marble staircases and individual baths, and the radial design of the park with angular pathways drawing visitors directly to the pavilion and beach. It was designed to attract more people, and particularly motorists, to Bondi, and to turn one of the city’s most popular beaches into ‘the finest beach in Australia and (even) the world’. The scheme was designed by Sydney architects Robertson and Marks, who won a design competition judged by esteemed architects and planners, including John Sulman, in 1924. The architects had designed several of Sydney’s modern architectural landmarks of the 1920s and ’30s, including parts of the Randwick Racecourse and Sydney Cricket Ground, the Trocadero dance hall and the 1939 AWA tower. They had also won a competition for a redesign of the Bondi Baths, with an elaborate plan that exceeded the council’s budget and was never built.23 By securing Robertson and Marks for its beautification project, the Waverley Council had signalled grand intentions for its overhaul of Bondi Beach.

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The Bondi Beautification was officially opened in December 1929 in front of an estimated crowd of 200 000 people, a ‘dense mass of pleasure seekers’ who swarmed over the promenade, marine parade and sand. Bands played music throughout the day and evening, a procession led by child-lifesavers passed along the beach, and a surf lifesaving carnival and other sporting competitions were held throughout the day. A skydiver descending for the thrill of the crowd horrified onlookers when he landed on the roof of an apartment block at North Bondi. His parachute sparked when it hit electrical wires, prompting nearby surf lifesavers to rush to his assistance. But aside from this minor disaster, every part of the opening ceremony, like the beautification scheme itself, was extravagant.24

The price of beauty

They may not have realised it, but the crashing and burning skydiver may have been an omen for the Waverley Council’s own hopes and fortunes. In the mid-1920s the council had approached the state government for financial assistance to fund the Bondi Improvements, drawing on old arguments about the benefits of increased tourism and the state govern-

ment’s responsibilities to support the leisure activities of the broader community. But the only state assistance came in the form of sandhill demolition and

The Randwick Council had great expectations for the extravagant Coogee pier. Modelled on the pleasure piers of the British coast, this was the first to be built at a Sydney ocean beach. But it failed to captivate local beachgoers and was demolished by the council in 1933.

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the removal of the tramway loop from the centre of the park – a move that both extended the park and allowed an extension of the tramline to North Bondi. When the Waverley Council opened the Bondi Improvements, after six years of planning and construction and less than two months after the Wall Street crash, it had accrued a £160 000 debt over the works (equivalent to more than $11 million in 2013).25 Bondi Beach had been brought into the modern era at significant financial risk for the council. The pavilion and associated businesses – the surf sheds, casino and hot and cold baths – were not the money-spinners they were expected to be. The Depression undoubtedly contributed to the council’s dire situation as well as the reluctance of beachgoers to pay for their pleasure. But the council had also failed to anticipate a shift in the way Sydney’s beaches were being used. Sydney bathers, like many overseas, were beginning to dress and undress on the sand or by their cars: they no longer required dressing sheds and therefore, from the council’s perspective, they made no contribution towards meeting the costs of the Bondi improvements. All of Sydney’s coastal councils suffered financially from a reduction in dressing-shed revenue in the early 1930s. The competition from the new Coogee shark-proof swimming enclosure, which had opened less than two months earlier than the Bondi Pavilion, also lured bathers from Bondi in the short term. But many Bondi visitors were also not interested in the pavilion’s luxuries. The provision of individual hot and cold Turkish baths, for example, was excessive during these difficult times. They ran at a loss of around £700 per year and were closed down in mid-1932. Compounded by a lower than expected income from surf bathers, in 1933, the council estimated it had lost around £20 000 (or more than $1.8 million dollars in 2013) over four years on the Bondi Improvement works.26 Yet the Bondi Beautification Scheme was a success in other ways. Through its extravagant redevelopment the Waverley Council achieved its aim of creating a world-famous beach, transforming a sandy, partly redesigned stretch of the coast into a modern iconic landscape. From 1929 Bondi stood alone as the most celebrated Sydney beach. The use of Bondi Beach in domestic and

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international tourist campaigns, the dramatic events of a mass rescue on ‘Black Sunday’ in 1938 during which five people drowned, the visit by the Queen in 1954 and, more recently, the use of Bondi in a reality television show about lifeguards consolidated the beach’s position as Australia’s most famous. The landscape created in 1929 is preserved and protected through both state and national heritage listings, which recognise the beach’s significant cultural, social and historic values to all Australians.

Driving to the beach

The construction of the Marine Drive that swept in front of the pavilion was the most expensive element of the Bondi Beautification. In terms of its modern appeal it was also one of the most important. With a specially designed surface and patrolled by uniformed attendants, the new ‘motor-park’ could accommodate 1200 cars and was elevated above the promenade so

that car passengers would have a clear view over the beach.27 Pedestrian tunnels under Marine Drive – which protruded onto the beach in two great concrete arms that came to be known as the ‘Bondi groynes’ – and footbridges over the parking area from Campbell Parade, completely separated motorists and pedestrians. The design protected pedestrians from the hazards of the road and motorists from the nuisance of people on foot. The new road and car park were carefully designed to enhance the motoring experience. They were a deliberate symbol of the modernity of the new improved Bondi Beach. Just as trains and railway stations had represented modernity in the 19th century, it was through their association with speed and movement that cars attained special status in the early 20th century. In a period of increasing car ownership among Australia’s wealthy and upper-middle classes, the car also represented freedom and affluence. The Waverley Council had also briefly considered building an ‘aeroplane landing park’ at Bondi Beach, another marker of modern travel and wealth.28

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The historians Gary Cross and John K Walton note the impact that rising car ownership had on creating class distinctions on the New York coast in the inter-war period. While Coney Island, a short subway ride from the city, was popular with New York’s working poor, middle-class families now used their cars to escape to a more distant stretch of coast that could only be reached by road. The demand for recreation spaces within driving distance of New York was so substantial that the government reclaimed much of the coast around New York for public parks in the 1920s and ’30s. It also built a maze of highways, creating places such as the immensely popular middle-class resort Jones Beach and the entirely artificial Orchard Beach, with its colonnade-fronted bathhouse.29 In Australia, the number of people who owned cars increased during the 1920s but between the wars car ownership remained the preserve of the prosperous middle classes.30 Although it did not create such a class-stratified situation as America’s north-east coast, the rise of the motor car did contribute to the changing landscape of Sydney’s beaches. Beaches on the Barrenjoey Peninsula, accessible only by road, became dotted with the holiday homes of Sydney’s wealthiest residents during the early 1920s. The resumption of the Newport properties was part of an expansion of the park network along this stretch of the coast to cater for increasing numbers of visitors who were arriving by car. On Boxing Day 1933, it was estimated that 25 000 cars were parked along the northern beaches between Manly and Palm Beach, carrying an estimated 100 000 people to this stretch of the coast alone. However unlike their New York counterparts, Sydney motorists did not abandon the more popular ‘city’ beaches of the eastern suburbs and lower northern beaches. In fact the proliferation of motor cars in the 1920s and ’30s created a need for car parks along the entire Sydney coast, an additional demand on the already hotly contested space around the beaches. At Bondi, sufficient land had been reserved around the beach in the 1880s to enable the construction of the ‘motor park’ fifty years later, but elsewhere the creation of car parks was more challenging. At Coogee in 1929, traffic congestion had become ‘a

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From the early 1920s, the beaches of the Barrenjoey Peninsula were enjoyed by a more exclusive crowd than other Sydney beaches, with access to motor cars and time to enjoy their newly built – and often quite grand – holiday houses.

serious problem’, and yet with so many picnickers using the spaces around the beach the council could not find room for car parks. At Manly, the council noted in 1934 that ‘the growing popularity of surfing beaches will necessitate the provision of additional areas to be set aside for parking of cars’. A shortterm solution was to grade part of the reserve at North Steyne to enable motorists to park on it.31

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A new sight at Cronulla – a line-up of parked cars shows how visitors were beginning to travel to the beach. By the early 1930s councils along the Sydney coast struggled to provide parking facilities for this new class of beach tourist.

Motorists exploring the coast travelled south too, enjoying the expansive parks around Maroubra Beach – at times offending locals by leaving discarded prawn heads and shells on the road – and crossing the Georges River by punt to the beaches of Cronulla. The opening of the bridge over the Georges River in 1929 brought even more motorists to the area in the summer months. The Sutherland Shire Council had invested in significant improvements to Cronulla Beach in the early 1920s – including a new promenade, seawall, dressing sheds and surf lifesaving clubhouse – and the Cecil Hotel and Ballroom that opened in 1927 had increased the suburb’s night-time appeal, luring young men and women to its Saturday night dances. An 18-year-old telephone exchange worker from Berry, my grandmother Mary Vallis, was one such Cronulla tourist in the early 1930s; she avoided the sun and surf but loved dancing at the Cecil.32 She was one among the thousands who discovered Cronulla in the inter-war period. By 1936 it was clear the existing recreation areas were inadequate for the crowds that travelled to Cronulla from St George and elsewhere in Sydney. Having already resumed land for the extension of Cronulla Park more than a decade earlier, the council now resumed privately owned land behind

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neighbouring North Cronulla Beach to accommodate the hundreds of cars that parked along that beach on hot Sundays and public holidays.33 Although the areas around the Cronulla beaches were less built up than those further north, the council had been slow to realise just how much coastal land would be needed to meet growing demands for the parks, facilities and car-parking spaces associated with days of recreation at the beach. Cronulla was added to the growing list of Sydney beaches where costly resumptions were required to help satisfy the city’s thirst for the beach.

A marine drive

Amidst the flurry of coastal resumptions and park extensions of the post-war years, Maroubra Beach had the luxury of a recreation reserve large enough to rival Bondi. More than 50 acres of land behind the beach had been reserved for public recreation in 1909 and 1910. It was set aside in anticipation of this beach becoming one of the city’s most popular, at a

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time when the major occupants of the area were campers, homeless people and owners of a wool-washing plant behind the beach. Close to 20 years later, although the sandhills had been removed from a portion of the reserve and the Randwick Council had planted some trees and made some improvements to the beach, most of the reserve appeared a desolate wasteland of scrub, sandhills and swamps.34 But the local and state authorities were becoming impatient in the wait for Maroubra to catch up with Bondi. In the 1920s as other coastal councils invested in their own beach ‘improvements’, the Randwick Council began to consider ways of improving Maroubra Beach. Anticipating the arrival of the boom that was already evident at Bondi, Bronte and Coogee, it sought to extend the park as an ‘absolutely essential’ provision for future beachgoers. But Premier Thomas Bavin’s government saw Maroubra differently. It insisted the current parklands exceeded the requirements of current and future beachgoers and moved to subdivide and sell parts of the recreation reserve and adjoining land, for which it anticipated a handsome return. Although initially resistant, in 1928 a more pro-development council agreed to allow the government to subdivide and sell three acres of the recreation reserve in return for assistance in constructing a marine drive through the reserve. Like the car park at Bondi, the marine drive would increase the appeal of Maroubra as a ‘modern’ beach and capitalise on the new-found pleasures of driving, particularly along the coast, among a particular tourist group. It was a small investment in the state government’s vision for a marine drive that would run from South Head (north of Bondi) to La Perouse, and would also, the government hoped, enhance the value of its proposed local subdivision.35 Local residents were outraged at the proposal to revoke part of the Maroubra reserve. Hundreds attended an ‘indignation meeting’ to voice their concerns. Thomas Mutch, the Legislative representative of the neighbouring electorate, led the campaign against the government and council, declaring:

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The beaches are vital to the wellbeing of the people of Sydney and also of New South Wales. They are like jewels around the throat of a lady. Overseas and other visitors never go away without congratulating us on our wonderful beaches. Surf bathing has become a national pastime and we should, therefore, jealously guard every inch of space we have got, and Maroubra is the last of the city beaches which has to be developed … The beaches do not belong to the Council, the Lands Department, or anybody but the public. They must be developed in the national interests.36

With these words Mutch articulated a passion for Sydney’s beaches that had inspired beachgoers and coastal residents to fight for their protection and public access for more than half a century. At Maroubra the battle was unique; it was about preserving existing recreation areas rather than creating new ones. The park in question was also some distance from the surf. But it was driven by shared resentment that governments might sacrifice – for short-term financial gain – space that other coastal resumptions had shown would be needed in the future. Bodies including the NRMA, Master Builders’ Association, Town Planning Association and Maroubra Chamber of Commerce cautioned against reducing the size of the reserve. They feared Maroubra would become as ‘congested’ as Sydney’s other beaches. In light of the greater number of people driving to the beach, they were particularly keen to see the area preserved as a car park. Local newspapers condemned the council too, feeding community anger by labelling councillors ‘civic czars’ and comparing them to Judas for betraying the ‘people’s rights’: Amongst the greatest betrayals recorded in history this handing back of the Maroubra Beach will, in not so many years, rank as one of the greatest. The epitaph of those responsible will be written as “They lacked foresight – we think they were lunatics”.37

Such exaggerated claims divided the council. But while a minority of councillors was concerned about revoking and subdividing part of a park most deemed

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Winter does not deter this crowd from gathering on the sand at North Steyne to welcome Myrle Ridgeway, a well-known swimmer and finalist in the 1926 Miss Australia beauty competition. Myrle’s appearance on the beach in a bathing costume was a sensation not to be missed.

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the opportunity for ‘progress’ – through the sale of land and increase in tourist appeal – worth the loss of a small piece of land. Those with local land investments were particularly supportive. As with the battle for so many other Sydney beaches, the people of Maroubra ultimately succeeded in preserving their prized park space from residential development. But this was not an achievement born of community action. Rather, the government postponed its agreement with the council in 1930 owing to financial pressures associated with the Depression. The proposal was buried, never to be revisited. The anticipated coastal road never eventuated despite the government’s 1935 purchase of ten blocks of land on the cliff tops immediately north of Tamarama Beach for the purpose. One can imagine now how popular such a road would have been. The area of Maroubra the government had hoped to sell for at least £10 per foot is preserved as Broadarrow Reserve and John Shore Park, which continue to be used for recreation. But the willingness of both state and local governments to sacrifice beachfront recreation areas for residential and business development, particularly in the face of such an aggressive public campaign, had alarmed beachgoers. In the complex interplay between state and local governments, and between tourists and residents, beachgoers had proven to be a worthy investment. But they also discovered what others had learnt before them: that they were just one part of a much larger economy associated with the beach.38

Tr a n s f o r m i n g the beachfront

The Bondi Beautification was a model for inter-war ‘improvements’ at many of Sydney’s ocean beaches, as well as some in the harbour and Botany Bay, although none were to the scale or budget of the Bondi works. At Freshwater and Newport, the Warringah Council modelled its new bathing pavilions and surf clubhouses on the Mediterranean style of the Bondi

Pavilion. Others, such as those at Cronulla, were art deco. A new, modernised

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surf pavilion at Manly Beach, initiated just as the finishing touches were being made to the Bondi Pavilion in 1929, was completed nearly a decade later in 1938.39 The beautification of the broader beach, with a remodelled seawall, redesigned park and gardens and new band rotunda, were finished soon afterwards. A decade younger, this pavilion was sleek and modern in a deliberate contrast to the elaborate Mediterranean style of the Bondi Pavilion.40 It did not mark the end of civic investment in the beaches but was the final chapter in a large-scale transformation of Sydney’s coastline. The rush to capitalise on the popularity of the beaches by creating more parks, car parks, homes and businesses along Sydney’s coast in the 1920s and ’30s irrevocably changed the coastal landscape. Investment in the beaches themselves in the form of ‘improvement’ schemes also had an enduring impact. In the ultimate irony, properties resumed at Newport, Collaroy and elsewhere in the 1920s for essential recreation spaces were again transformed after World War II into desperately needed car parks. But elsewhere the parks have been preserved. A visitor to Newport, parking their car just north of the surf club today would have no idea that a boarding house once stood on this same spot on the edge of the sand; nor would they realise, should they wander down towards the children’s playground, that a century ago they would have been knee- or even waist-deep in a tidal lagoon. No trace of ‘Farrell’s Lagoon’, which marked the Newport landscape for so long, remains; a stormwater drain marks the point at which it flowed into the sea. This story is repeated along the coast. The mountains of sand that marked Bondi, Maroubra and Avalon are buried under houses. The ‘once majestic’ Kurnell dunes which in 1940 had been used as a substitute for the vast deserts of the Middle East in film director Charles Chauvel’s Forty Thousand Horsemen, ‘are now scattered throughout the Sydney metropolitan area in the form of cement aggregate’.41 The ‘swampy’ lagoons of the northern beaches have been deepened and reshaped and are now surrounded by ‘healthy’ recreation areas. And the land on which the McInerneys had built their home was incorporated into Bronte Park in 1924. It remains part of the lush, verdant recesses of the Bronte gully.

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The transformation of the physical coastal landscape into a modern, neat and purpose-built environment was part of the same ‘cleaning’ process that saw the removal of campers from many coastal areas during the inter-war period. This process had also seen the eviction of the last of Maroubra’s market gardeners, Jon Song and Lung Foong, from their lease behind the beach. They and previous gardeners had invested in draining and cultivating the land, transforming it from ‘a peaty swamp, overgrown with high reeds and other forms of vegetation into a highly productive vegetable garden’. But by the late 1920s the government viewed their presence as a threat to its primary local goals of residential and tourist development, and they were soon gone.42

The beaches that were largely created by the late 1930s continue to shape our sense of what a beach should be. It is a more sanitised beach than in the past; it is more easily accessible, and with more clearly defined boundaries. We rely on seawalls, concrete pathways, car parks and grassed parks to separate the beach from suburbia: there is a clear point where the sand stops – save the grains clinging to our bodies, towels and the thongs on our feet – and the ‘land’ begins. This may not be how beach always was. But now it’s the only beach we know.

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5 The shark menace On a drizzly Saturday afternoon in February 1922, surf lifesavers from across Sydney’s eastern suburbs gathered at Coogee Beach for an inter-club carnival.

With time to spare before it started, three members of the Coogee Surf Life Saving Club dived into the surf from the rocks beneath the clubhouse for a swim. Among them was Milton Coughlin, an 18-year-old junior member who only a week earlier had been involved in rescuing a surfer at nearby Maroubra Beach. Coughlin had recently graduated from Trinity Grammar School where he showed athletic promise, winning the championship cup and other sporting prizes in his final year. The son of Randwick’s postmaster, Coughlin was now working in the Newtown office of the Railway Department, spending his weekends swimming, surfing and patrolling on Coogee Beach. A small crowd of lifesavers watched the swimmers catch a few waves before Coughlin saw a shark and warned his fellow bathers. As he stretched out to swim to shore, Coughlin was attacked, the shark badly mauling both his arms.

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Of a number of surf lifesavers who scrambled into the surf from rocks near the clubhouse to help Coughlin, Jack Chalmers, a member of North Bondi SLSC was the first to reach the injured man. Olympic swimmer Frank Beaurepaire was close behind him and the two brought Coughlin to shore. He was treated by the club doctor in the clubrooms and rushed to Sydney Hospital but died shortly afterwards. He was buried two days later at Randwick cemetery in front of thousands of mourners. At the funeral, the Sydney Morning Herald reported, Coughlin’s mother embraced Chalmers and said ‘I can never thank you enough for trying to save my boy’. His coffin had been carried on the shoulders of four members of the Coogee Surf Club and hundreds of surf lifesavers, from across Sydney and as far away as Newcastle, attended the funeral. Two local Members of Parliament attended on behalf of the Premier.1 The city was in shock. Chalmers always played down his role in the events surrounding Coughlin’s death, later saying ‘I felt I ought to go – that if I didn’t the other chaps would think me yellow’.2 But Chalmers and Beaurepaire were widely praised. Public collections made in honour of their ‘gallantry’ raised several thousand pounds and Beaurepaire used his share of the money to start a tyre business in Melbourne. King George V awarded Chalmers the Albert medal – the highest bravery award for citizens – and the Surf Bathing Association was so impressed it created a new award of its own, the Silver Meritorious Award, to honour the two rescuers. They were national heroes.3 The overwhelming public and political response was provoked by the suddenness and severity of the attack. This was the first fatal shark attack on a Sydney ocean beach in the nearly two decades since daylight surf bathing had first been allowed, and the first on record. Suddenly, something bathers had long feared had become a terrifying reality. Sharks had never been far from the minds of surf bathers. A number of fatal shark attacks in Sydney Harbour and the Parramatta River in the late 19th century remained in the public consciousness into the 20th century, weighing on the minds of surf bathers as they explored and enjoyed the ocean beaches. The Sydney press frequently reminded beachgoers of the threat of sharks,

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reporting shark sightings – real and false – and the shark haul of local fishers. More than a dozen sharks, mostly grey nurse and wobbegongs, were caught from Bondi Beach in a three-month period in late 1907. The fishermen lay the sharks on the sand for all bathers to see, including a 10-foot (three metre) grey nurse shark that dwarfed the rest.4 To most bathers, sightings or reports of fishermen catching large sharks off Sydney beaches were as much a reassurance that there was one less dangerous fish in the sea as they were a reminder of their presence. Before Milton Coughlin’s death, Sydney surf bathers were conscious of the threat posed by sharks but the fear lay dormant. Over the coming decade, however, they would be repeatedly reminded of the dangers of ocean swimming. Just a month after the Coogee attack grabbed the headlines another swimmer, 21-year-old Mervyn Gannon, was attacked by a shark at the same beach. Again, the media reported all the gruesome details of the attack. But this time newspapers valorised Gannon, rather than his rescuers, for defending himself against an unrelenting predator that reportedly lunged at him even as the Beach Inspector and another surfer helped him to shore: It was a terrible fight that ensued – Gannon fighting with doggedness and The Digger spirit that would not accept defeat, and the shark attacking with a fierce tenacity that disregarded the kneedeep surf. To the spectators it seemed that Gannon moved as the shark swung towards him and punched at it … A small shoot (wave) then rolled towards the beach and Gannon took it.

Gannon survived the attack long enough to tell his aunt from hospital that his rescuers were ‘great chaps’ and that it would be ‘awkward’ living with one arm, but he died several days later from an infection. The NSW Premier, James Dooley, reinforced the popular narrative that had emphasised Gannon’s heroism. He declared that ‘Australia can ill spare a citizen capable of the display of such wonderful courage in the face of terrible danger and of the patience and fortitude shown during his last hours’. The city mourned again. The shark menace had arrived in Sydney.5

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Infested waters

Over the next 16 years there would be a total of 16 shark attacks at Sydney’s most popular ocean beaches, half of them fatal, and all of them reported in macabre detail in the Sydney press. There were many more on the ocean beaches of Newcastle north of Sydney and in Sydney’s harbour, bay and river beaches. With each attack came renewed vigour for shark fishing

and the newspapers were flooded with suggestions for new techniques such as dynamite or baited bamboo. Following so closely after Coughlin’s death, the attack on Mervyn Gannon unnerved Coogee beachgoers in particular. It prompted the government to offer a reward for the capture of any sharks in Coogee Bay, including extra money if a dead shark could be proven to have killed either of the men. Journalists also scrutinised shark-catching techniques in other parts of the Pacific to see how they might be applied in Sydney. In a period in which all shark species were thought to be ‘man-eaters’, all sharks were equally feared, and the death of a wobbegong or grey nurse – later found not to directly threaten human life – was celebrated as much as that of a tiger shark.6 The shark hysteria soon subsided. Towards the end of the 1920s, after just three non-fatal attacks at Bronte, Coogee and Bondi between 1924 and 1928, Sydney swimmers were regaining trust in the safety of their beaches. But their confidence would soon be shattered with three fatal attacks on Sydney beaches within little more than a month. The first victim was 14-year old Colin James Stewart of Bondi, an ‘exceedingly well built’ boy who was attacked while in waist-deep water in January 1929. Bathers nearby were shocked by the suddenness of the incident and helped to bring the injured boy to shore but, having been mauled in the back and leg, he died later that evening in hospital. Less than four weeks later, a 39-year-old man who lived in nearby Curlewis Street, was also fatally attacked by a shark at Bondi Beach. Unconscious by the time he was dragged from the water, John Gibson, the son-in-law of the poet Christopher Brennan, passed away before

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reaching the hospital. Just 10 days later, 21-year-old Allan Butcher from South Kensington was attacked at Maroubra Beach while waiting for a wave, reportedly about 70 metres from shore. A ‘jolly fellow with … a reputation for practical joking’, Butcher’s friends who were surfing nearby initially thought he was ‘pretending’ to be attacked, until they saw the colour drain from his face and the water stained with blood. On the beach, his jovial side returned, Butcher joking to the ‘anxious faces around him’: ‘I don’t think I will be able to swim for a while now … Anyway I suppose my mother would go “crook” if I did’. He died several days later in the Coast Hospital.7 Although praised for his bravery – ‘the bravest chap I ever saw’, remarked one onlooker – before he passed away Butcher was also chastised for swimming out too far. According to beach officials, who had warned him against this before, ‘to a certain extent, Butcher had only himself to blame’. For many years, ‘shark baiting’ – the term given to swimmers who ventured further out than most – had attracted criticism from politicians and some surf lifesavers for unnecessarily exposing bathers to risk of shark attack. In 1911 the Surf Bathing Committee had found no ‘practicable’ methods for protecting against sharks, but had recommended prosecuting ‘shark-baiting’ bathers. The Minister for Local Government, Michael Bruxner, also blamed ‘foolhardy’ behaviour for the three deaths in 1929, even though two attacks had occurred in shallow water or among other bathers. Blaming swimmers for their own fate was a useful tool in diverting attention from the perceived responsibilities of state government while also reassuring bathers that, if they used caution, they had nothing to fear from the surf. The reality was that no-one knew what had caused the sudden spate of shark attacks on the Sydney coast, nor what to do about them. At a special meeting convened shortly after Butcher’s death, local government and surf lifesaving representatives expressed diverse opinions. They advocated sharktrawling programs, building watchtowers in the surf, paying bonuses to fishermen for catching sharks, a netting system, more control over when bathers could and could not enter the surf, and forcing bathers to surf in ‘mass-formation’.

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They disagreed about whether a surfer’s distance from shore or the time of day created more of a risk. The meeting formed a committee to investigate and make recommendations to ‘counteract the shark menace’. The committee considered a number of unworkable proposals: an electric fence that would electrocute sharks but which might also be dangerous to bathers; a ‘barrage of bubbles from compressed air in pipes’ (inspired by the theory that sharks did not attack divers because of the bubbles from their helmets), which would be likely to attract fish and therefore sharks; policing by aeroplanes, which would cost too much; and bait fishing, which might lure sharks to the beach ‘habitually’. Rejecting these suggestions, the committee instead endorsed the use of lookout towers on beaches, recommended ‘regular and systematic netting of the beaches by trawlers’ and suggested that ‘drastic penalties could be inflicted on surfers who bathed at dangerous hours or swam out far enough to earn the title of “shark bait”’. However none of these recommendations was implemented. The government denied a shark threat existed that needed to be addressed.8

A sharkproof fence

The Randwick Council had more to lose. The two 1922 fatal shark attacks had reduced the popularity of its local beaches. Following another attack in 1925, Coogee was, in the public mind, synonymous with the shark threat. Soon after the attack on Mervyn Gannon, the council had tried unsuccessfully to erect a shark-proof fence at Coogee Beach. In the follow-

ing years it investigated other ways of making the beach safe. Finally in 1929, following the fatal attacks at nearby Bondi and Maroubra beaches, the council agreed to a plan developed by its own surf-shed manager, Frank O’Grady, that would see a fence of galvanised steel net enclose the southern end of the beach. The net was hung from steel cables that extended south from the newly built ocean pier to a support tower, and then in a triangular shape to the beach.

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Lit by electric light, the netted area was also promoted as a venue for ‘night surfing’. The Randwick Council believed its shark net was the first enclosure of its type in the world, not realising that a shark-proof net erected on a Durban beach in South Africa in 1907 was now falling into disrepair. It considered the net to be a financial risk, but the potential economic impacts from future shark attacks were a danger of greater concern. The opening (or ‘closing’) of the Coogee shark net in November 1929 was celebrated by thousands. Surf bathers welcomed the new promise of safe surfing and swimming and local and state government representatives heralded the event as a momentous occasion in the development of Coogee. As the Sydney Morning Herald saw it, the fence would keep predatory sharks, ‘hungry and ravenous looking for tit-bits in the surf’, at a safe distance from bathers, allowed only ‘to look through a grating at the dainties displayed inside, but with no chance of coming into contact with them’. Around 135 000 people flocked to Coogee for the inauguration of the fence, an event that included a formal procession nearly a mile long from Randwick to the beach. The Sydney Morning Herald captured the mood of the first night [It] was a beautiful one. Eighteen flood lights … besides innumerable lights strung out on the pier, were used. As soon as the lights were switched on, there was a rush of bathers into the water. Coogee was even gayer at night than it had been during the afternoon. The pier was crowded, music was everywhere, and the new dancing floor on the pier was filled to its utmost capacity. Proceedings concluded with a brilliant display of fireworks on the southern reserve.

The net was an instant success. While the pier from which it was strung ran at a loss – a casualty of the same influences that had doomed past beachfront amusement parks – and Waverley’s new Bondi Pavilion struggled in its early years, the shark enclosure on Coogee Beach boosted the council’s fortunes in challenging economic times. In the first two months of operation, more than half a million people flocked through the turnstiles, earning the council around

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Sydney’s first ocean beach sharkproof swimming enclosure was built at Coogee in 1929 and was immediately popular with swimmers sensitive to the threat of sharks.

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‘Night swimming’ at Coogee Beach was a popular innovation. The Coogee pier provided entertainment and the shark net offered safe swimming. Local businesses welcomed night swimming because it extended the local tourist day.

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£1000 per month from the one-penny admission fees.9 The associated increase in the number of people using the council’s dressing sheds – which soon proved inadequate for the larger crowds – added to its already inflated revenue. Randwick became the envy of other coastal councils. Nets were springing up on some of the calmer and smaller beaches of Sydney Harbour and other bays and rivers including Nielsen Park at Vaucluse, which remains netted today. Edwards Beach at Balmoral was first enclosed by a temporary chain net in 1935. But Coogee remained the only ocean beach to be enclosed. With an eye to the economic as well as social benefits, and as public fears of shark attacks mounted, both the Waverley and Manly councils soon began to consider erecting their own shark-proof fences to lure tourists back from Coogee.

The price of protection

It took just a year from the opening of the Coogee net for the Waverley Council to seek permission for its own shark-proof swimming enclosure at Bondi Beach. The net, it hoped, would compensate for the money it was losing on the newly erected Bondi Pavilion. Its proposed net would enclose more than 23 acres of surf with a fence that extended around 275

metres into the sea and stretched approximately 450 metres along the beach. However it soon learnt of two obstructions that had to be avoided. The government required that the enclosure by-pass the telegraphic cables that departed Sydney underneath the sands of Bondi Beach. It also sought to protect local fishing businesses by ordering that the northern corner of the beach remain net-free so that local fishermen could land and haul their garfish nets.10 Within a month a private syndicate offered the Labor Minister for Lands, John Tully, £1000 (equivalent to around $75 000 in 2013) per year for 10 years for the privilege of erecting a similar shark-proof swimming enclosure on Bondi Beach. Awakened to a greater economic potential of the beaches, Tully’s department applied new scrutiny to existing lease arrangements with Sydney’s

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coastal councils. It discovered that the Randwick Council sub-let the Coogee baths for nearly five times the fee it paid to the government, and the Waverley Council sub-let the Bronte Baths for more than 20 times its lease.11 Infuriated, and determined to no longer charge councils ‘ridiculously low rents’ that would benefit only the councils, Tully demanded the Waverley Council pay the government five per cent of returns or £1000 for the right to construct a sharkproof net at Bondi. The government also sought to recoup part of the Randwick Council’s recent windfall earned through its netted enclosure. The investigation into beach leases found that the Randwick Council had no formal lease or Trust arrangement over Coogee Beach, and that its surf sheds and shark-proof enclosure had been illegally erected – likely without the council even realising it. The department offered to issue the council a permissive occupancy over the beach for an annual fee of £100, a move the council strongly resisted. Both the Randwick and Waverley councils resented government attempts to capitalise on what they argued was a public service, particularly as earlier requests for government investment in the beaches had been refused. To their frustration, as the Depression stretched on the Labor government remained intent on obtaining what it deemed ‘fair and reasonable rents’ for its beach assets. At Bondi, Tully was reluctant to lease a portion of the beach directly to a private syndicate – no doubt fearing a public backlash – but he also refused to lease it to the Waverley Council for a lower sum. The council fought back, claiming its sole purpose was to protect people in the surf and yet, when pressed, it admitted the lure of attracting night-time crowds was equally if not more important. Soon, the council abandoned its plans for a shark-proof enclosure on Bondi Beach altogether. It blamed its decision on the difficulty of constructing a fail-safe barrier and on the unworkable restraints imposed by the fishers and submarine cables. But the council also now argued that Bondi did not need a net. The only council to actually deny there was a shark problem, it attempted to counter the media-fuelled hysteria by highlighting that only three shark ‘accidents’ had occurred despite 41 062 947 bathers having visited

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Bondi between 1914 and 1931 – an improbably precise figure. Undoubtedly the government’s proposed rent, rather than a philosophical shift, had been the deciding factor in persuading the council a net was not needed at Bondi. In the battle with the state government the Randwick Council again enjoyed more success than its neighbor and rival. Although the Crown Solicitor charged the defiant council with trespassing on Coogee Beach in January 1932, a newly elected conservative government proved more sympathetic. Tully’s successor as Minister for Lands, Ernest Buttenshaw, agreed that ‘so long as a safe and reliable net continued to be provided [at Coogee] and any profits accruing from the venture above business expenses were expended on beach improvements’ he was willing to negotiate a better outcome for the council. In a new agreement, the Department of Lands charged the Randwick Council just £10 per annum for its lease of the area for the shark-proof net, 10 per cent of the sum originally proposed. The new price acknowledged coastal councils’ financial responsibilities for managing and improving Sydney’s beaches. But it also distinguished their income, which would be reinvested in coastal improvements, from profits made by private syndicates. Had the Waverley Council waited just a year longer, it is likely that it could have established its own private shark-proof enclosure on Bondi Beach for a far more palatable sum.12

A net for Manly

At Manly, safe swimming enclosures already existed. The council’s shark-proof bathing enclosure on the harbor was popular with people of all ages and local community members had erected a net at Fairy Bower in the late 1920s with some financial assistance from the council. But swimmers on the ocean beach – one of the most popular spots in Manly – remained

exposed. In 1934, following three shark attacks on the northern beaches in a four-month period – two of them fatal – the Manly Council embarked on its own battle for a shark-proof enclosure for surf swimmers. Like the Waverley

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Council, the economic viability of the enclosure was central to the council’s considerations. It favoured arranging for a private company to sub-let the southern end of the beach (locally referred to as South Steyne) from the council and erect its own shark-proof swimming enclosure. The company would fund the new infrastructure and would keep the earnings. To ensure adequate returns, the council agreed to erect its new dressing sheds inside the enclosure, which would also be managed by the private syndicate. Announcing the proposal, the Mayor John Cross emphasised the effect a fear of sharks had had on swimmers and promised that the proposed net, which would be erected free of charge to the council, would ‘revolutionise surf bathing’. Like the Coogee and proposed Bondi enclosures, it also held the promise of bringing night swimming to Manly, therefore extending the tourist day. The council and syndicate also promoted the net as a safety device that bathers could cling to if they were caught in a rip. But surf bathers did not want a revolution or a safety net, at least not at South Steyne. They rallied against the council’s proposal to charge a fee for entry to an enclosed section of the beach – one penny, the same as at Coogee – and for the erection of a new surf pavilion inside the enclosure. Around 500 residents of Manly signed a petition in 1935 declaring ‘emphatic protest against any alienation of any portion of the ocean beach from the free use of the people’. Many also attended a lively public meeting. As concerned as they were about paying to use a portion of the beach, many of those who signed the petition were particularly outraged that a private syndicate would be making money from this public space. These were the same arguments that had been played out at this beach, and those further south, about leases to private amusement companies in earlier decades. The only purpose beachgoers seemed content to see beaches fenced off for were temporary surf carnivals and associated events. These were part of an accepted culture of the beach. They were both an entertaining spectacle and considered essential to maintaining the fitness and skills of surf lifesavers. The proposed Manly shark net, in contrast, was repugnant commercialism.

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Among the many local residents who spoke out against the proposal was Joseph Henry Pyne, a regular bather at Manly for the preceding 25 years, who knew the beach intimately. In his testimony to the Local Land Board Inquiry into the council’s application for a special lease, Joseph explained his reasons for opposing the enclosure. They closely echoed those of many other residents. He was concerned about the impact the fence would have on the view of the beach from the promenade, which was so busy it had virtually become a ‘fashion parade’ on Sundays, and suggested that ‘it would be like a zoo’ looking through the fence to the beach from the bandstand. He pointed out the ‘regular social community’ gathered at the southern end of the beach, many of whom, including his wife and daughter, often did not even swim. The thought that non-bathers may have to pay for the privilege of sitting on the sand was galling to many who testified at the Inquiry. Joseph and others also claimed they did not even believe sharks were a threat in this corner of the beach. Above all else, Joseph objected to paying a fee for access to a beach that he considered ‘belonged’ to him: that part of the beach represents heaven to me. I have seen most of the beaches in New South Wales and I don’t know of a prettier beach than Manly Beach. And that part of the beach constitutes the real Manly Beach. It would not inconvenience me financially but I consider the beach belongs to me and I object to paying.

Joseph Pyne was so closely attached to Manly Beach he insisted he would continue to object to the fence even ‘if two people were taken by sharks there today’. Others who objected to the commercial element of the plan agreed with the principle of providing safe bathing areas. A small number of those who testified to the Inquiry even admitted to fearing sharks, including Terence Bennett, the Secretary of the Manly Life Saving Club, who confessed he no longer enjoyed the surf as he once had. The Minister for Lands, Ernest Buttenshaw, did not consider it ‘unreasonable to expect surfers to pay’, but swayed by public concerns he insisted that ‘those who merely desire to lounge on the beach should

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not be called upon to pay for a privilege they have so long had without charge’. On this basis he requested the council modify its scheme. In February 1936, just days after Manly Council representatives and the Minister had argued again about the merits of an enclosure, and on the day the Manly Daily published a letter accusing the councillors of being ‘white elephants’ for bungling the surf pavilion project and attempting to lease the beach to a private syndicate, local teenager David Paton was taken by a shark at the very spot locals including Joseph Pyne had insisted was free from sharks. His body was never recovered, intensifying the mystery and terror that surrounded shark attacks in the public mind. But while his death may have strengthened the council’s resolve to proceed with the proposal, it otherwise had little impact on the public debate. Determined to proceed, the council resolved to move the enclosure further north to a part of the beach at the end of the Corso that was less popular with swimmers and therefore less likely to upset local beach users. However its dogged insistence on constructing the new surf sheds inside the enclosure raised further tensions among locals. They feared the proposed surf sheds would ‘destroy that beautiful first view of the water, when walking up the Corso; that wonderful peep through the trunks of the trees’. The strong public campaign waged against the Manly shark fence ultimately sealed its fate. The government yielded to the community opposition against constructing surf sheds at the end of the Corso, and to commercialising the beach. It would only permit surf sheds at South Steyne and an enclosure slightly further north so that the best part of the surf would remain free to use. But while the Manly Council was concerned for the welfare of its bathers, this was purely a business proposition: it could not afford to build the net itself and separating the enclosure from the surf sheds made the project less viable to private investors. Like the Waverley Council before it, faced with unworkable government conditions the Manly Council withdrew its proposal. Swimmers at Manly and Bondi continued to enter the surf at their own risk, but they had won the right to continue doing so for free.13

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Addressing the shark menace

For the Manly Council, which firmly believed that ‘the surfer must and should be protected’, the decision to erect its own shark-proof bathing enclosure had been a last resort. It may have stood to gain a modest income from the shark net on the beach, but the council was committed to improving the safety of ocean bathing. Like the Randwick Council before

it, it understood the economic damage that a widespread fear of sharks could inflict on a suburb that relied on beach tourism. Early in 1934, immediately following the first fatal shark attack at North Steyne and before it considered tenders for a net, the Manly Council called a meeting with representative of the Surf Life Saving Association of Australia, local surf lifesaving clubs and others keenly involved in the use of the beach, to discuss the ‘shark question’. The conference resolved to approach the Prime Minister and Premier requesting that a committee of experts be appointed to find a solution to the problem. This was a proactive approach that ultimately convinced the government that state-level intervention was required.14 In August 1934, after a sub-committee of the SLSAA made its own recommendations for a government-funded solution to the ongoing shark attacks, the state government finally relented and appointed its own committee to investigate methods of making Sydney and Newcastle beaches safe from shark attacks. Chaired by the president of the SLSAA, Adrian Curlewis, the committee was charged with examining more than 100 schemes that had been submitted by the public. Some of the more imaginative ideas included requiring bathers to wear ‘a jet black bathing suit, with bells on the headgear’; or ‘a chain belt reaching from the waist or neck to the knee’. Others suggested ‘a submersible boat, able to pull out bombs when under six feet of water, and another was for a high tower with a nine-inch gun’.15 The committee instantly rejected a bizarre and dangerous proposal that required observation balloons to be stationed above the surf, and

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upon the appearance of a shark electric alarm bells to be rung to warn bathers to leave the water; a section of AMF artillery to be stationed at each beach with light howitzers, mortars or other hightrajectory guns; the observers to communicate the position of the shark by telephone; projectiles with a delayed fuse to be fired at the sharks; and all fish killed to be netted immediately and taken from the water.16

Such a system would have inflicted far more damage on tourism than an occasional shark attack. The public submissions varied, but nor could the expert witnesses interviewed by the committee – engineers, marine scientists and shark fishermen – agree on the most effective methods for shark protection. Some doubted that netted beaches could be 100 per cent effective, given the possibility of channels forming along the seabed. They also suggested the cost of constructing and maintaining nets would be prohibitive. Some favoured trawling for sharks, in the belief that ‘the only way to minimise the danger and protect the surfers would be to catch the sharks’.17 Again though, there were no guarantees. One expert witness even questioned whether sharks had been responsible for all the attacks. The surgeon, scientist and medical advisor to SLSAA, Doctor Victor Coppleson, who would later write an internationally renowned book about shark attacks, reported to the committee that while sharks were certainly responsible for most of the recent attacks, there was no evidence they had all been perpetrated by sharks: there was a possibility some had been inflicted by a barracuda or the saw of a sawfish. American fish experts had made similar claims in 1916, initially blaming a series of shark attacks on the Jersey coast – which later inspired the 1970s book and horror film Jaws – on killer whales or a broadbill swordfish.18 Theodore Roughley, the president of the Royal Zoological Society of NSW and another well-known expert witness, had published informative articles about sharks in Sydney newspapers in the 1930s. In a 1934 article in the Sydney Morning Herald titled ‘Surfers’ dread: habits of the shark’, Roughley had

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This stunning shark tower guarded swimmers at Manly Beach from 1939 onwards. Part of the pavilion that won its designer a Sulman Award, imposing structures like this were recommended as essential for Sydney beaches by the government’s Shark Menace Advisory Committee.

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reinforced the popular idea that humans were the natural prey of sharks. He informed readers about eight deadly shark species, which he believed included grey nurse and hammerhead: Sleek, silent and sinister, ever on alert to grab some unwary bather in its leering mouth of sharp, glistening teeth, the shark is the lord of its own domain and is met by intruders into its realm in very unequal combat.19

Sensationalised ‘scientific’ accounts such as these did little to calm bathers. But in his evidence to the committee Roughley played down the danger of sharks, pointing out that there was an average of three shark attacks per year in Australia compared to 700 motor accidents. This and similar relative statistics would come to be repeated regularly by those trying to bring some perspective to debates about shark attacks, and continue to be cited in the media today. Yet despite the statistical evidence, Roughley remained a ‘firm advocate of an enclosure of some kind’, which he argued would preserve a surf culture that was ‘helping to build up a virile community’. The fisheries expert David Stead – father of novelist Christina – agreed with Roughley, arguing that the estimated £1 million (equivalent to around $90 million in 2013) required to enclose all metropolitan beaches was worth the incredible expense because, although there were relatively few shark attacks, ‘death from shark attack is particularly horrible and it is impossible to overlook the psychological effect’.20 The committee agreed. Concerned by the potential impact of shark fears on the state’s beach economy it reassured the beachgoing community that swimming in the surf was one of Australia’s safest and healthiest recreations and admonished the media for unnecessarily fuelling public hysteria. But it also acknowledged that despite the ‘very great room for doubt whether there is in fact such a thing as a shark “menace”’ on the beaches, the public fear of sharks was tangible. To allay this fear and boost confidence in the beaches it recommended systematic meshing through sinking nets offshore. Based on a successful trial at Port Stephens north of Newcastle, this would be the most

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economical way of reducing the risk of shark attack in Sydney. Meshing was less visible than netted bathing enclosures, but the committee was confident that evidence that meshing had reduced the number of sharks in local waters would restore public confidence in the safety of surf bathing.21 The meshing program was a political solution to what had become primarily a political problem.

Protecting bathers

It is difficult to quantify the impact of the inter-war series of shark attacks on Sydney’s beach culture. Anecdotal evidence suggested fewer people were going to the beaches and that more people were using the protected ocean and harbour pools rather than swimming in open water. Certainly the initial popularity of the Coogee enclosure testifies to the prefer-

ence of swimmers for protected surf at that time. But while people may have avoided particular beaches immediately after well-publicised attacks, there is no evidence to show a long-term decline in the numbers of people swimming in the surf following shark attacks. The 1920s and 1930s are renowned for the huge crowds that flocked to Sydney’s beaches each summer. Manly’s Mayor admitted that Manly had experienced no tourism decline following the 1934 attacks. In some cases, businesses even benefited from a short-term increase in voyeuristic sightseers following attacks. On the Sunday following the attack on Mervyn Gannon in 1922, for example, and with kerosene tins baited for sharks bobbing across the bay like a scene out of Jaws, the possibility of seeing a shark had drawn the largest crowds to the beach that Coogee had ever seen, although few of the visitors were willing to go into the water.22 Local business owners were also among those who opposed the Manly shark net, fearing they had more to lose by its presence than they did by the possibility of shark attacks. Nonetheless, the government remained convinced that ongoing shark attacks would irreparably damage Sydney’s coastal tourism industry. Since the committee had first met eight months earlier, seven people had been attacked

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by sharks – in the Georges River, Brisbane Waters, Wollongong, Narrabeen and Maroubra.23 In the first acknowledgment by a state government that it should accept responsibility for protecting bathers against sharks, it agreed to adopt the committee’s recommendations. State Cabinet was unanimous in investing in a program that would ‘protect surfers from shark attack’, but the councils, some experts and other members of the community were not convinced that systematic meshing would stem the flow of attacks, or that any effort to protect ‘reckless and foolhardy’ bathers from an inevitable risk was justified at all.24 Councils remained adamant that individual beaches needed to be securely netted, but this was an expense the government would not accept. The meshing program instituted by the NSW government in 1937 was the first of its kind in the world. Initially limited to Sydney’s ocean beaches, it was later extended to the beaches of Newcastle, the central coast and Wollongong areas. Queensland and Durban in South Africa introduced similar protective programs in the early 1950s and ’60s respectively. More than 80 years later, nets 150 metres long and 6 metres deep continue to be ‘bottom set’ in about 10 or 12 metres of water, 500 metres offshore. Their depth and location is designed to minimise potential impacts on air-breathing animals, although they do occasionally entangle whales, dolphins, turtles, seals and even dugongs, which are released alive where possible. The nets cannot be seen from shore and do not protect all the beaches all the time; but swimmers know they are there and their presence off the city’s coast between September and April each year is a part of local beach folklore.25 The meshing program was successful in reducing local shark populations. Some 1500 sharks were caught in the nets in the first 17 months of operation but, a decade later, the average catch in the Sydney region was less than 100 sharks per year.26 Whether due to the meshing program or not, an attack on local surf lifesaver Ernest Baker while on a surf ski at Cronulla beach in January 1938 – an event which finally dispelled the Sutherland Shire Council’s longheld belief that the Cronulla beaches were ‘immune’ from sharks – was the last in this series of inter-war attacks.27 Although many more swimmers and surfers

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would encounter sharks in Sydney’s rivers and bays and other NSW coastal waters, there were just two attacks on the Sydney coast in the decade that followed, and few since. At the time of writing, there had been no fatal shark attacks on the Sydney ocean coast in the 75 years since meshing began. Attacks have become so rare that an attack on a Bondi surfer in 2009 shook the city almost as much as the death of Milton Coughlin had 87 years earlier.

Deepseated fears

Shark attacks occurred less frequently in the postwar decades but the fear persisted. The generations whose beach experiences were shaped during the spate of attacks in the 1920s and ’30s undoubtedly passed their anxieties about the dangers of beach swimming onto later generations. My own maternal grandmother who lived in Newcastle at the time of

several shark attacks in the early 1930s warned my older sister half a century later not to swim while menstruating for fear it would attract sharks. More than an ‘old wives’ tale’, her theory and many like it reflect society’s need to find a rationale for something entirely unpredictable, as well as one individual’s attempt to protect her family. The myths that have sprung up as a result of a somewhat exaggerated fear of sharks in Australia created an interest in the very creatures they were demonising. Sharks have been described as Australia’s ‘oldest obsession’, the fear of them ‘integral in the national psyche’.28 The Australian swimmer, beach beauty and Hollywood silent film star Annette Kellerman told American audiences in 1916 that ‘the shark to the Australian child occupies the same position as the bogey man does to American children’.29 Such statements perpetuated foreign perceptions of Australia as a shark- (and snake- and spider-) infested country as much as they reinforced to Australians the important symbolism of the shark.30 Australians were also fascinated by dead sharks. For Sydney journalist and historian Gavin Souter, the sight of four kittens inside the carcass of a shark at

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Curl Curl as a young boy created an enduring memory. It was an important lesson about what sharks were capable of. Although the kittens had probably been drowned, it was a shock to see that something so recognisable had been swallowed whole by a shark.31 In 1930, the raising of a net laid by shark fishers along Coogee Beach attracted hundreds of sightseers along the beach and pier, keen to get a glimpse of the feared creatures that lurked below the surf. They were rewarded when a tiger shark nearly four metres long was caught in the net and ‘rushed the vessel’, only to be stopped by ‘five bullets in its head’ – behaviour many probably expected from a ‘monster’ such as this.32 The most enduring chapter in the history of Sydney’s relationship with its sharks was an episode that became known as the ‘shark arm murders’ of the mid-1930s. A tiger shark caught live several kilometres from Coogee Beach in 1935 and put on display in the Coogee Aquarium horrified onlookers when it regurgitated a tattooed human arm with part of a rope tied around the wrist. The mystery behind whose arm it was, and whether the victim had been killed by the shark or by other means, captivated Sydney. The daily papers speculated that it was a suicide or a prank by medical students.33 Police discovered that the owner of the arm, Jim Smith, had been murdered and his dismembered body disposed of at sea – but his murder remains unsolved. The mystery that surrounded this case linked the city’s existing obsession with sharks – at its height in 1935 – with the intrigue of its criminal underbelly. The story of Jim Smith’s associates in life and grisly death was more powerful than fiction; the intrusion of a shark into a criminal investigation turned Jim Smith’s murder into Sydney folklore. Forty years later, Jaws, the 1975 American film based on Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel, brought a fear of sharks to the world stage. For many Australians, reading the captain’s description of the shark’s ‘savage grin’ and ‘black, fathomless eyes’ reflected and reinforced popular perceptions of the fish from earlier in the 20th century: that sharks were evil, ‘an angel of death’, their occasional attacks on swimmers ruthless, deliberate and calculated acts perpetrated upon defenceless bathers.34

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Even as Jaws was terrifying swimmers around the world, attitudes towards sharks were beginning to shift. A global conservation ethic began to pervade local debates about sharks and the threat they posed to bathers. In Sydney, people began to question the environmental cost of the meshing program, suggesting that the impact the nets were having – not just on shark populations but on marine mammals and other large fish – was too high a cost for ‘an Aussie day at the beach’.35 The debate continues today, informed not just by politics but by newer concerns for the welfare of endangered and threatened sharks and other marine species. Conflicting perspectives are particularly divisive in Western Australia, where there are no shark nets to protect bathers. In the wake of seven fatal shark attacks in three years, in late 2013 the state government announced that For most of the 20th century, the capture of a shark of any type was cause for celebration. This tiger shark caught at Maroubra Beach in 1936 fascinated and terrified beachgoers who knew there were plenty more like it out in the water.

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it would ‘cull’ large sharks found within one kilometre of popular beaches. But unlike the NSW government’s decision to mesh Sydney’s beaches 75 years earlier, the announcement was condemned by conservationists and beachgoers across Australia, sparking protests on beaches as far away as New Zealand. It reincited the national discussion about sharks and beaches, and the role governments play – or should play – in protecting people in the surf. News organisations and politicians may like to play to peoples’ fear, but in the public mind sharks are no longer the predatory ‘monsters’ they were once feared to be.

Coogee unbound

Each October during the 1930s the Randwick Council celebrated the reopening of the Coogee shark-proof enclosure as the official start of the surfing season. Following the demolition of the pier in 1933–34 the council continued to maintain and annually erect the net, extending it in 1937 so that it covered almost the entire length of the beach.36 Gradually though, and

particularly as shark attacks became less frequent in the late 1930s, the popularity of the net faded. The Randwick Council sorely felt the associated loss of income, which was compounded by a ban on lighting for night swimming and a decline in the number of people using the ocean baths during World War II. In 1942, with steel in short supply and labour in high demand due to the war effort, the council decided not to renew the shark net for the summer season, bringing more than a decade of enclosed bathing at Coogee Beach to an end. Most of the net and associated structures were soon destroyed by storms and neglect and in 1948 the council dismantled and removed the last remnants of the Coogee shark net. There had been no shark attacks on the Sydney coast in more than four years, and none at Coogee for 17 years. The government’s program of shark meshing was evidently taking effect.37 By the end of the 1930s any shark panic that had existed on the city’s beaches had abated, and the onset of war in Europe ensured media and public

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attention was soon focused elsewhere. After close to two decades of concerted efforts to protect Sydney’s beach-tourism industry – and by extension bathers themselves – from a very real shark threat, the coastal economy and local beach cultures faced new and, for many, unforeseen challenges of a potential military invasion across the sands of Sydney.

The shark meshing program and the notable decline in shark attacks on the Sydney coast from the 1940s placated Sydney beachgoers. But swimmers and surfers continue to jump at shadows in the surf. We probably always will. Television shows and news reports continue to feed the shark-fear frenzy. Spectacular footage of huge great whites leaping out of the water in pursuit of artificial seals emphasises their predatory instincts and reminds us they are ever-present in the water. Whether seen or unseen, sharks always have been and will continue to be a part of the Sydney beach.

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6 A military invasion Nestled into the cliff on the headland south of Whale Beach, Sydney residents Captain Charles and Mrs Pauline Grieve built a luxurious weekender cottage in 1934.

They commissioned local architect Alexander Stewart Jolly to design the house and named it ‘Careel House’ after the headland. The main drawing room – 20 metres in length with solid stone walls – looked out over the ocean and from the front door the view of the coast stretched north and south in ‘the most wonderful panorama of earth and sea and sky’. It was a place where Mrs Grieve could ‘get away from everything’. When the Grieves were not holidaying at Whale Beach they leased the house to holidaymakers, conference attendees and party-goers who sought their own brief holidays by the sea. In December 1941, less than a year after hundreds of actors and theatre-goers had gathered for a drama festival at the house, two signallers from

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the nearby coastal defence post on Careel Headland asked the Grieves’ tenant, Mrs Allan, if they could use the telephone. The defence post had been established as part of Sydney’s extensive network of World War II coastal defences. It had been selected for its isolation and the commanding view it provided over the ocean and coastline of the northern beaches – the same features that had attracted the Grieves to the headland less than a decade earlier. Mrs Allan invited the men into the house and also offered them use of the shower. Before long, Careel House was being informally occupied by dozens of soldiers from a number of different battalions who were dissatisfied with their official outpost accommodation. Mrs Grieve permitted and even encouraged the soldiers’ occupation of her house, fully aware that a military tenancy was the best opportunity for leasing a coastal property such as hers at this stage of the war. She sent someone to board up her bedroom and sitting room so the soldiers could make use of the kitchen, showers and downstairs suite and she wrote to the military authorities urging them (without success) to make the occupation official, pointing out that the house had been designed for a large number of people and it could accommodate up to 100 men. Mrs Grieve continued to visit and stay at the house but she became increasingly concerned about the way the men were using the house and the damage they caused. The soldiers acted as though they had a ‘right’ to the property, she later complained. They drove through the grounds to reach their outpost and even burst into her room at 5.45 am one Sunday and shone a spotlight into her face as they searched for an absent corporal. Mrs Grieve wrote that at the house, ‘rations were delivered, the men cooked (sometimes electrically), ate, washed, ironed (electrically), bathed, slept, read, wrote, were paid, kept their equipment and personal gear, spent their off-duty time and were actually established there’. They had literally taken over her home but did not pay the family any compensation for the privilege. Mrs Grieve also reported that the soldiers had ‘souvenired’ crockery and cutlery, and had taken or damaged tools and garden equipment including

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hammers, spades, brooms, shears, a hose, hoe and paint brushes. They broke glass, windows and doors, damaged locks, removed bars from an external door and damaged part of an external retaining wall. Some broke into her rooms and removed six stretchers and beds. The external stone steps, which six years earlier had been meticulously constructed under her close supervision and were the only path of access into both the house and the downstairs apartment, were now being trampled daily by soldiers’ boots. When the soldiers eventually vacated the property in mid-1942 – ordered out by the military authorities after learning of their unauthorised occupation – they left Careel House in such poor condition Mrs Grieve complained she was unable to re-let it without substantial remediation works. The house once described as ‘a retreat from life, a place of clean sea winds and spacious views … where only the real things in life seem to hold significance’ had become a casualty of the war. It was torn apart by military personnel seeking dry, warm places to spend the night and for whom the otherwise important design features of a splendid holiday house were immaterial.1 Careel House was one of many private homes and holiday houses along the Sydney coast and throughout the city that were occupied by the military – with or without the permission of the owners or the appropriate authorities – during the middle stages of World War II. For a brief period Sydney’s beaches and headlands were transformed from spaces predominantly used for holidays and recreation to a series of carefully guarded military defence zones, divided from civilian areas by barbed wire fences and home to infantry, gunners and searchlight personnel, both men and women. Sydney’s beachgoers and coastal homeowners, who shared the government’s concerns about a possible coastal invasion, adapted to the new military presence on their beaches and coast. But few would have imagined the scale of the occupation or its physical impact on the city’s beloved beaches.

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A landscape of strategic importance

Sydney’s beaches have always been strategic points in the city’s defence. The beaches at Kurnell, Sydney Cove and Manly Cove had been the first points of the European invasion in the late 18th century. A little over two decades later, the South Head Road was built to strengthen the colony’s defence capabilities, providing the first land access from Sydney Cove to

the ocean coast. An order made in 1828 by the British Colonial Office, which demanded the reservation of all coastal and riverfront land for the Crown, had also been partly driven by a perceived need to set aside coastal areas for defence. A century later, the Commonwealth government was less interested in the defence requirements of coastal land. A number of well-situated coastal areas had been reserved as defence sites in the 1890s, claimed during a period in which areas close to beaches were being increasingly subdivided and sold. But by the late 1920s many defence reserves had never been actively used for this purpose. They remained unoccupied by the military, often used instead by locals for coastal recreation or as the unofficial living sites of campers. At La Perouse on the northern peninsula of Botany Bay, much of a Military Reserve dedicated for ‘defence purposes’ in 1892 was leased by the Commonwealth to a golf club in 1928 for 20 years. It was here that the Depression-era camp Happy Valley materialised. Parts of the defence reserves at Manly’s North Head and Hungry Point at Cronulla were leased to local councils in the early 1930s to formalise their use as recreation reserves. Situated at the entrance to Port Hacking, part of the latter reserve had already been revoked and dedicated to fisheries research in 1902, a purpose it would serve for over a century.2 The conversion of military land extended to roads too: Bondi’s Military Road, which had been transferred to the Commonwealth for defence purposes upon federation, was retransferred to the state in 1920 to serve as a residential and tourist road.3 With no immediate threat of war, these former defence sites were most useful for the income they could generation through leases. But other coastal

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defence reserves remained critically important. In the decade leading to World War II the Commonwealth government reviewed the nation’s defence strategies and capabilities. Due to the possibility – in event of war – of attack from the sea, modernising and improving coastal defence, through the installation of new guns, searchlights, anti-aircraft guns and other equipment, was among its top priorities.4 The federal Department of Defence developed a number of plans in the 1930s that emphasised the strategic importance of Sydney’s coast to the defence of the nation. Sydney was part of the section of coast – stretching from Port Macquarie on the mid-north coast of New South Wales to Jervis Bay in the south – declared in 1933 to be ‘vital to the commonwealth as a whole’. Under the assumption that a permanent population might deter invasion, the Commonwealth government had sought assurances from its state counterpart that this entire stretch of coast had been settled.5 Of particular importance in Sydney were Bondi’s Ben Buckler Headland, the remaining section of North Head near Manly and the stretch of coast between Malabar and Coogee. As part of a nationwide control over designated ‘defence areas’, property owners close to these three areas required Ministerial permission for buildings higher than one storey to ensure that buildings would not interfere with possible military activities such as low-flying aircraft or gunfire.6 It should have come as no surprise when these and other coastal areas were taken over by the military during World War II. As the threat of war escalated, military authorities considered the Sydney coast, with its many large beaches protected by headlands and connected by well-constructed roads offering direct access to the city, to be particularly vulnerable. They were determined to protect it against a possible wartime attack from the sea. A 1939 district defence plan, which labelled Sydney as ‘of the highest strategic importance to Australia’, detailed the mechanisms for defending the city against an attack by land, sea and/or air in the event of war. It closely analysed the topography and population density of each segment of the coast, concluding that most of Sydney’s beaches would be ‘practicable’

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for enemy landings in calm weather. A draft coastal defence plan for the area between Narrabeen and North Head, which was drawn up in 1940, instructed that all resources should be put into preventing enemy beach landings. It made no reference to secondary defence plans for inland areas of Sydney should an enemy invasion occur.7 The beaches assumed national significance – but for an entirely new reason.

A nation at war

In September 1939, Britain declared war on Germany and the Australian Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, solemnly informed the nation that it, too, was at war. Australian troops were sent across the world to fight in North Africa and Greece. Two years later, on 7 December 1941, Japan carried out an abrupt and devastating attack on the US naval fleet at Hawaii’s Pearl

Harbor. The collective fear many Australians held of a war in the Pacific was realised. The possibility of invasion by Japanese troops alarmed the Australian population. The fall of Singapore and the bombing of Darwin in February 1942, attacks on ships off Australia’s east coast, the invasion of Sydney Harbour by two Japanese midget submarines on 31 May 1942 and the shelling of the eastern suburbs of Sydney and Newcastle a week later, only intensified these fears. With a heightened threat of invasion, in December 1941 the Australian military authorities swiftly implemented the nation’s coastal defence strategy. Around Australia, parks and playgrounds were turned into military defence zones and the military forces established headquarters, troop accommodation and military installations along the coast. Defence reserves that had been leased were converted to their former purpose. In Sydney the military immediately requested that the Warringah Council close its beachfront camping grounds but, unwilling to bear the financial cost of reduced income, the council instead warned campers that they occupied coastal parks at their own risk.8

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Not only had Sydney’s beaches become a symbol of the nation’s vulnerability but also, with the exception of the harbour, the beaches themselves were the most exposed and vulnerable part of the city.9 Some of those who lived close to the beaches, and who could afford it, temporarily abandoned their valuable coastal real estate for apparently safer inland areas, leaving houses and shops vacant and leading to a decline in coastal property prices. Guests at Furlough House, the Narrabeen holiday house for the families of servicemen, were evacuated to Orange and the Far West Children’s Health Scheme temporarily suspended its children’s camps. Many of the holiday houses and weekender shacks that still lined parts of Sydney’s coast lay empty too. Their owners were on active duty or unable or unwilling to spend time by the coast – and there were fewer people wanting to rent beachside accommodation. From mid-1942 the ban on using petrol for pleasure motoring also had an impact on the ‘weekender’ lifestyle.10 Vacated houses close to military posts and bases soon became sought after for accommodation for the troops stationed at coastal gun emplacements and searchlight posts. The Australian military authorities hired houses throughout Bondi, on Ben Buckler Headland and further back from the beach, along the entire coastal strip of Cronulla and also on higher land back towards Caringbah, as well as at Maroubra, Bronte and Queenscliff. They hired shops at Dee Why, Curl Curl, Coogee and Bondi. But vacant houses such as Careel House, for which no occupation agreements existed, were also a temptation for troops camped on beaches, parks and the front lawns of coastal properties on cold, wet winter nights. Mrs Grieve was consequently not the only coastal homeowner to complain of inappropriate behaviour by troops stationed along Sydney’s coast in the midst of World War II. Thomas Hitchman, who owned a holiday cottage at nearby Mona Vale, was another property owner who submitted an inventory of missing and damaged property. He also accused the 15–20 soldiers he had permitted to sleep on his veranda of breaking into the house and of pulling down the timber fence to keep the fire burning ‘day and night’. Others made similar complaints.

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At Collaroy, although R Longworth of Centennial Park gave permission for soldiers to camp on his front veranda and use his electric light, lavatory and veranda furniture, he was concerned that the trenches they had dug around the property, presumably for weapon pits, might undermine the foundations of his house.11 Landowner Arthur Franklin was even less fortunate. On arriving at his newly purchased block of land on the edge of the Collaroy plateau overlooking Collaroy Beach, and on which he planned to build a home and maintain a bushy garden, Franklin was alarmed to discover that he was barred by military authorities from entering his own property. The woman who had sold him the property, the elderly Jessie Green of Manly, was also completely unaware of the army’s occupation of this and her neighbouring land. On these vacant properties and without even alerting the landowners, the military authorities had undertaken extensive construction works: they had dug two large weapon pits, a 60-foot (18 metre) communication trench, a 100-foot (30 metre) run of slit trenches and had enclosed the area in barbed wire fences. On Jessie Green’s property they erected a dummy radar station. It was made of hardwood and covered in chain mesh wire on top of a three-room observation building made of iron, with wooden frames and floors. They built a two-room ablution building and connected water and a kitchen and mess building with a concrete floor – all in complete secrecy, and surprisingly close to the real radar station and other homes.12 Around Australia, similar critical defence works were materialising on public and private land as the military scrambled to protect the coast. Although they sometimes had little or no choice in the military’s occupation of their homes and properties, many coastal property owners saw military accommodation as a way of contributing to the war effort and so claimed no compensation for it. Others welcomed the lease payments and rate reimbursements the military offered.13 For each soldier sleeping inside a house there were many more camped in parks, on front lawns or on people’s verandas. They also made use of the

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This captivating image by Max Dupain captures the light playing on tetrahedral tank traps at Freshwater Beach. Part of the extensive military beach fortification program during World War II, barriers such as these were wedged in the sand to protect the coast from a potential enemy invasion.

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pedestrian tunnels under Bondi’s Marine Drive and slept in surf lifesaving clubs and surf pavilions at Mona Vale, Maroubra, Bronte and Bondi, which the coastal councils made available free of charge. The Far West Children’s Home at Manly was occupied for a while by the Australian Women’s Army Service (AWAS), with more than 100 members who worked at North Head and other nearby coastal defence sites taking advantage of the well-appointed, and vacant, rooms and amenities. Sometimes, these places fared no better than the private homes occupied by the military. The men who took refuge in the North Curl Curl SLSC building during poor weather in 1942 used one door as a dartboard, but the club was more concerned that their heavy boots had spoiled the floor for dancing.14 The northern beaches were also used for military training camps during the early war years. Members of the Australian Air League camped at Narrabeen Lake on several occasions and battalions of the Volunteer Defence Corps camped between Collaroy and Mona Vale, and at Long Reef in October 1941. The air trainees who camped at Avalon Beach during the war left around 50 vacant huts when they departed. The areas that homeless and recreational campers and weekenders had taken over during previous decades were now home to a new, equally transient population – but one that saw Sydney’s beaches through entirely different eyes.15

Defending the beaches

The men and women who lived in or temporarily occupied these private homes and coastal spaces transformed the coastal landscape as they constructed the city’s defences. They established localised headquarters in existing buildings along the coast which already had amenities: at the Cecil Hotel in Cronulla, the garages of the Hotel Bondi and Astra Hotel on

Bondi, Maroubra Hotel and Oceanic Hotel at Coogee and the Bondi Beach and Maroubra primary schools. They constructed gun emplacements at South

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Curl Curl and at Maroubra, in the park and on the merchant Robert Clarke’s vacant property nearby. Clarke raised no objection to the occupation of his vacant land, and claimed no compensation; Herbert Taylor on the other hand, who lived with his family overlooking the ocean on Marine Drive at Bronte, was outraged that the military wanted to put a gun on his front lawn and he refused to grant permission. Aileen Adele Cox from Strathfield was no doubt astounded to find a gun emplacement in the garden of her Curl Curl holiday home and men sleeping under the veranda.16 The coastal military units also installed anti-aircraft searchlights along the coast, in public places including Bronte Park and Dunningham Park at Coogee, and on private land along the southern end of the Esplanade at Cronulla, where the searchlight personnel also lived in people’s homes. The Mona Vale golf course was transformed by defensive works that included tank traps, and the Long Reef golf course was used as a field firing range, destroying holes and fairways.17 Whether on prominent headlands or further back from the ocean, for a brief period in the early 1940s all these sites and many more were deemed critical to the city’s defence. The armed forces also modified the beaches and surrounding infrastructure to thwart any attempted beach landings. They damaged or destroyed much of the recreational infrastructure that had been constructed over previous decades to attract and accommodate leisure-seeking beachgoers. The bandstand at Dee Why, a rotunda on Bronte Beach and the brick toilet building at Harbord (Freshwater) were all destroyed. They demolished the steps of the Collaroy surf building (without council permission), the bridge over Dee Why lagoon, and applied to wire roads and remove footbridges.18 Gun pits were dug at most beaches, steps were dismantled, promenades were damaged and their handrails removed. At Bondi, the two large ‘groynes’ that extended from the promenade across the sand, and which had been built as part of the Bondi beautification, were blown up by the army in early 1942 in an over-enthusiastic demolition. Pieces of concrete flew into nearby buildings, including the pavilion and surf club.

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The tunnels, which provided pedestrian access to the beach under the marine drive and in which troops had initially slept, were also destroyed to hinder any potential Japanese invasion across the sands of Sydney’s most famous beach. But the most visible and enduring element of the beach defence works was the rows of barbed wire installed across the sand and along the promenades of the city’s beaches as an additional hurdle to invading forces. Generally the coastal councils were supportive of defence works. But they were powerless against the military forces, unable to refuse ‘requests’ to alter the beaches. They were also initially unsuccessful in any claims for compensation: when the Warringah Council sought compensation in April 1942 for damage caused by unauthorised work along the northern beaches it was advised by the military that the work was ‘essential for the effective defence of the coastline’, and warned that further damage was likely should the city’s worst fears be realised.19 The councils, like everyone else, had to make sacrifices. Similar beach modifications were implemented by troops mobilised around the Australian coast. Along the coast of Cockburn Sound, south of Fremantle in Western Australia, incredible ‘hurdle defences’ standing several metres high were constructed in the water, stretching along the beaches for nearly six and a half kilometres. Beaches were also strewn with barbed wire in the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands and Belgium and, according to the Minister for the Army Frank Forde, had been successfully implemented by the Turkish at Gallipoli during World War I. Across the north of Australia, anti-aircraft guns dotted the coastline even in the most remote areas. Forde reassured Australians that if they saw defence works being constructed they should not be concerned that their area was a likely point of invasion, but rather should see it as part of anti-invasion preparations being conducted around the country. Australia’s World War II coastal defences were not a hasty improvisation in response to invasion panic. They were erected in accordance with carefully considered defence plans that had been in place for some time.20 The fear of coastal invasion and associated military activities also affected ordinary people who lived close to the beaches. Those who had not abandoned

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the coast were required to black out their windows at night so buildings would not be visible from the sea. Car and streetlights were also masked and street signs removed. But authorities complained, just as they did at Western Australia’s Cottesloe and Fremantle, that people were not taking the blackout seriously.21 Parts of Marine Drive along Bondi Beach were closed from 8 pm to 7 am for defence purposes, hindering motor access to the beach. But locals soon complained that military trucks were being raced along this beachfront road, which had been constructed a little over a decade earlier to provide a pleasant drive for weekend motorists.22 The transformation of the coastal landscape was conspicuous, but the beaches did not remain fortresses for long. On some of the more popular beaches the defence installations were removed as soon as they could be. In September 1943, less than two years after troops had laboured over the barbed wire installation, and buoyed by military and naval successes in the Pacific, the Australian Prime Minister, John Curtin, declared that ‘the danger of invasion has passed’. A month later the Chief of the General Staff of the Australian Military Forces advised state headquarters that ‘the threat of invasion has receded sufficiently to warrant the removal of barbed wire obstacles on beaches’.23 As battles raged on in the Pacific, the government was keen to restore a sense of normality to the nation’s beaches and beach culture. The coastal battalions quickly retreated. They removed most of the defence works but sometimes neglected to fill in trenches or to remove barbed wire and iron stakes as they left. The task of returning coastal properties and the nearby beaches to their ‘pre-war condition’ was considerable. Between Ben Buckler and Bronte in the eastern suburbs lay more than three and a half kilometres of wiring, resting on some 6000 iron stakes and pins embedded in rocks, sand, seawalls and concrete. At Tamarama Beach, the military authorities removed nearly 80 metres of irons and wire, 279 sleepers and more than 250 cubic metres of ballast, and reconstructed two flights of stairs. They removed all material from the gun pits at Bondi Beach and filled them with sand from disused sandbags or from the beach. Countless holes from the irons required filling in, paths were

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rebuilt, drains required repairing and grassy areas had to be cleaned up and topdressed. This process was repeated along the coast at the beaches of Cronulla, Maroubra and Manly. At Bronte, 5000 square feet (close to 500 square metres) of the park had to be replanted and shelter sheds repaired where a factory site and anti-aircraft searchlight post had stood for more than two years.24 Despite the challenges, long before the war officially ended many of Sydney’s beaches had returned to ‘normal’, visually at least. Some coastal batteries were still manned, although at reduced capacities, their soldiers released to serve in more critical areas and replaced by personnel from the AWAS or the Voluntary Defence Corps. Parts of Sydney’s coast would continue to be manned by artillery until 1962, when Australian coastal units were eventually abandoned as new military technologies changed the nature of potential future enemy attacks.25

The beaches in wartime

Joyce White (nee Curtin) was celebrating her 19th birthday as the soldiers were fortifying the coast. She lived at Maroubra with her parents Alice and Daniel (a future federal Labor politician), and her cousin Nancy Gairns, who was about two years older. Throughout the war, Joyce and Nancy continued to spend their days at Maroubra Beach and their nights

dancing at the surf club, the Trocadero or any number of other dance halls around Sydney. Their family was among the many who did not abandon the coast and who continued to live their lives as normally as possible while the military figures scrambled around them to defend their city. For many coastal residents, and regular beachgoers who remained in Sydney like the Curtins, the war did not prohibit summer beach activities. Newspapers continued to report large crowds at the beaches throughout the war. On Christmas Day 1942 the Sydney Morning Herald reported that surf lifesavers rescued swimmers from heavy surf at Coogee, Manly and Maroubra

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beaches. The lines and coils of barbed wire that extended across so many of Sydney’s beaches were designed to be impenetrable to invading forces and, by implication, could be reasonably expected to prevent beachgoers from accessing the surf. But Sydneysiders continued to go the beach and many enjoyed the surf even when the beaches were wired. Alan Alva Collins, a young boy living at Bondi in the early 1940s was among those who evaded the wire, later recalling that ‘hardly had the army’s sappers gone than we had found a path through the wire, which zigzagged until we could reach the rolling surf’. So many beachgoers were trying to navigate the barbed wire at Bondi that local surf lifesavers spent much of their time tending to cuts and bruises from the defences and the Waverley Council attempted to have the barbed wire reconfigured to allow for greater access to the beach.26 At nearby Bronte, too, locals recall that the barbed wire deterred many beachgoers but that locals knew how to get through to the surf. At Manly, gaps in the barbed wire enabled surfers to access certain parts of the beach, or sometimes the barbed wire was trampled or flattened specifically to allow people through. But not everyone got through. At Cronulla, the Cecil Café and Ballroom’s owner blamed the barbed wire, which ran along the promenade for ten weeks in mid-1942, for preventing people from entering his business overlooking the beach.27 Going to the beach may have remained a regular practice among local residents but there were fewer bodies on the beach and fewer surf lifesavers to watch over them. As they had during World War I, a large proportion of active surf lifesavers had enlisted. A number of Sydney clubs lost around 100 active members each to overseas service, including North Steyne where 104 men, representing 98 per cent of active members, enlisted. The President of the Surf Life Saving Association of Australia, Adrian Curlewis counted 141 active surf lifesavers alongside him at the Changi prison camp in Singapore. Warriewood SLSC was one of the few Sydney clubs forced to close entirely due to lack of numbers: most of Sydney’s surf lifesaving clubs continued to operate, with younger members taking on executive roles and patrolling in smaller numbers,

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An idyllic moment in the midst of wartime as Joyce Curtin and Reg White enjoy the beach at Maroubra around 1943. The beach was a haven for those who stayed in or came to Sydney, offering momentary escape from the realities of war.

or reducing patrol hours. The national surf lifesaving championships were cancelled for several years in the middle of the war, but inter-club carnivals continued to attract crowds, some raising funds for war-related charities. The large numbers of enlistments by surf lifesavers and other healthy young beachgoers also eroded the revenues of coastal businesses. Financial losses were compounded by an end to night swimming due to the ban on lighting. The Waverley Council blamed these factors for financial losses incurred at the Bondi Baths from 1940 onwards, culminating in a loss of £753 in 1942 alone (equivalent to more than $50 000 in 2013).28 The nearby Bronte Baths, as well as ocean baths in the Warringah and Sutherland shires also lost revenue

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during the early 1940s due to the abolition of night lighting and therefore night swimming.29 But the war brought a new group of people to Sydney’s beaches. During the later years of the war, almost one million US servicemen passed through Australian cities and many of those who visited Sydney crowded onto Bondi, Manly and other beaches while on rest and recuperation leave. They spent their days on the sand and nights at dances held in local surf clubs and dance halls. The dance halls and movie theatres elsewhere were closed on Sundays, much to the consternation of American authorities, but that made the beaches especially attractive. When Guinea and her ex-boyfriend Kim, characters in Dymphna Cusack and Florence James’ war-time novel Come in Spinner, visited Bondi Beach on Eight Hour Day, the beach was swarming with a holiday crowd made up largely of US servicemen who serenaded the young, svelte Guinea with ‘an admiring chorus of wolf calls and whistling’.30 In Sydney, the beach was still the place to be. The beaches were promoted in guidebooks published specifically for visiting servicemen and women, a wartime version of tourist guides. The US military authorities and support services sought to provide entertainment and services at places like Bondi and Manly, where US servicemen were already spending their spare time. In January 1944 the US Red Cross opened the Bondi Esplanade Club, which promised to hold dances every night of the week except Sunday, as a recreation centre for troops on leave. One month later the US army opened a prophylactic dispensary in a vacant shop on Bondi’s Campbell Parade, next door to the primary school that had been home to the headquarters of a local battalion just one year earlier. This was at least the third local location selected for the dispensary, after a shopfront in Hall Street and after the Bondi SBLSC had refused permission for the club’s ambulance room to be used for the purpose. But the dispensary only operated from the shop for six weeks. Although the site had been specially selected by US Army medical personnel and representatives of the Waverley Council for its discreet location and accessibility, complaints by local religious ministers persuaded the government

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and council to find a more suitable site, away from primary school tuckshops and further from the beach. 31 Across Australia, newspapers reported violence and brawls between American and Australian men, and many condemned the visitors for their seduction of young Australian women.32 But for young children living by the beach in the early 1940s the influx of US servicemen on R&R leave was an exciting part of the later war years. They were a novelty, often polite, and shared chewing gum and rations with local children. Joyce Curtin was not allowed to go near the ‘Yanks’, and was more interested in ballroom dancing with Australian men than trying the new dance styles the Americans brought to the dance halls. Her cousin Nancy, however, married Troy, an American soldier, and moved to Alabama with him after the war, one of the thousands of Australian war brides who went to the United States with their new husbands in the mid-1940s.33 The apparent invasion of the beaches by American and other visiting servicemen and women was a boon to the fading fortunes of coastal businesses. But for many locals and beachgoers, whether they witnessed violence or enjoyed the novelty of the accents, their presence was just another chapter in the wartime occupation of the city’s beaches.

Dismantling the defences

On the rocky southern shore of Bondi Beach, close to the path that winds its way from the beach past the famous Bondi Icebergs pool and around the rocks and headland to the beaches further south, two small pieces of rusted metal protrude from a rock. Rising less than a metre, they are the remains of stakes that were sheared off rather than removed completely once they

were no longer of use. Some people believe that these small pieces of metal are remnants of the stakes that had supported the barbed wire fences that stretched along Sydney’s coast during World War II, although it is difficult to be certain.

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For some time after the war, physical evidence of the military activities that had briefly scarred the Sydney coastline remained scattered along the coast. In some places, parts of the infrastructure that had been removed or damaged were rebuilt in the later years of the war, returning the beaches to their former state as the city’s summer playgrounds before the war was over. But in 1946, three years after their removal had been permitted, Freshwater Beach was still covered in barbed wire and iron stakes. The Bronte band rotunda was never rebuilt, nor were the groynes on Bondi Beach, upon whose stump the lifeguard station made famous by the television show Bondi Rescue now sits. At Bronte, where most of the barbed wire that had stretched across the sand was removed, small parts remained concealed in the sand for several years, occasionally cutting the feet of unsuspecting beachgoers.34 The effects of the military invasion of private homes and properties also took some time to be resolved. Mrs Grieve was paid a small amount of compensation for the damage inflicted on her property at Whale Beach and military tradesmen from a local unit also made some repairs. Many other coastal homeowners whose properties were occupied by the military were also successful in their claims for compensation, an acknowledgment by the military authorities that the defence of the city’s coastline had inconvenienced, if not created financial burdens for, many coastal landowners. However, remnants of the wartime defences on private property were not always easily erased. Growing up on the edge of the Collaroy plateau in a brand new house in the 1950s, Russell Hardy always wondered who had cut a long thick groove across the face of a huge rock in his backyard, and for what purpose. He always suspected it might be related to the bits of barbed wire he and his family sometimes found in the garden, but never knew the house he lived in all his life had been built on the edge of the site of a dummy radar station, in a property neighbouring those owned by Arthur Franklin and the elderly Jessie Green in the early 1940s. Regardless of any inconvenience it may have caused, few had questioned the need for the physical transformation inflicted on Sydney’s beaches during

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the early 1940s. In the first half of 1942, Sydney’s coastal residents and homeowners believed there was a real and significant threat of invasion, and did what was required to assist in the city’s defence. Sydney’s coastal landscape had been altered to suit an entirely new purpose, one that seemed at odds with the recreational culture that had emerged on the beaches over the past century. But the military defence works fitted neatly in the history of a space that was constantly being reshaped according to particular demands and political and commercial pressures. Parts of the Sydney coast have been used for sand- and mineral-mining, garbage dumps, sewage and storm-water disposal and, more recently, a salination plant. World War II military defences were just another way in which the beaches and coast were used and modified for a particular purpose. A large part of the army’s work in transforming the beaches into military defence zones had involved dismantling structures which had been put in place to serve particular purposes, whether it was stairs to connect promenades with sand; tunnels and bridges to ferry beachgoers under and over roads; or amenity buildings to attract and cater to recreational beachgoers. These buildings and structures might themselves have been seen as an invasion onto ‘natural’ coastal space in another period or another context. In some ways, the army inadvertently went some way towards temporarily returning the beaches to something closer to their natural state; removing earlier coastal modifications in the process of creating their own. Whether they could have held off an invasion will never be known. But they did little to deter Sydney’s most determined beachgoers.

Fr o m t h e war to the waves

As the soldiers returned home to Australia after the war, they began to rebuild their lives. Some rejoined surf lifesaving clubs and demanded authority as senior members. Wanda Surf Life Saving Club at Cronulla was formed in 1946 by a group of returned servicemen who adopted the colours of the army (red), air

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force (light blue) and navy (blue) as the club’s colours. In many clubs, there was a clear generational demarcation between the returned soldiers and those who had been too young to serve, such as Bronte where junior club members ‘lived in fear’ of the seniors, always careful to address them as ‘Sir’. Other Sydney clubs, having learnt from the difficulties experienced by returned soldiers after World War I, implemented programs that were designed to help ease the men back into club life. The Bondi SBLSC created a ‘Discharged Servicemen’s Committee’ whose job it was to help returned soldiers, many of whom didn’t recognise the young men now running the club, maintain their connection to the club. It elected two members to be ‘official entertainers’, and promised they would always try and have someone ready to greet them in the left-hand corner of the public bar at the nearby Astra Hotel, ‘where Sylvia serves’.35 In 1945, Palm Beach SLSC purchased ‘Ortona’, a house reserved specifically for the repatriation and recuperation of returned servicemen. The house played an important role in providing the men with a place where they could recover from the emotional and physical scars of war in the company of others with similar experiences, and give them the chance of ‘recapturing a youth which the war had stolen’.36 Most surf lifesaving clubs did not have the resources or connections enjoyed by members of the Palm Beach SLSC however. Elsewhere many returned servicemen remained with their clubs for only a short period after the war. For some returned servicemen, the regimentation and discipline of surf lifesaving clubs was too much to cope with after their experiences of being in the military. Others married and moved away from the beaches to start their families in new inland suburbs where housing was more affordable.37 In the following decades, their children would grow into a new generation of young men and women who would make the beaches their own. They would adopt new fashions, stomp to surf music, and some would challenge the surf lifesaving movement’s authority over Sydney’s waves. Sydney’s beach culture would continue to evolve and the beaches would be shaped and reshaped accordingly.

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Over time, Cronulla would become better known for Puberty Blues and race riots than for the searchlight personnel who had walked the esplanade; the sands of Bondi Beach, which had supported coils of barbed wire, would host 50 000 people watching entertainer Bob Dyer in 1946, the tens of thousands who came to catch a glimpse of Queen Elizabeth in 1954, and the 200 000 who protested against sewage pollution in 1989. Once it was repaired, Mrs Grieve probably continued to hold lavish house parties at her Whale Beach home, but Mrs Galvin’s home, Shipton, on Ocean Street Narrabeen, which had briefly been home to members of the 7th garrison battalion, would be demolished to make way for a controversial high-rise apartment building. That building would spark heated debate in the mid-1960s about whether the northern beaches should resemble the skyline of the Gold Coast.

For a fleeting moment, two apparently contrasting uses of Sydney’s ocean beaches that had quietly co-existed for 150 years – recreation and defence – dominated the city’s beachscape and the minds of coastal residents and beachgoers. The beaches simultaneously symbolised and provided an escape from the war that had gripped the city. By the mid-1940s, the waves of war, which had washed over the beaches, had largely receded. But for many Sydney residents, the memories and the physical markers of this brief coastal invasion were never fully erased.

A military invasion

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7 Young and restless In 1954, nearly a decade after World War II had ended and one year after her coronation, Queen Elizabeth II became the first, and so far only, reigning British monarch to visit Australia.

Accompanied by her husband Prince Philip, the 27-year-old Queen spent eight weeks in Australia where she attended up to five engagements per day as part of her exhaustive six-month post-coronation tour of the Commonwealth. Official estimates claimed that more than one million people gathered at Farm Cove to greet the Queen on her arrival in Australia, and it was estimated that between six and seven million Australians would catch a glimpse of her during the following weeks. The tour was, according to historian Jane Connors, ‘the last great spectacle of the pre-television era’.1 On the afternoon of Saturday 6 February, between a visit to Randwick Racecourse and her attendance at a Royal Gala Concert that evening at the Tivoli Theatre, the Queen travelled to Bondi Beach to watch a surf lifesaving

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carnival held in her honour. Witnesses reported that the royal couple showed a keen interest in the carnival, leaning forward in their seats and ‘gasping as surf boats bucked into towering breakers’. Newspapers, fuelling the royal hysteria, reported they were so ‘thrilled’ by the spectacle that they stayed at Bondi Beach 45 minutes longer than scheduled. Older members of the surf lifesaving fraternity still beam at the mention of the event, and some of those who formed an honour guard were 50 years later recalling the rare honour of meeting the Queen in bare feet. More than 8000 people paid for a seat in the grandstands overlooking the beach. Tens of thousands more lined the route to the beach and watched the carnival, and monarch, from nearby headlands.2 The crowds did not come to Bondi that day for the beach but to catch a glimpse of its most famous visitor. Nonetheless, the royal surf carnival was an illustrious moment in Sydney’s beach history. It confirmed and strengthened Bondi’s claim to international fame, which had been slowly gaining strength since the pavilion had been constructed 25 years earlier and had spread to North America through the stories of returned American soldiers in the second The Royal Tour would not be complete without a visit to the iconic Bondi Beach. In 1954 Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh attended an international surf carnival held at Bondi in their honour. Thousands travelled to the beach to glimpse their new monarch.

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half of the 1940s. It also reinforced the Surf Life Saving Association’s belief in the national and international significance of its own activities. The surf lifesaving movement would continue to benefit from broad popular appeal in the following decades. But the idea of being a surf lifesaver was about to lose its lustre for a new generation of boys and men. A decade after the Royal Surf Carnival, around 65 000 people congregated at Manly Beach to witness the first world surfing championships. Such an event and the crowd it drew would have been unimaginable in 1954. To many Australians, the appeal of surfing was still largely unknown and surfboard riders or ‘surfers’ remained subjects of suspicion on the fringes of society: dismissed as reckless and undisciplined, they were part of a broader problem of young people behaving badly. Attempts by local and state governments to control surfing – the equipment surfers used and where they could surf – not only reflected the authorities’ anxieties about out-of-control youth but were another attempt to protect an accepted mainstream beach culture from perceived threats. But the surfers fought back. If the surf lifesaver was the masculine face of the Australian beach in the inter-war period, by the 1960s he was starting to be challenged by the surfboard rider – metaphorically and physically – in a battle over Sydney’s waves. A major cultural shift was taking place on the sands of Sydney.

Surfing cultures

The small figure of the Hawaiian Olympic swimming champion, Duke Kahanamoku, looms large over the history of surfing in Australia. A statue of Kahanamoku at Freshwater Beach commemorates the moment when he is said to have introduced surfboard riding to Australia during a swimmingpromotion tour in 1914. However while the publicity

afforded to his surfing display did contribute substantially to the popularisation and promotion of the sport in Australia, contrary to popular belief he did not

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introduce surfing. Sydney’s keenest surf swimmers were already riding wooden boards in the surf, some of them brought back from Hawaii by tourists such as the first president of the Surf Bathers’ Association of NSW, Charles Paterson. In 1910 the Warringah Council was so concerned by the dangers surfboards posed to other swimmers it banned them from Freshwater Beach, although it is not clear how the boards were being used. Surf bathers at Freshwater, probably campers, ignored the ban and continued to use boards. In 1912, two years before Kahanamoku’s visit, surfer Tommy Walker attracted media attention for riding a surfboard both upright and standing on his head in front of a crowd of fascinated onlookers, in the first known account of what was considered ‘Hawaiian style’ surfing in the Australian surf.3 Boosted by the publicity associated with Kahanamoku’s visit, surfing grew in popularity in the following decades, particularly among surf lifesavers who stored the long, heavy boards in clubhouses on the beach. They also considered them useful as rescue equipment. In 1956, visiting American and Hawaiian lifeguards introduced the shorter, lighter and more manoeuvrable balsa wood Malibu boards to Australia. Locals learnt how to make the new boards and they proliferated on the beaches, transforming surfing cultures. The new boards allowed surfers to tackle new surf breaks and develop new surfing styles. A growth in car ownership over the following decade enabled surfers to travel to the beach with their boards, leading to an influx of surfboard riders along the Sydney coast, many of whom, for the first time, were not members of surf lifesaving clubs. Surfboard riders also began to travel beyond the cities searching for bigger and better waves, discovering breaks like Byron Bay and Angourie on the NSW north coast, and in Victoria, Bells Beach where nearby Torquay became a surfing town. The Surf Life Saving Association of Australia (SLSAA), which had brought the American and Hawaiian lifeguards to Australian shores, had unleashed a new generation of surfers – a force they were powerless to control. Two distinct groups of primarily young men with competing interests in the surf – surf lifesavers and surfers – now co-existed on the Sydney coast.4

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As surfing grew in popularity during the early 1960s it became closely associated with a subculture that, defined through music and film, had a broad appeal among teenagers and young adults. American surf music by bands like the Beach Boys and surfing films such as Gidget (1959), Beach Party (1963) and Muscle Beach Party (1964), which largely came out of California, captured and contributed to the mood of the period. They enjoyed considerable success in Australia, but the home-grown surfing culture had its own unique elements and was gaining international fame. North Narrabeen, which by the 1960s was well known in Sydney for its superior surf break, was the only non-American spot (and one of only two outside California, the other being in Hawaii) to feature in the Beach Boys’ 1963 hit ‘Surfin’ USA’. For a brief period at the height of the surf craze young men and women ‘stomped’ to Australia’s own surf rock music. In 1963, the Sydney band The Atlantics had a number one hit in the Australian charts with the instrumental ‘Bombora’, The Denvermen’s ‘Surfside’ also reached number one and 14-year old singer Little Pattie’s debut single ‘He’s My Blonde Headed, Stompie Wompie, Real Gone Surfer Boy’/‘Stompin’ at Maroubra’ reached number two in the Sydney charts. Little Pattie’s ‘Stompin’ at Maroubra’ may have implied stomping was a Sydney craze, but the new dancing style was popular around the country. This new surf culture was bigger than the beach. Through surf music and films, non-surfers identified with a youth culture that glorified the beach, the surf and the freedom of youth itself. Even as relationships between surfers and surf lifesavers became fractured in the mid-1960s, surf lifesavers were among those who identified most keenly with surf music and films and who stomped in surf lifesaving clubs, town halls, dance halls and other venues across the country. One stomp alone brought 20 000 local teenagers to the Sydney showgrounds. In December 1963, a stomp on the far south coast of New South Wales – a fund-raising event for the Tathra Surf Life Saving Club – brought down part of the ceiling of the newly constructed Bega Town Hall, outraging the local authorities who preferred to blame wayward youth for the damage rather than architectural deficiencies.5 The ‘surfie’ teenager had arrived.

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Rockers and surfies

It is not surprising some were quick to blame the Bega stompers. Many older people already had misgivings about the ‘youth’, and in the early 1960s ‘surfies’ were emerging as a particularly suspect group of young people. The creation of the independent ‘teenager’ in the 1950s, captured so astutely by author Colin MacInnes in Absolute Beginners, sparked fears of juve-

nile delinquency and caused moral panic in Australia, North America, Britain and elsewhere. Australian anxieties in the 1950s about young working-class rock ’n’ roll fans – called ‘bodgies’ and ‘widgies’ – were extended in the 1960s to surfers. They were characterised in the media as an aggressive group who challenged the authority of surf lifesavers on the beach and terrorised swimmers who inadvertently found they were sharing a wave.6 Fights between ‘rockers’ and ‘surfies’ on Sydney beaches exacerbated public fears and drew new attention to this youth subculture. Tension briefly flared in early 1963. Rockers reportedly ‘roamed Sydney’s beaches assaulting surfers’ and, in early March 1963, lured to Manly by a midnight double movie bill of Blackboard Jungle and Jailhouse Rock, ‘rival gangs of garishly dressed teenagers’ reportedly brawled on the waterfront. The Sydney media, keen to exploit anxieties about juvenile delinquency and the bad influence both rock music and surfing inflicted on young people, pounced on the story, publishing headlines like ‘war on beaches’ and ‘what can we do about the hoodlums?’7 The Sydney newspaper the Daily Mirror gave the matter considerable attention in sensational style, printing tips for identifying ‘surfies’ and ‘rockers’: A Surfie is less a sand and surf lover than someone who is antiRocker – a girl with long bleached hair, a boy with short bleached hair. A Rocker is not only anti-Surfie, but generally anti-social – a girl with a head like a lacquered bird’s nest set on a death-mask, a boy in jeans and leather jacket with a coiffure contrived to look like a mopful of sump oil.8

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Politicians were particularly concerned about this new threat to peace on the beach and the government increased police patrols of beaches and streets. The NSW Premier Robert Heffron was quoted saying that ‘youth having its fling is all right in its place, but not on our public beaches’. The Liberal member for Collaroy and future NSW Premier, Robin ‘Bob’ Askin, voiced concerns that ‘the law-abiding people of a number of leading beach resorts are being greatly disturbed by louts who call themselves Rockers and Surfies’. Some politicians became fearful that the problem was unique to Australia, although one MP, Robert McCartney, cited the Broadway musical and 1961 film West Side Story as reassuring evidence that similar gang-related violence existed in America – despite its fictional nature.9 Of course this type of violence also occurred away from the beaches and Sydney’s youth were just as likely to ‘hang out’ at shopping centres, cinemas, skating rinks, railway stations and a myriad of other public places. Nor was it unique to Sydney or even Australia, as McCartney suggested. This was a local and slightly earlier version of the battles between English ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’, which captivated that nation during the mid-1960s. But there were important differences. Whereas the clashes on the British seaside were a collision of working-class youth subcultures, those in Sydney were more class-based. And while the British seaside was an incidental location for violence that reflected a place where teenagers could escape the confines of their homes, in Sydney the conflict was partly fuelled by surfers marking out beaches as their territory. Here, freedom from parental authority on the beach combined with surfers’ territorialism to create an explosive cocktail.10 From a political perspective, the sacred space of the Australian beach had been violated. The fights between the rockers and surfies in Sydney, and between the mods and rockers in England the following year, shared one important characteristic, however: they were both seized on by local media keen on exploiting the sensitivities and anxieties of the general public about juvenile delinquency and youth ‘gang’ violence. Yet despite the sensational accounts of beachfront brawls and random violence in Sydney newspapers and on the floor of parliament,

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only a minority of young people were involved in the altercations. Many of the reported episodes were only minor incidents. Like the reports of violence among rock ‘n’ roll fans in the 1950s, some episodes were even provoked by heavy-handed policing and by overblown media attention.11 Thirty-six young people were arrested during the Premier’s ‘police blitz’ on the beaches on 9 and 10 March 1963, but these kids were not the violent gangs reported in the press. They were teenagers and young adults who were arrested primarily for ‘offensive behaviour and indecent language’ after being asked by police to move on from street corners, milk bars and beaches. One Cronulla ‘youth’, who was among a large group of teenagers told to move on, was fined £5 and put on a good behaviour bond for jabbing a detective in the chest and saying ‘I don’t go nowhere, nohow’. Police at Manly arrested one young man for taking a newsagent’s papers to make a fire on the beach and another for carrying an unlicensed antique pistol. These arrests were hardly provoked by out-of-control gang violence. As the Police Commissioner saw it, they were ‘lion cubs at play’. The closest the police could find to an impending brawl that weekend, at the beachside suburb of Corrimal south of Sydney, was resolved when an officer ‘took off his coat, stepped between the rival gangs and advised them to go home. They went’. Nonetheless, the negative stereotypes of surfers as aggressive youth continued to dominate public perceptions. Young men in surf lifesaving clubs, like other sporting groups, had always pushed the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. But clubs appeared to be disciplined environments, so their reputation remained largely intact. The reputation of surfers, however, had been marred.12

Fighting over waves

The scrutiny of anti-social ‘youth’ behaviour also extended to the activities of board riders in the surf. They were accused not just of accidentally injuring swimmers with stray boards, but of deliberately ‘playing chicken’ with ‘bathers as their targets’.

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Children ride a wave on inflatable surfoplanes. These surfoplanes were so popular they could be hired at the beach, giving those who did not have a surfboard the chance to experience the thrill of the surf.

Other beachgoers, particularly surf lifesavers, called for discipline and control. This was not the first time the coastal councils had struggled to accommodate competing users of the surf. In the mid-1930s fishermen at North Bondi had complained to the council that swimmers and surfers were getting in their way. Complaints by swimmers also prompted the Waverley Council to briefly consider setting aside a special area on the beach for rubber (inflatable)

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surf-o-planes.13 Teenagers and young adults engaging in activities that made their parents uncomfortable was not something new, especially at the beach. But this competition for surf was new, and it was branded as deliberately and unnecessarily violent. As the numbers of board riders in the surf grew, they came into conflict with each other and occasionally with swimmers who crossed their paths. This was particularly the case with newer surfers who were still learning the skill. The coastal councils attempted to segregate swimmers and surfers, setting apart areas for surfboards in the surf and banning board riding in bathing areas. But their collaboration with surf lifesavers who, as the accepted authority on the beach they charged with policing the new rules, aggravated surfers. In 1960 when coastal councils decided to establish a surfboard registration scheme they exempted surf lifesavers from paying the five-shilling annual surfboard licence, further fuelling tension between the two groups. The special treatment for surfboard-riding surf lifesavers seemed particularly unfair to those board riders who recognised that the aggressive, misogynistic, alcohol-fuelled and occasional criminal behaviour of some young surf lifesavers was not so different from their own negatively portrayed cultures. Many surf lifesavers, in turn, resented the new challenges to their authority on the beach by predominantly young men who, a generation ago, would probably have been lifesavers themselves.14 In some places, such as Palm Beach, the simmering tensions turned to physical violence between the two groups. Frustrated by council attempts to curb their behaviour, the surfboard riders formed clubs and created a national association, the Australian Surfriders Association (ASA), to represent their collective interests, improve relationships with councils and gain legitimacy for their presence in the surf – just as the first surf lifesavers had over half a century earlier. The North Narrabeen Boardriders Club, formed in July 1964, was among the first Sydney clubs. In a nod to the importance of public relations its aims included ‘closer liaison with the Warringah Shire Council’ and ‘assisting with the rescue work of the North Narrabeen SLSC when necessary’.15 But the surfers’ efforts to contribute to the

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management of their sport did little to appease councils and lifesavers intent on demonising surfers. In 1964 the first official world surfing championships at Manly drew large crowds to the beach. It attracted major sponsors keen to benefit from international television coverage. The event is commemorated by surfing historians as the turning point for the sport of surfing – when surfing competition became more organised and surfers and surf culture began to be accepted by mainstream Australian audiences. However, although the championships were held with the full support of – and funding assistance from – the Manly Council, relationships between surfboard riders, surf lifesavers and coastal councils along the Sydney coast remained tense. In 1966 the Warringah Council took the most drastic step yet to control board riders. Citing growing complaints about board riders and the injuries some surfboards inflicted on swimmers, it banned surfboards from Harbord Australian ‘Midget’ Farrelly becomes the first World Surfing Champion, at Manly Beach in 1964. Seen here shaking the hand of a competitor, Farrelly won the title in front of huge crowds.

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Beach (now Freshwater) and from ‘bathing only’ areas of the remaining beaches between South Curl Curl and Palm Beach. Surfers protested the ban. In a sign of their growing importance as a distinct consumer group the surfers were supported by local businesses who were concerned about loss of income if beaches were closed to board riders.16 Soon, measures to control board riders in the surf were being discussed in parliament. The catalyst was the injury of a teenage girl, Ronnette Gibson, by a surfboard while swimming at North Cronulla Beach. The Leader of the Government in the upper house, Arthur Bridges, declared that ‘the utmost rigour of the law should be used against board riders who irresponsibly used their boards in areas restricted for [swimmers]’. Two years later, in 1968, 15-year-old Lyle Fitzpatrick was tragically killed by his own stray surfboard at Redhead south of Newcastle, after the ‘sharp fibreglass fin’ hit him on the base of the spine. The event reverberated along the Sydney coast, where surfers were criticised for riding ‘dangerous’ boards. Politicians and civic authorities were particularly critical of ‘pintail’ boards, which had a sharper tail than earlier designs. Surfers insisted the new, lighter boards were safer than any earlier models. But despite their protests, in January 1969 Warringah Council banned surfboards with sharp fins protruding beyond the stern. The Sutherland Council also segregated dangerous boards from other surfers and bathers, acting, against surfers’ wishes, to protect them from themselves.17 The Waverley and Randwick Councils were less concerned, expressing faith in existing measures to separate boardriders from swimmers in the surf. For close to a decade, surfers had fought attempts to control and monitor their activities in the surf – moves that had been driven by suspicions about their respectability as a distinct grouping of young people and by fears of the dangers they posed. They resented the ongoing heavy-handedness of coastal councils and defended their right to enjoy themselves at the beach. But by the end of the 1960s, attitudes were beginning to soften. In response to the Warringah Council’s ban a Sydney newspaper chastised the coastal councils for what it saw as their unfounded fear of pintail boards:

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Manly surfboard riders share the waves with swimmers and other board riders in the crowded surf. By the mid-1960s, when this photo was taken, Sydney’s coastal councils were starting to segregate board riders from swimmers to create safer surfing conditions.

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Councils and surf clubs and beach inspectors tend to frown on board riders because they identify them vaguely with larrikins and long-hairs and other notionally anti-social elements. The fact is that boards are becoming more and more popular; in a few years they may well be standard equipment for every young surfer.18

As the Waverley and Randwick Council’s support suggested, the new breed of surfers were starting to become a ‘normal’ presence on the beach. Their violent associations from earlier in the 1960s were also starting to fade, and surf bathers were becoming more used to sharing their beaches with board riders. During the following decade the relationship between surfers and surf lifesavers also became less volatile, helped by the introduction of leg ropes that contained stray surfboards, and motorised inflatable rescue boats that ‘helped to remove the domineering visual presence of lifesavers on the beach’. The ASA also provided a respectable face for surfing, assisting in the gradual acceptance of surfers’ presence in the surf.19 Yet while surfboard riders may have outgrown their reputation for threatening the peace of the beach for ordinary beachgoers, amongst each other, competition for the waves remained fierce.

Defending local rights

In early 1962, 17-year-old Peter Wincote and a friend arrived at North Narrabeen Beach with a couple of surfboards in their FC Holden. Having recently moved to Sydney from Port Macquarie on the mid-north coast, Peter had some surfing experience and he occasionally stayed with family at North Narrabeen, close to the beach. Now coming from

working-class Gladesville in Sydney’s north-west, Peter and his friends were not typical of the northern beaches board riders of the early 1960s. They were instantly dismissed as ‘outsiders’ and ‘westies’: the locals did not welcome them to ‘their’ beach. One of the local surfers later recalled that ‘we used to give them heaps of abuse; call them kooks (a slang term for inexperienced surfers),

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run over them in the surf, rub soap on their boards’. But they gave as good as they got. Eventually, having proven themselves in and out of the surf, the boys from Gladesville became mates with the locals and when the North Narrabeen Boardriders Club was formed two years later, 9 of the 103 foundation members were from Gladesville – the club’s only members from outside the northern beaches. The local board riders had not adjusted their outlook to include people who lived in inland suburbs, or ‘westies’, rather the boys from Gladesville had proven themselves worthy of joining the local crew.20 Across Sydney, surfers perceived and defended exclusive rights to particular surf breaks. Locals were particularly territorial and many remained reluctant to share ‘their’ waves with outsiders in increasingly crowded surf. North Narrabeen surfers derided outsiders as ‘sewerage people from outer areas’. One visiting surfer complained to the council he had been called an ‘Eastern Slobovian Yak-herder’.21 Pro-surfer Mark Warren suggested in 1970 that the At Dee Why in 1962, these two surfboard riders contemplate the intimidating surf breaking close to shore. During the 1960s a new generation of surfers was colonising Sydney’s beaches.

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problem was particularly acute at North Narrabeen because the fame of the surf break drew large numbers of surfers to the beach, who often ‘try to … cut in on a good wave’. But he also admitted with some sympathy that ‘for an outsider it’s rough. Everyone gives them a hard time’. But the defence of a local wave was not limited to North Narrabeen. As the best breaks became more crowded surfers along Sydney’s coast protected ‘their’ breaks against outsiders, with violence if necessary. ‘Kooks’ were especially vulnerable. The territorialism of Maroubra’s ‘Bra Boys’, a group of local surfers notorious for violently protecting ‘their’ surf breaks (one of which is ominously named ‘Ours’) from outsiders is perhaps the best known recent expression of the physical defence of local ‘rights’ to the beach. The cultural studies scholar Clifton Evers encountered the Bra Boys during a surfing trip to Maroubra and later recalled that after inadvertently disrespecting a local by taking a wave he had wanted, he had earned back some ‘respect’ by demonstrating his ability on a subsequent wave. According to Evers, the complex rules dictating surfing manoeuvrings and encounters cannot be taught to new surfers but must be learnt at the ‘ever present threat of physical pain’. At Maroubra, ‘going surfing and dealing with respect … is a moving negotiation, not some hard and fast rule’.22 Similar rules, negotiations and threats of violence dictate behaviour at surf breaks across the world, in a continuation of the surfing tribalism or ‘localism’ that was being negotiated and fought out on the beaches of Sydney and elsewhere in the 1960s and ’70s.23 Surfers and surf lifesavers may have had their own differences, but they shared an aversion to outsiders. At Bronte, members of the surf lifesaving club labelled some young beachgoers ‘Leichhardt sandthrowers’, not understanding why they would come to the beach and not swim. Other ‘clubbies’ were slow to accept the new and different ways that some groups were starting to use Sydney’s beaches too. Partly, they were defending ‘their’ beach from ‘outsiders’, but they were also reinforcing a pre-defined set of rules – codified in the opening decade of the 20th century – about how people were expected to act at the beach. Particular beach users unknowingly marked themselves as

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‘outsiders’ through their behaviour or appearance, no doubt not realising that outsiders were not always welcome on Sydney’s beaches. Joining the club however, bought membership into the local culture. Many surf lifesaving clubs had strong links with particular suburban areas or swimming clubs: young men from the western suburbs around Parramatta joined North Steyne SLSC in the 1940s and ‘50s; members of the Pyrmont swimming club joined North Narrabeen SLSC and those from the Balmain swimming club joined Freshwater SLSC, sleeping in bunks in the club rooms or storage sheds at weekends.24 In 1972 a young Dunghutti Aboriginal man, Paul Burman, from Paddington in Sydney’s eastern suburbs joined Bondi SBLSC with a friend whose family had migrated from eastern Europe. They may not have fitted the ‘Anglo’ mould that continued to dominate the surf lifesaving movement but, far from feeling like outsiders, the two men were made to feel welcome by other members of the club. They enjoyed participating in the sporting events associated with lifesaving, particularly rowing. Their ability to fit into the club culture, like that of the Gladesville boys at North Narrabeen, demonstrates the adaptability and occasional openness of the local tribalism of the surf – as long as rules were followed.25 The exclusivity of surfing culture also extended to gender relationships. Both surfboard riding and surf lifesaving were distinctly male domains; women played an uncertain role in the new surfing culture. In the 1960s, women who rode boards formed a minority among board riders, but they were generally accepted. Yet from about the 1970s, according to historian Douglas Booth, women surfers ‘found themselves victims of increased male hostility’. Certainly there were few female professional surfing role models for future world champion Pam Burridge as she surfed at Manly as a young girl in the 1970s. In 1980, at the age of 14 and having just won the first Australian Women’s Surfriders’ Association national

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championship, she advised girls to ‘be determined not to be put down by the guys’. In the 1980s, Layne Beachley was also distinctly aware of gender politics when she decided to graduate from ‘kiddies corner’ at the south end of Manly Beach to further north where the more established riders surfed. She later recalled that ‘there were some supportive guys, but some felt very threatened by a very tenacious, determined, blonde surfie chick’.26 As seven-time World Champion surfer, Beachley, like Burridge before her, has worked hard to build the profile of women’s surfing and make it easier for girls to hit the beach with a board. In 1980 the Surf Life Saving Association of Australia permitted women to join men on the beaches as active surf lifesavers for the first time, persuaded

Girls sit on the sand and watch boys surf: part of Sydney’s beach culture immortalised in Puberty Blues. Although some girls and women surfed, in the 1960s board riding was mostly the preserve of men.

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not by internal cultural shifts but by external political pressure. The ‘rampant masculinity’ and misogynistic cultures of many clubs remained a challenge for some time. Some of the more progressive clubs welcomed women from the start, but elsewhere Australia’s first female surf lifesavers battled institutional exclusion, harassment, verbal abuse and sexist taunts before they finally gained acceptance in the surf lifesaving movement. But equality remains evasive. In 2012, approximately 33 per cent of active surf lifesavers in Sydney clubs were female, some of whom continue to find it difficult to negotiate the highly masculinised culture.27 Yet not all women and girls wanted to be included in this particular brand of surf culture. Some despised surfers’ behaviour and detested the maledominated surfing and surf lifesaving cultures, especially their treatment of women and their blinding obsession with the surf. Caroline Lawrance, a young teenager visiting Newport Beach from Melbourne for summer holidays in 1970, recalls being far less impressed by her friend’s boyfriend’s Sandman panel van – an icon of male youth surfing cultures of the period – and all its associations, than were some of her friends.28 A decade later, Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey, two young women from the Sutherland Shire who had spent their teenage years on the Cronulla beaches, immortalised this perspective. Their book, Puberty Blues, later turned into a feature film and more recently a television serial, shed light on a surfing culture that glorified sex, sexual assault, drug use and teenage drinking, a misogynistic culture in which girls existed purely for sex and to watch their boys perform in the surf. It was Cronulla’s Greenhills gang that young Debbie and her best friend Sue at first longed to join and eventually rejected. According to the novel’s narrator, Debbie, teenage girls involved in this social group never ate in front of their boyfriends or went to the bathroom, suppressing human needs for fear of offending male sensibilities. Instead they spent their days at the beach, watching and supporting their surfer boyfriends: ‘off he went into the deep blue sea and there I sat on the hill … warming up the towel, folding his clothes into neat little piles, fetching the Chiko rolls and watching him chuck endless cut-backs’.29 Debbie and Sue’s final

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and controversial act of defiance against the Greenhills gang – to surf – reinforces the highly gendered nature of Sydney’s waves in the 1970s.

Beaches for everyone

During the 1960s and ’70s, surfers, surf lifesavers and surf girls (and to a lesser extent rockers) seemed to dominate public perceptions of ‘typical’ young beachgoers. But others were quietly using the beaches too. In the early 1960s, young nuns from convents across the eastern suburbs descended on McIvers’ Ladies Baths at Coogee, travelling to the beach with their

swimming costumes – furtively purchased and posted to the convent by their mothers – concealed beneath their habits. The sisters from one convent were driven to the beach by their electrician, telling disapproving elderly sisters, from a distinctly different generation, they were going on an ‘excursion’. One sister still recalls with a laugh the sight of the change room walls. With the habits and wimples of women from a number of different orders hanging from hooks along the wall, it looked as though the nuns themselves were keeping watch.30 North of the Harbour the young men in the catholic seminary at Manly – of which Australia’s 28th Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, is one of the most famous students – were completely restricted from going to the beach in the late 1950s. Living in the seminary perched high above Fairy Bower, with views across Manly Beach to the headlands of the northern beaches, it was ‘agony’ for Michael Hogan, a ‘teenage boy who loved to live in the water’ not to visit the beach, especially on weekends when he could hear the surfers and other beachgoers yelling and laughing. Even while training for their bronze medallions (surf lifesaving qualifications) as part of a seminary program to prepare priests for community engagement, the young men from the seminary were kept away from the ‘temptations’ of the ocean beach, training instead in the harbour pool on the other side of the peninsula. They swam in the surf at South Steyne only

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once, to pass the test. Surf lifesaving itself may have been viewed as worthwhile, but their ongoing presence on the beach, or involvement in other club activities, was considered inappropriate for future priests.31 For journalist and historian Gavin Souter writing in the late 1960s, Shirley Appleton, a young woman from Lalor Park in Sydney’s west was a typical Sydney beachgoer. She spent her summers on Bondi Beach with her lifesaver fiancé Barry and their friends. They went to parties and dances and talked about swimming costumes and lifesaving carnivals. But Souter’s description of a city for whose residents ‘surf and sand are never far from … consciousness’, where people spend their summer Saturday afternoons surfing ‘at Bondi and twenty other beaches’ or simply lying ‘in the sand in a half dream’, concealed the subtle cultural and physical changes that had occurred along the coast during the previous two decades.32 These changes were reflective of broader social and cultural changes that were being felt across Australia. The car was at the forefront of social change in the post-war period, and not just because of the proliferation of young men with cars and surfboards. With more families than ever before being able to afford cars in the 1950s, and with workers in New South Wales guaranteed at least two weeks’ paid annual leave from 1945, cars and roads ‘opened up the landscape to holidaymakers’ in the post-war decades. Around Australia, families left the cities each summer for beach and inland holidays, staying in caravans, motels, in weekender cottages or camping by their cars. They discovered new beaches along the way and transformed coastal towns from industrial centres – where the local economies had relied on the agriculture, timber, fishing, whaling, harbour-building and mining industries – to tourist destinations.33 In the process they inadvertently displaced Aboriginal people from some of their own seasonal beach camps. An increase in the number of suburban and municipal swimming pools also gave Sydney residents more options for cooling down; the beach was not the only place to be in summer. Cars also brought people to Sydney’s beaches and coastal councils struggled to expand the car-parking spaces they had fought to provide in the 1920s

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and ’30s. Civic leaders realised, just as Britain’s Blackpool local government did when it replaced the main train station with several large car-parking lots, that car parks were increasingly fundamental to attracting visitors to the beach. The councils were also mindful of the income they would make from parking fees.34 The first parking meters, an innovation imported from America, were installed

Cars huddle in the magnificent sand dunes behind Greenhills in an unconventional and secluded surfers’ car park in 1964. By the 1960s, car ownership was more common and surfboards were smaller and lighter so surfers could travel to more distant surf breaks.

in Melbourne in 1955 and appeared in Sydney around the same time. But the coastal councils differed in their parking philosophies. The Warringah Council charged parking fees in areas close to beaches, such as at Harbord, where it had acquired land for car parks. But neighbouring Manly Council acquired land to provide free off-street parking in the mid-1960s. One Warringah Councillor

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responded to criticism of its parking fees by saying that ‘those who don’t want to pay the parking fee can park their cars outside the Harbord area … and walk to the beach’. He saw the parking fees, which were waived for Warringah ratepayers, as a way of ensuring beach users from outside the shire contributed to maintenance and improvement costs. The coastal councils had been looking for ways to pass their expenses onto beachgoers from outside their municipal boundaries for half a century; in the new era of mass car-travel, parking fees that applied only to non-ratepayers offered a welcome, if not completely flawless, solution.35 Attitudes about dress and propriety were also continuing to shift in the post-war period. In 1945, before the ‘bikini’ even had a name, women began to venture onto some Sydney beaches wearing brief two-piece bathing costumes, attracting the attention of both male bathers and local councils. They were immediately banned. Women persisted in the new outfits however and beach inspectors across Australia policed the briefer costumes until the mid-1960s. But just as beachgoers had flouted daylight bathing bans at the start of the century, and bathers had disregarded the regulations for torso-covering costumes in the 1930s, bikinis were becoming commonplace on Sydney beaches during the 1950s. By the end of the 1970s, women were starting to bare their breasts on the beach and nudists were also staking a claim in Sydney’s sand.36 Australian beach bodies had been liberated.

Belonging

For all these shifts, Sydney’s beach culture as it was popularly understood remained more or less intact during the post-war period. In North America more affordable air travel, the development of rival resorts such as Miami and Disneyland, and the end of racial segregation led to notable declines in some previously successful middle-class seaside resorts such as Atlantic

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Girls relax at the beach, enjoying the sun. Banned in the 1940s, the bikini was eventually accepted by the 1960s when women won the right to wear the clothing of their choice at the beach.

City. Coney Island was also losing its lustre and appeal to young working-class New Yorkers, and increased racial tension in the area deterred tourists. The ‘last of the great amusement parks’, Steeplechase, closed its gates in the mid-1960s. It followed Luna Park, which had been razed two decades earlier to make way for high-rise apartments that would house more than 600 World War II veterans and their families. While these beaches were left to less ‘desirable’ crowds, in southern California a decline in mass transport and unofficial racial segregation made

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the beaches of Los Angeles less accessible to the city’s poor. Many Hispanic and African-American people were effectively locked out of these beaches during the 1960s.37 Sydney’s beaches were not places of overt racial tensions like those in some American cities. But they were generally conceived as particularly ‘Australian’ spaces, shaped by shared Anglo-Australian attitudes and behaviours. Australians harboured expectations during the post-war period that new migrants should adopt ‘the Australian Way of Life’, an undefined concept that was virtually impossible to embody.38 Nowhere was immigrants’ ‘foreignness’ more apparent than on the beach, where rules about what to wear and where to swim, and cultural knowledge about rips and safe bathing practices – second nature to most Sydney residents – were difficult for a newcomer to decipher. Author Frank O’Grady’s They’re a Weird Mob reinforced the ‘Australianness’ of the beach, emphasising the foreignness of Bondi Beach to an Italian immigrant, Nino Culotta. Nino first encountered the Sydney surf at Bondi Beach in the late 1950s: A young man with a close-fitting cap on his head, tied on with white strings, was waving to me. I waved to him … No doubt he was saluting my courage [at not being afraid of sharks]. At that moment, it seemed that the whole of the Pacific Ocean fell on the back of my neck. I was knocked down, and found myself on the bottom of the ocean, with my face on the sand. I got up with difficulty, in time to see another bank of water attacking me.39

O’Grady’s fictional account of a European immigrant’s stunned discovery of the power of the surf articulated and reinforced Australians’ ideas about migrants being out of place on the beaches. Although somewhat overstated, the story did capture an experience shared by many newcomers to the Sydney coast. Around 25 years later, as a young boy new to Australia from land-locked Eastern Europe and standing fully clothed in knee-deep water at Bondi Beach, Brano Vaura was also knocked off his feet by the unexpected power of the surf. This kind of experience remains an enduring memory of

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the first visit to an Australian beach for him and so many others. Confusion about the meaning of the flags and lack of experience with rips and surf has brought many international tourists and immigrants – from both English and non-English-speaking backgrounds – into trouble on the Sydney coast. This cultural disconnect is partly responsible for the disproportionate representation of tourists in the annual Surf Life Saving Australia drowning statistics. The beach could be dangerous in other ways too. In the mid-1960s three shocking events shook the nation’s confidence in its beaches: the murders of 15-year-old best friends Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock in the sandhills behind Wanda Beach in January 1965, the disappearance of siblings Jane, Arnna and Grant Beaumont from Adelaide’s Glenelg Beach on Australia Day the following year, and the disappearance of Prime Minister Harold Holt in the surf at Cheviot Beach near Victoria’s Portsea in December 1967. Neither the Beaumont children nor Harold Holt were ever found, nor were the Wanda Beach murders ever solved. Individually and as a group, these three tragic and mysterious events sank into the national consciousness. They challenged Australians to think about the beaches in new and darker ways. These three events occurred in daylight, but at night beaches are transformed into dark, empty spaces on the edge of suburbia: in the absence of surf lifesavers drunk swimmers drown; people take drugs, have sex under the cover of darkness, and fall off cliff edges. In the late 1980s and early 1990s coastal areas like Bondi’s Marks Park and Manly’s North Head, known gay beats, could become particularly violent. Here, gay men were assaulted and some murdered by homophobic gangs who ‘hunted’ gay men in a gruesome ‘blood sport’, crimes which only recently attracted the legal and media scrutiny they deserved.40 This is a far darker side to Sydney’s beaches than most people associate with them. It is a reminder that beaches exist, metaphorically and physically, on the periphery of the city.

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Clashes at Cronulla

Close to half a century after Nino Culotta would have been swept off his feet by the surf at Bondi, and 25 years after Puberty Blues first captivated Australian teenagers and sent a collective chill down their parents’ spines, Cronulla Beach again hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons. In scenes that surpassed the violence between rockers and surfers in

the early 1960s, hundreds of local residents and some from elsewhere in Sydney descended on Cronulla on 11 December 2005 to ‘claim back’ the beach from perceived ‘outsiders’ – primarily young Lebanese Australians from Sydney’s western suburbs. Witnesses described the way the ‘alcohol fuelled the racism and the racism fuelled the alcohol’, and parts of the crowd soon turned violent. Tim Lee, a lifesaver from nearby Wanda Beach who came to North Cronulla to assist in managing the surging crowds, was among many shocked and disgusted to see his local beach temporarily transformed into a site of ugly, racist, aggressive mob violence.41 The events that became known as the ‘Cronulla riots’ were a reaction to a fight between surf lifesavers and young men from south-western Sydney a week earlier. Media reports had portrayed the lifesavers as victims – although a police investigation later found evidence of provocation on both sides of the initial fight. Close attention to the fight and its broader implications during the following week – in which media commentators conflated surf lifesavers, the beach, and ‘Australianness’ in a frenzy of nationalistic fervour – fuelled the aggression of those who sought to ‘protect’ Cronulla Beach. Talkback radio was particularly influential in the week leading to the riots and at least one prominent broadcaster was later found to have breached the industry’s code of practice by broadcasting inflammatory material. Some broadcasters portrayed the lifesavers as defenders of the unofficial rules of Australian beach culture, which the other men, and the larger cultural group they supposedly represented, were seen to have broken. Cultural Studies scholar Fiona Allon interpreted the events at Cronulla

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as ‘an ugly claiming of territory’ that was about ‘access to the nation and its culture, a fight about … ownership and membership’. The ‘rioters’ drew on the power of the beach as a national symbol to justify their aggression: they draped themselves in Australian flags and branded their bodies with the Southern Cross. One young man compared their actions to the Diggers at Anzac Cove, declaring that ‘our fathers, our grandfathers, fought for these beaches and now it’s our turn’.42 But the beach itself was central to the conflict, which brought attention to the ‘culturally informed sandy games of assimilation and exclusion’ that take place at beaches like Cronulla every day: Ideas about where you walk, swim, surf, how you dress, what kind of games you play and the food you eat on the beach have evolved to fit a particularly Anglo-Australian middle-class view of the world. Inexperienced beachgoers and newcomers transgress beach rules, often unintentionally, because these practices are unfamiliar.43

During the Cronulla riots the beach was more than a coincidental setting for racial conflict; the clash erupted specifically because of the national and cultural significance of the beach that had been taking shape over the course of a century. In preceding years other Sydney riots had remained relatively local affairs. But on this occasion the violence spread to other beaches. Approximately 100 cars at Maroubra were damaged, police ‘locked down’ 200 kilometres of beaches from Newcastle to Wollongong and race-motivated violence was even reported at Glenelg, Adelaide’s most prominent beach. Despite the broader cultural significance of the beach, for many the Cronulla riots were not a national but a local issue. Under the flag, many scrawled the Cronulla postcode onto their bodies; at least one displayed the message ‘we grew here you flew here, 2230’ to emphasise the ownership rights of locals over the beach. Racial anxieties were central, but for those Sutherland Shire residents who see Cronulla as ‘their’ beach, the day was about claiming back a shared local place from outsiders, many of whom came to Cronulla by

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train. Ironically, the railway line they used had been constructed to bring people from western suburbs to the beach in a government initiative designed specifically to give them access to what were deemed to be healthy recreation opportunities. It was a battle that had been brewing since Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey first identified the local contempt of ‘Bankies’ from the ‘greasy western suburbs’ at Cronulla Beach in Puberty Blues. Lebanese Australian victims of the attacks responded in the same language, declaring that ‘today the beach might be theirs. Tomorrow it will be ours’.44 But despite police and political fears of further violent outbreaks, peace soon returned to Cronulla. The struggle between locals and visitors over ‘ownership’ of Cronulla Beach is another reminder that Sydney’s beaches are contested landscapes. They can be central to the identity of coastal communities whose values and expectations of behaviour – although invisible to outsiders – may be fiercely protected. In many ways the conflict at Cronulla was a contemporary manifestation of the rocker–surfer and surfer–surf lifesaver clashes of the 1960s – although those did not have a racial element – and echoed Robert Lowe’s violent defence of ‘his’ Bronte Beach against ‘trespassers’ more than a century earlier. Sydneysiders have always wanted a say in how their beaches are managed. They also wanted a say in who could go there. The apparent transgressions of the ‘outsiders’ on this occasion echoed the transgressions of the surfers of the 1960s. They, like the surf bathers of the previous generation and the surf lifesavers and sunbathers of the generation before that, had challenged pre-defined and unwritten expectations of appropriate behaviour and ideas of ‘belonging’, raising the ire of the moral authorities in the process. The beach is a ‘loose space’, a place primarily of leisure where people experience greater freedoms relating to dress, behaviour and activities than other public spaces.45 It was this ‘looseness’ that appeared to invite new behaviours through which beach users, such as surfers, eventually redefined the parameters of normality on the beach and carved a space that legitimised their presence in the surf – ironically turning a ‘loose space’ into a ‘tribal space’ on which they tightened their grip.

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Protecting the breaks

Beaches, surf lifesaving clubs and surf breaks have become more inclusive spaces. Each year in February, a group of gay and lesbian surf lifesavers and their friends, known collectively as ‘Lifesavers With Pride’, gather at Bondi to rehearse their dance moves for the annual Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. During several of the parade routines, the shark alarm has

been used as a sign for them to get back into their lines immediately with no time for delay: a fitting signal given every surf lifesaver understands the urgent response demanded by a shark alarm. Four friends from North Bondi and Tamarama surf clubs conceived the group as a way to ‘reach out’ and create a network among Australia’s gay and lesbian surf lifesavers.46 They represent a new surf lifesaving culture, which is openly more diverse than ever before; be it gender, sexuality, ethnicity or culture. The Lifesavers with Pride organisation that exists today does so in a much more accepting environment than it did eight years ago. When the organisation first participated in the famous parade, it attracted resistance from some corners of the movement, despite attempts by Surf Life Saving Australia to promote itself as an organisation that embraces diversity, particularly in the wake of the Cronulla riots. Years of participation have eroded any fears the organisation had and it now receives SLSA’s support. Surfers have also become accepted at the beach. In the decades since board riders were required to register their boards, surfboard riding has become embedded in Sydney’s beach culture and surfers have earned themselves a legitimate place, alongside surf lifesavers, as spokespeople for issues that affect the beach. The allure of surfing is also now more broadly understood. Aggression in the surf still occurs and the violent defence of waves, particularly by locals against ‘outsiders’, is so prevalent it has earned its own title: ‘surf rage’. Nonetheless, surfing is a normal beach activity and a popular competitive sport. The many ‘learn to surf’ schools that have sprung up along the coast make board riding accessible to most beachgoers, men and women, and

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particularly tourists. Even for those who have never surfed, mainstream audiences were introduced to the enchantment of surfing by author Tim Winton in Breath and more recently by Malcolm Knox in The Life. The success of the surfing retail industry – itself closely linked with the rise of professional surfing in the 1970s and ‘80s – helped new generations to identify with surfing cultures through clothing, posters, magazines and film. Between 2006 and 2010 four Sydney beaches – Maroubra, Cronulla, North Narrabeen and Manly – were formally gazetted as National Surfing Reserves. The surfing reserves are protected for use by surfers and the general public. In 2012, Manly and Freshwater beaches were declared Australia’s first World Surfing Reserve (and one of only four across the world), partly for the role Duke Kohanamoku played at the latter beach in increasing the profile of surfing. The National and World Surfing Reserve programs were founded by surfers who were concerned about the coastal environment and the future of particular surfing breaks. But the program’s subsequent embrace by politicians across the political spectrum, and the positive publicity new reserves generate, suggests that 40 years after Sydney’s surfers had fought for the right to ride the waves unrestricted and free of petty licence systems, their presence in the surf and the preservation of their favourite surf breaks were seen as worth protecting by the government and broader society.

In the post-war decades, the forces that influenced broad cultural changes across Australia also drove changes in its cultures of the beach. The surfers who asserted their rights to enjoy Sydney’s best surf breaks unknowingly echoed the struggle of those who had fought against amusement parks and shark enclosures

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at these same beaches decades earlier. Their battles were different, but they shared an underlying belief that beachgoers themselves should have a say in who used the beaches and how. Their defiance against the established authorities on the beach signalled the arrival of a distinctive new group of beachgoers. These surfers would soon make their mark in the waves and on the sand; the beaches were now theirs.

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8 Surfing in sewage The men who leased and managed Sydney’s surf sheds during the first half of the 20th century knew their beaches intimately.

They were on the beach every day, observing seasonal changes, getting to know the regular swimmers and employing locals during busy summer periods. Along with beach inspectors and lifeguards, they were the councils’ eyes on the beaches. They made their money from the swimmers who flowed through their turnstiles looking for privacy, security, or to hire equipment for the day. Frank O’Grady managed the Coogee Beach dressing sheds. From 1914 until his retirement in 1935 he rented more than 1000 lockers as well as swimming costumes, towels and bathing caps to beachgoers, and he provided a private place to change. In 1929, he achieved local fame for designing the shark net that the Randwick Council erected at the beach, creating an enclosure that significantly boosted his income. In the late 1920s the council also relied on him to keep them informed of the progress of the troubled pier’s construction.

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O’Grady’s presence on the beach meant he was among the first to observe the large volumes of household garbage that washed onto Coogee and other nearby beaches in the spring of 1932. O’Grady was so concerned by the invading refuse – and no doubt its potential impact on his business – that he wrote to the Randwick Council to formally complain. On 19 September 1932 he wrote, garbage including ‘pumpkins and other vegetables, rotten fruit, garden refuse, tins and bottles’ littered Coogee and Maroubra beaches. Five dray-loads of garbage had been removed from Coogee Beach in front of the surf sheds. Two weeks later Coogee Beach was again polluted, ‘littered end to end with rotten fruit and vegetables, dead rats, kittens and fowls, one dead dog, and one dead duck, butcher’s shop offal, garden refuse and other filth’. The garbage was so thick in the breakers, O’Grady wrote, that ‘early morning bathers refused to enter the surf’.1 Outraged at the foul pollution of its beaches, the Randwick Council arranged a joint meeting with other coastal councils and the Surf Life Saving Association of Australia to raise the issue with the Minister for Local Government, Joseph Jackson. This was not the first time the coastal councils and surf lifesavers had joined forces to protest the garbage pollution of Sydney’s ocean beaches. Nor would it be the last. For 30 years, household garbage and other waste had been periodically washing onto Sydney’s beaches. The coastal councils argued it was the garbage that other councils had transported on punts and dumped in the ocean off Sydney. But to their consternation, Jackson refused to intervene in what he considered a local government matter. He even questioned whether the garbage had originated, as the councils believed, on the Glebe Council’s barges.2 The encounter was typical of a period in which Sydney’s beaches were visibly polluted by garbage and untreated sewage effluent. Over the opening decades of the 20th century Sydney’s coastal councils fought to eradicate the pollution from their beaches in a bid to protect local tourism industries and the reputation of their so-called ‘health resorts’. But consecutive state governments, realising the considerable expense of alternative garbage and sewage

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disposal methods, refused to admit a problem existed. Meanwhile, the pollution continued to wash in.

Garbage

The coastal councils and some of those along the harbour had protested the proposal to dump garbage at sea since it was first considered in 1891. They argued the potential for garbage to wash back onto beaches was both ‘undesirable and unhealthy’, ironic given the Manly Council buried its own household garbage behind the ocean beach, a disposal solution

the Waverley Council briefly considered for the Bondi dunes. But their protests delayed rather than prevented the new garbage disposal system. In March 1900 the City Council’s first punts were loaded with 111 tons of garbage and towed through Sydney Heads, bound for deeper water. The City Council’s decision to close its Moore Park tip and start punting garbage to sea was driven by heightened anxieties about sanitation immediately following the outbreak of bubonic plague in Sydney at the end of the 19th century, and followed a similar move by the Newcastle Council six years earlier. It was a decision wholeheartedly endorsed by the Premier William Lyne who ordered public servants to assist the council. At a time when new cases of the plague continued to be reported, the City Council and government considered disposing of disease-causing garbage at sea to be the most effective way of cleaning up the city.3 The cleaner city came at the cost of clean beaches. Less than two months after the first punts left Woolloomooloo and Pyrmont the Waverley Council complained that excessive waste had been washed onto Bondi Beach, including fruit and vegetable matter, and ‘a rat, a cat and a kitten’.4 To the council’s dismay, attracted by the relatively low expense, soon other councils, businesses and government agencies were also dumping their waste in the ocean off Sydney. By 1913, an investigation by the Sydney Morning Herald – prompted by a suite of complaints about beach pollution – found that in one week alone,

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53 punts ‘deposited their contents in the sea outside (and sometimes barely outside) the Heads’, only five of which were the City Council’s punts. This was new evidence of the scale of the ocean pollution Sydney was creating. The Herald article also provided a first-hand account of the daylong journey on one of the City Council’s garbage punts. It was loaded on this occasion with offal from the Glebe Island abattoir (due to a temporary fault in the incinerator), ashes from the council’s destructor, clean tins, hoop iron and fencing wire, ‘an old umbrella cover, some straw wrappers for bottles, odd bits of wood and stone, cigarette packets, numerous newspapers, and a sprinkling of apples, tomatoes and cabbage leaves’. The refuse was divided among seven compartments with individual doors, which remained closed until the punt had reached its destination. The heavier material was offloaded about four and a half miles (7.2 kilometres) from shore, and the punt was around seven miles (11.2 kilometres) from the coast before the offal ‘began to float out’. Two abattoir employees had travelled aboard the punt ‘to disentangle objects when they get caught in the door chains’, a ‘gruesome’ job, which the garbage contractors refused to carry out. The Herald’s journalist observed that apart from the offal, most refuse began to sink at once, concluding that it was ‘highly unlikely’ that any of this ‘cargo’ would reach the beaches. And yet as readers knew, ‘disgusting matter’ which had clearly come from the abattoirs had been washing onto the city’s beaches for several days.5 The City Council blamed other councils, which in turn blamed oceangoing vessels, for the garbage that sometimes washed onto the beaches during the 1910s and ‘20s. It is likely they all shared some responsibility. Occasionally, when the pollution was particularly bad, the issue was raised in state parliament, but to little effect. In 1928 the Civic Commissioners’ proposal to increase the volume of garbage it dumped at sea sparked more heated debates in parliament.6 During one exchange Alfred Reid, the Member for Manly, complained that it was ‘almost impossible at weekends for people to swim at Manly owing to the amount of rubbish washed up on the beach’, to which William Dunn, the Member for Mudgee, chided ‘it is so bad at Coogee that the sharks will not

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go there now’.7 However, again the government did little. The City Council continued to deny that it disposed of ‘objectionable refuse’ in the sea, but newspapers reported that dead kittens were included on its barges. Dead kittens, it seems, had become the unfortunate symbol of Sydney’s garbage pollution problem in the opening decades of the 20th century. They refused to accept responsibility but, privately, consecutive state governments admitted that the ongoing pollution of the city’s beaches by garbage posed ‘a grave danger to public health and safety’. Unwilling to become embroiled in municipal waste-disposal issues, they deflected blame upwards to the Commonwealth government, supporting councils’ contentions that ocean-going vessels that discharged their refuse off the Sydney and Newcastle coasts – and which operated outside the state’s jurisdiction – were the heaviest polluters. The NSW government appealed to the Commonwealth to take action, which in turn issued notices to shipping companies in the mid-1920s that requested masters of vessels to discharge their refuse as far as possible from the coast. By 1932 the City Council had also bowed to public pressure and voluntarily ended its own ocean-disposal program, turning instead to the more expensive incinerators that were constructed with architectural flair across the city and suburbs during the inter-war period. But as Frank O’Grady testified, despite these measures, garbage continued to float onto Sydney’s beaches.8 In the early 1930s the state government remained steadfast in its refusal to admit responsibility for the beach pollution and maintained pressure on the Commonwealth government to intervene. Eventually, the Commonwealth relented and took more decisive action. Two months after O’Grady complained of the pollution at Coogee Beach to the Randwick Council in late 1932, and a month after the US Supreme Court ruled dumping of New York’s garbage at sea must cease due to the consequent pollution of Long Island and New Jersey beaches, the Australian government created new legislation specifically designed to protect Sydney and Newcastle beaches from garbage pollution. The Beaches, Fishing Grounds and Sea Routes Protection Act 1932 prohibited for the first time any vessels in defined areas of Australian waters discharging any

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garbage, rubbish, ashes or organic refuse into the sea. The prohibited area adjacent to Sydney extended seaward for 15 miles (24 kilometres) and included not just Sydney’s coast, but the entire stretch from the National Park south of Cronulla to Sugarloaf Point, north of Port Stephens on the state’s lower-north coast.9 For the coastal councils, surf lifesavers, other beach users and their political representatives who had demanded cleaner beaches for three decades, the new legislation was a rare and welcome victory. The Commonwealth government now admitted that the ongoing pollution of the state’s most popular beaches could not be tolerated, primarily because it threatened the health of bathers – although as with Sydney’s shark-meshing program, the health of the tourist industry was an underlying concern.10 The new Commonwealth legislation protected the marine environment against some forms of pollution for the first time. But it was driven less by an environmental ethos than by concerns for the public amenity of that environment – it ensured that beaches remained pleasant for swimming and that scuttled boats did not contaminate important fishing grounds. Together with new state government support for a Glebe incinerator – providing for cleaner beaches at the expense of clean air in Glebe – and 1933 amendments to the Local Government Act which prohibited throwing garbage into the sea in New South Wales,11 the new Act spelled an end to the regular disposal of municipal garbage into the ocean off Sydney. Occasionally, garbage from passing ships continued to litter some of Sydney’s beaches, including RAAF flares and smoke bombs, which had been dumped from navy ships off the coast in 1946, but this occurred less frequently. Floating items of municipal garbage no longer greeted Sydney’s surf bathers on their morning dip. But the beaches were still not clean. When the city council first considered dumping its garbage in the ocean in the late 19th century, the ocean’s ability to absorb, purify and eradicate waste was thought to be limitless. The ocean was the ultimate garbage disposal outlet in a period when noxious industry and other forms of pollution were being banished to the outskirts of the

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slowly expanding settlement.12 It was this philosophy that inspired the decision to dispose of the city’s sewage effluent into the ocean east of Sydney.13 This would present another danger to the popular use of the beach and again a battle was joined against the contamination of coastal waters.

Sewage pollution

In 1890 raw sewage from across Sydney began cascading into the ocean from the cliffs at North Bondi. The pipes that fed the city’s first ocean outfall drained more than 5000 acres, channelling the human waste and wastewater of nearly 100 000 people from the city and surrounding areas through five miles of pipes into the sea. At its mouth the pipe was seven feet six

inches in diameter, jutting out from the cliff face eight feet above the highwater mark. The outfall’s champions celebrated the moment as a symbol of the city’s long-awaited sanitary reform, praising the new infrastructure for eradicating offensive and unhealthy sewage from the city’s streets and the waters of its harbour. Driven by fears of ‘miasma’, which linked rotting human, animal and vegetable wastes with disease, and a Victorian faith in the ocean’s unlimited capacity to absorb and purify polluted waters, the colonial government saw the outfall as a symbol of progress rather than environmental destruction. Not everyone welcomed this form of sanitary reform. From 1880 the NSW Chief Justice and former Premier James Martin and his supporters in the NSW Anti-Pollution of Air and Water League (later the Sanitary Reform League), lobbied against channelling the city’s sewage into the ocean. Far from believing in the ocean as a cure-all they argued in the press that sewage would flow back to the coast, rendering beaches like Bondi and Coogee ‘hotbeds of pestilence’ and leading to their ‘utter destruction’ as health resorts. But in the name of progress and, ironically, ‘health’, the city’s sanitary reformers dismissed the group’s concerns.14 Soon after the North Bondi outfall began flowing, the League’s fears of beach pollution were confirmed. Not only was the sewage slick

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occasionally visible along the coast near Bondi, but the strong smell emanating from the outfall during certain winds alerted beach visitors to its presence even when sewage was not being washed onto the beach. As more ocean outfalls were opened to service a growing population in the 20th century – at Malabar south of Maroubra in 1916, North Head (near Manly) in 1928, Cronulla in the late 1950s and Warriewood on the northern beaches soon afterwards – more beaches, and beachgoers, were affected. In the opening decades of the 20th century, during periods when the beaches were particularly polluted, surf bathers began to draw a direct correlation between their own health and the sewage slicks they saw and smelt. In the public mind, this was more dangerous than garbage pollution. They blamed sewage pollution for children infected with skin disease after bathing at Long Bay in 1929, ringworm, ‘surfer’s foot’, and other ‘poisoning’ of Bondi swimmers in 1935, and for typhoid outbreaks near Malabar during the early 1940s. In 1970, with the sewage pollution of the beaches again in the news, an eastern suburbs doctor blamed it for ear, nose, throat, chest, skin, bowel, liver and eye infections across the district. In Britain in the mid-20th century, sewagepolluted beaches were also associated in the public mind with infections including typhoid and poliomyelitis, links that scientists dismissed as ‘irrelevant’ but which were later proven to be possible.15 The same groups that lobbied for an end to garbage pollution of the ocean and beaches – primarily surf lifesavers, coastal councils and their parliamentary representatives – also led the fight against sewage pollution in the first half of the 20th century, demanding better sewage treatment or, ideally, an alternative disposal method. Their victories were few. Unlike pollution by garbage, governments could not deny the source of sewage pollution, nor that it was aesthetically unpleasant. But they rejected claims that sewage-polluted coastal waters posed any real risk to health, reassuring bathers that natural processes had diffused the effluent. Australian politicians and sewerage authorities continued to cite this Victorian-era belief into the mid-20th century. Their repeated denials of the problem and its health impacts paralleled governments’ treatment of

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air pollution, which was also causing considerable community nuisance and concern – and health impacts – over the same period. Governments were also deterred by the scale and expense of new sewerage infrastructure. In 1936 the government had briefly considered investing in a deep ocean outfall, 7 to 14 kilometres long, off either Malabar or the National Park. But it decided to pursue the less expensive – and less effective – option of installing primary treatment works – the most basic form of sewage treatment, separating the solids and ‘sludge’ from the rest of the effluent – at the major outfalls before discharging it into the sea. It also closed the Coogee outfall, which had caused considerable localised pollution. When the primary treatment plants were finally completed at Bondi in 1966 and Long Bay 11 years later an incredible 30 and 40 years had passed since the government first committed to their construction. By then, other governments were investing in the more effective secondary sewage treatment plants, which had become legally required across the United States, justifying complaints by beach users that the new Sydney plants were inadequate and outdated.16 After three-quarters of a century, Sydney’s beaches seemed more polluted with sewage effluent than ever before, and bathers were becoming much more alert to the problem.

Environmental politics

From the mid-1960s, greater global awareness of the damaging environmental impacts of human activities – sparked partly by American scientist Rachel Carson’s widely read book Silent Spring – contributed to increased environmental consciousness in Australia. Just as the local media coverage of the devastating London ‘smog’ incident of 1952 alerted Australians to the dangers of

air pollution, images of the wreck of an oil tanker off the Cornish coast in 17

1967, and an oil spill at California’s Santa Barbara in 1969, had a powerful

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impact. They raised new awareness across Australia of the vulnerability of coastal environments. Prominent environmental campaigns around Australia in the late 1960s and early 1970s – particularly at Lake Pedder in Tasmania, Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef and the Myall Lakes north of Sydney – also attracted national media attention and helped to consolidate a broad environmental consciousness. As a result, people living in cities began to think differently about the urban environment. Sydneysiders living on the coastal fringe were not just concerned about sewage pollution but were starting to campaign against landfill too, alarmed about the damage leachate was having on sensitive coastal ecosystems like lagoons and estuaries. This was a marked departure from the earlier denigration of coastal wetlands as ‘unhealthy’ environments, a philosophy that had partly inspired the Warringah and neighbouring councils to bury their waste as landfill in places like Curl Curl lagoon and behind Mona Vale Beach in the mid-20th century.18 In the context of this environmental awakening, Sydney newspapers, which had periodically given oxygen to the call for cleaner beaches, grew more aggressive. Dramatic headlines like ‘did you know that the faeces and urine of 634 000 people are emptied into the ocean about a mile and a half from Manly Beach’ alerted a new generation of Sydneysiders to the scale of pollution on their doorstep. In 1969 the Daily Telegraph commissioned water tests that found faecal coliform levels in the water at Malabar were 600 times the ‘satisfactory level for drinking water’, and Collaroy, Coogee and Bronte also had considerably high levels of faecal coliform among a coastline of polluted beaches. The following year, newspapers reported that a large number of blue plastic streamers had floated from the outfall onto rocks at Manly Beach. Members of the government initially claimed these were pollution flow-testers deliberately flushed through the sewerage system, but it was soon revealed they were plastic liners from sanitary napkins.19 As they became more outraged by the sewage pollution of their beaches, coastal residents and beachgoers grew more active. At Mona Vale in 1964,

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locals, angry about the construction of a sewer outlet from Mona Vale hospital to the cliffs nearby, placed a plaque and wreaths on the headland ‘in memory of good, clean swimming’. In one well-publicised stunt, a Freshwater resident, so incensed at the ‘beachful’ of sewage on his doorstep, dumped a bucket of the sludge at the entrance to parliament house in 1972. He had perhaps been inspired by a Newcastle resident who had swept up the coal dust in her house and dumped it on the council doorstep in 1950 – a slightly less offensive mess to clean. In Britain, the Coastal Anti-Pollution League (CAPL) had been established in the late 1950s by Tony and Daphne Wakefield following the death of their young daughter who had contracted poliomyelitis while swimming at a British beach. Over several decades, the League achieved improvements in waste management systems around the country, and attracted ongoing publicity to the pollution problem.20 From the government’s perspective, sewage pollution of Sydney’s beaches remained an infrastructure rather than a health issue. In 1970, Premier Robin ‘Bob’ Askin wrote to Prime Minister John Gorton seeking funding for improvements to a system whose inadequacies he argued were ‘symptomatic of arrears’ in the state’s capital works program. Publicly, his government steadfastly maintained that ‘no direct cause-and-effect relationship has yet been established between disease and sewage-polluted seawater and beaches’, but its claims were increasingly falling on deaf ears. This formal position also seems at odds with the government’s decision in 1970 to close Malabar Beach – which suffered pollution from both sewage and stormwater outlets – to swimmers. The beach would remain closed for nearly 20 years. 21 They could publicly deny that sewage outfalls threatened swimmers’ health but governments could no longer ignore public concerns. Towards the end of the 1960s the growing public anxiety about threats to the environment began to influence global public policy, leading to the creation of bodies such as the American Environmental Protection Authority in 1970 and, in Australia, new state and federal legislation to address air, water and land pollution. The environment had become such a potent political force in Australia one

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journalist wrote in 1971 that for politicians, ‘to be against the vague ideals of environmentalism is akin to being against motherhood’. In New South Wales, in response to the increased public pressure, the government commissioned reports into the state’s pollution problems and enacted new legislation to tackle air and water pollution and waste disposal. In 1970 it also created the State Pollution Control Commission (SPCC), a regulatory body that by 1974 would be responsible for air, noise and water pollution.22 The new legislation, regulations and regulatory bodies did little to improve water quality at the beaches. As early as 1940 the Metropolitan Water Sewerage and Drainage Board (MWSDB, later Water Board) had been concerned about the disposal of trade wastes and particularly the risks to public health of ‘large unregulated discharges … into stormwater channels’. Close to three decades later, council bans on dumping industrial waste in their tips contributed to an increase in clandestine dumping of industrial wastes in sewers and waterways, contributing further to ocean pollution. In an effort to better regulate industrial waste and divert it from the river system, the Clean Waters Act 1970 led to the connection of a large number of industries to the city’s sewerage system, a move which meant that ‘the rivers and the air were … cleaned up at the expense of the ocean and bathing beaches’. The pollution created by this increase in industrial waste was compounded by the expansion of the domestic sewerage network over the same period. It was at this time that a greater proportion of the rapidly growing metropolitan population abandoned septic tanks for full sewerage services. Homeowners across the outer suburbs may have been liberated but, at the city’s beaches, the sewage problem worsened and the public outcries grew louder.23

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A decade of activism

In 1980 the Wran Labor government announced its intention to construct ‘deep ocean outfalls’. Nearly a decade had passed since the report that recommended them was commissioned, but the intense political pressure now compelled the government to invest in major new sewerage infrastructure. Upon completion, underground sewerage pipes would

extend from the North Head, North Bondi and Malabar treatment plants and discharge effluent into the sea three kilometres from the shore. The scheme was similar to the sewerage outfall pipe at Los Angeles off the California coast, which extended 30 kilometres out to sea over a far flatter seabed. It was designed not only to discharge sewage effluent into the sea away from the beaches, but to improve the dilution processes through the use of diffusers. The activism of the late 1980s remains prominent in the public memory, but it was the strong public pressure directed at the Board during the 1960s and ’70s that compelled it to invest in a system that might finally clean up the beaches. 24 It would be another 11 years before Sydney’s deep ocean outfalls were in operation. In the interim, amid scepticism about the effectiveness of the new solution and demands for better treatment of sewage or an alternative to ocean disposal, public criticism escalated and media attention intensified. A series of strikes and industrial action by sewerage workers in the early to mid-1980s – which created pollution so severe beaches had to be closed, many for the first time – attracted yet more public attention to the sewage flowing into the surf. Environmental consciousness among many Australians, and the political environmental movement, also grew stronger during the early 1980s. As well as groups like Greenpeace and the Australian Conservation Foundation, which had been created in the 1970s, many smaller, localised groups were formed. These were driven by ordinary people with particular environmental concerns – people environmental scientist and activist Garry Smith called ‘urban greenies’.25 The fights to ban certain pesticides, end logging in New South Wales’ south-east forests and save the Franklin River in Tasmania were particularly

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significant campaigns. They stimulated environmental consciousness among a diverse section of the community and benefited from widespread support in the 1980s. The successes of the Franklin River campaign and earlier ‘Green Bans’, which showed Australians that direct action could be effective, buoyed Sydney’s beach-pollution activists. Individuals, coastal councils and surf lifesavers had been campaigning against beach pollution for close to a century, working hard to attract media attention and lobby governments to implement change, but with few successes. By the 1980s, the issue of beach pollution was part of a global movement for environmental change in which people were just as, or perhaps more, concerned by chemicals polluting the marine environment as by sewage effluent. Greenpeace, which had first campaigned in Australia on the issue of whaling in the late 1970s, ran a number of international campaigns during the 1980s that drew attention to various forms of marine pollution. It also ran a successful Clean Waters campaign in several Australian cities, including Sydney, in 1990. In America, an ocean dumpsite 12 miles (19 kilometres) from New York City, where the city’s sewer sludge, toxic industrial wastes and other forms of waste were deposited daily, attracted ongoing media attention over the late 1970s and ’80s too. In the late 1980s, the appearance of contaminated medical waste on several beaches close to the ‘sludge monster’ drove people away from the coast until the dumpsite was moved more than 90 miles (144 kilometres) seaward. It was officially closed in 1992.26 Strong media coverage ensured that events such as these influenced the way people thought about the beach in Sydney in the mid- to late-1980s.

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John Witzig, co-founder of the surfing magazine Tracks, wore a gas mask on Whale Beach as an imaginative way of raising awareness of the seriousness of contamination from sewage. The photograph appeared in the magazine’s first issue in 1970.

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The pressure for change

A Sydney Morning Herald editorial in 1985 described sewage pollution as ‘one of the fixtures of a Sydney summer’, arguing that ‘the stained water off some of our beaches, the unpleasant smell, the health warnings and gimmicks of politicians designed either to alarm or reassure us all have a familiar, if unwelcome, ring about them’. The journalist John Pilger

described the ‘nostalgic cocktail’ of Bondi’s taste and smell, during a hot westerly wind, as ‘salt, sand and shit’. It may have been normalised as part of the environmental context of particular beaches, but beachgoers – and particularly surfers – were increasingly unwilling to tolerate polluted beaches.27 Like the bushwalkers whose passion for preserving their favourite landscapes had inspired the bushland conservation movement from the 1930s, many surfers argued that the quality of the surfing experience was intimately connected with the health of the marine environment. Surfing in polluted waters was also distinctly unpleasant. Those who had condemned ‘surfies’ in the 1960s might have been surprised to see that surfers were at the helm of the anti-beach-pollution movement just a few years later. The Australian surfing magazine Tracks followed the trend established by other surfing magazines and dedicated space to conservation issues from its first edition in 1970. For co-founder John Witzig, Our being concerned about the environment was a no-brainer. The ocean was where we were playing, and the development (and destruction) of the coastline was something we faced on a daily basis … Rutile mining was probably our major target in the early days, along with the Sydney sewage outlets.28

In the first editorial Witzig listed ‘awareness of the environment’ as one of three basic contributions surfing makes to society. Later editions informed readers about and urged action on a range of environmental issues through its regular ‘ecology’ page. Letters from the magazine’s readers affirmed their own

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environmental consciousness and particularly their disgust at polluted beaches. Tracks and magazines like it played an important role in raising surfers’ environmental awareness and stimulating debate about environmental issues among the surfing community, as well as contributing to the broader environmental movement. As Australian and world champion surfer Nat Young commented in 1970, for an increasing number of surfers, surfing was ‘against anything that upsets the balance of nature. Nature is surfing!’29 When the young journalist and surfer Kirk Willcox was appointed editor of Tracks in 1981, he maintained the magazine’s environmental consciousness. The sewage pollution of Sydney’s beaches had concerned Kirk ever since, as a teenage surfer at Maroubra in the early 1970s, a gash in his leg had become infected during a summer spent mostly in the surf. The water was so ‘putrid’ he recalls, that neither he nor his friends had any doubt as to the source of regular infections. As editor of Tracks, he continued the magazine’s assault on politicians over Sydney’s ocean pollution, and was involved in a petition to Premier Neville Wran in 1981 sponsored by Tracks, the Australian Professional Surfing Association, the SLSAA and others. Through the magazine, Willcox chastised Sydney’s surfers for a ‘pitiful’ turnout to a pollution protest in May 1981, in a column titled ‘Wake up you wankers!’30 Willcox also worked to raise awareness of the pollution problems outside his role at Tracks. After regular meetings supported by Friends of the Earth, Willcox and other outraged residents and surfers formed a number of anti-beach-pollution action groups in Sydney in the mid-1980s, among them STOP (Stop The Ocean Pollution, of which Willcox was a member) and POOO (People Opposed

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to Ocean Outfalls). Their members, some of whom would later make their names in the environmental movement, worked to bring attention to the scale and dangers of ocean pollution and lobbied the government to create alternative waste-management solutions. They knew that political action would only happen through large-scale public pressure. POOO organised marches that attracted local media attention. They were attended by local activists and ordinary people who, like Lea Hill who swims across Bondi Bay every morning, were disgusted at ‘the thought they were just pouring all that into our ocean!’.31 The new local action groups proved powerful. By raising the public profile of Sydney’s sewage pollution problem they forced the government to Late afternoon in 1954, men fishing at Curl Curl, hoping to catch a meal for their families. Although Sydney’s beaches have always attracted fishers, during the beach pollution scandal in 1989 people were alarmed by the high levels of toxins found in fish caught near the ocean outfalls.

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acknowledge – if not solve – the issue. No longer able to play down the scale of beach pollution, and in an effort to appear more transparent, in November 1985 the MWSDB established Surfline, a telephone hotline that reported pollution levels at all metropolitan beaches based on daily ‘look-and-sniff tests’. The testing methodology may have been questionable, but Surfline amplified public concerns about sewage pollution, particularly when results forced the government to temporarily close beaches. This new era of transparency also boosted popular support for the government’s deep ocean outfall investment: there was no denying something needed to be done. In the first half of the 1980s the government had maintained the position – established a century earlier – that swimming in the surf posed no risk to human health: in 1984 the Minister for Natural Resources, Janice Crosio, even took a highly publicised dip at Bondi to persuade the public that bathing was safe. Two years later however, no longer able to ignore the overwhelming scientific evidence, the government finally admitted – via Surfline – that swimming in water polluted by sewage effluent was ‘unsafe’, and could lead to ear, nose and throat infections. This finding was consistent with American and European studies into the health effects of swimming in polluted water conducted over the previous two decades. Those studies also found a strong causal link with gastrointestinal disease. New research also confirmed what some swimmers had long believed – that viruses capable of causing meningitis, myocarditis and other fevers and infections were present in the water off Bondi.32 By 1989 a number of Sydney radio stations were broadcasting their own beach-pollution reports, exacerbating public fears with what coastal councils – who conducted their own tests – condemned as inaccurate scaremongering. Having spent decades trying to compel state governments to eradicate beach pollution, the coastal councils and local businesses now blamed the new high profile afforded to beach pollution on a perceived downturn in coastal tourism. In a bid to make the beaches popular again, they publicly challenged the accuracy of the pollution reports. Again, concerns for the beach economy proved a strong political influence.

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Bondi, Sydney’s most iconic beach, had become the public face of both the pollution problem and the anti-pollution campaigns, and it was to the welfare of Bondi businesses that the media now turned, emphasising the economic impacts of apparently smaller numbers of beachgoers. But other beaches were equally affected. At times when Bondi was free from sewage sludge the beaches north of Manly could be awash with effluent from the North Head and Warriewood outfalls. In the late 1980s, teenager Andrew Sekel and his friends spent their summers and winters surfing around Dee Why and Curl Curl, where they occasionally shared the surf with condoms and partially decomposed fruit. On some days, Andrew recalls, the water was so thick with effluent it was ‘grainy’. The boys regularly had ear, nose and throat infections, which they unflinchingly attributed to spending so much time in the polluted surf.33 But like Kirk Willcox and his friends a decade earlier, it never stopped them. They were among the regular and even daily beachgoers who had grown up swimming at occasionally polluted beaches, and who were undeterred by the increased attention afforded to the sewage problem. Anecdotal evidence may have suggested that tourists were less willing to go to the beach, but for so many locals and regular surfers and swimmers, nothing had changed. In January 1989, after newspapers reported that Sydney’s beaches were polluted by a local oil spill and floating garbage, a Water Board spokesman conceded in a moment of unusual honesty that the city’s beaches were ‘a bloody disaster area’.34 Public awareness and media attention soon reached a crescendo. In a series of stories that were so influential they won their authors Walkley Awards, the Sydney Morning Herald’s Paul Bailey and Alan Tate published the findings of a 1987 study, which had been conducted and kept secret by the SPCC, and other unpublished studies from the 1970s that had found high levels of toxic substances in marine life near the ocean outfalls. Sharon Beder, who later published an account of the politics of Sydney’s sewage pollution, had uncovered the documents while researching her doctoral thesis. Other media outlets joined the enquiry, publishing the results of their own tests, just as they had done in the late 1960s. They also countered the official argument that

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only recreational fishers were affected by citing evidence of a black market, in which seafood caught near the outfalls was supplied to local fish and chip shops. According to Beder, ‘suddenly, sewage pollution became a topic of conversation at dinner parties’. This was what STOP and POOO had been working towards. The new media focus had an instant impact on local seafood industries. Reports citing evidence that Sydney’s beaches were often unsafe for swimming due to toxic chemicals deterred more beachgoers than ever before. The SLSAA threatened to withdraw its members from Sydney beaches and the union that

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represented paid lifeguards also threatened to withdraw their labour, reminding councils they were legally obliged to protect the health of their employees. Doctors along the eastern and northern suburbs weighed in with their own advice and evidence of sick swimmers. Seventy thousand people signed a petition urging the Premier Nick Greiner to ‘give us back our beaches’.35 On 24 March 1989 the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground in Prince William Sound, Alaska, spilling close to 40 000 metric tonnes of crude oil and polluting 2000 kilometres of coastline. Like other significant spills before and after, the More than 200 000 people attend a concert at Bondi in 1989 to protest against sewage pollution. The groundswell against beach pollution could no longer be ignored.

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disturbing images of a heavily polluted coastline and dead and injured wildlife would attract international media attention, spark renewed environmental activism and remind Australians of the fragility of the ocean environment. On the same day, before news of the spill reached Australian shores, more than 200 000 people gathered on Bondi Beach in the largest single event of Sydney’s anti-sewage-pollution campaigns: a free concert titled ‘Turn Back the Tide’. The anti-sewage-pollution campaigns had gained such a following that the concert attracted major corporate and radio sponsors and big-name performers like Dragon, Jimmy Barnes, John Farnham, Angry Anderson, Chrissie Amphlett and Icehouse. It was the best-attended and most-publicised event in the campaign against water pollution in the 1980s, if not the 20th century. Organisers hoped for 50 000 spectators, but more than four times as many came to listen to the music and express their anger at the ongoing pollution. The event raised more than $90 000 for the anti-pollution campaign and fuelled even greater public awareness.36 Many concert-goers may have come to Bondi just for the music. Nonetheless, the momentum against ocean pollution was overwhelming, and the government was forced to act. In the wake of the concert the state government – under the Liberal leadership of Nick Greiner – commissioned a community review into the city’s ‘beach protection program’. It was to be chaired by Member of Parliament and former Olympic swimmer Dawn Fraser and was intended to improve the government’s understanding of community concerns. Among other recommendations the committee suggested that the beaches be regularly monitored by an independent body, which would play a similar role to Surfline but with far greater credibility. The government responded by creating Beachwatch in late 1989, which conducted twice-weekly waterquality sampling combined with daily pollution assessments. Beachwatch was later incorporated into the Environmental Protection Authority and continues to report on the state’s beach pollution from within the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage. Its findings are based on far more rigorous and proven testing methods than Surfline ever used.

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Tu r n i n g t h e tide

Sydney’s deep ocean outfalls opened at Malabar in September 1990, North Head in December 1990 and North Bondi in August 1991. They transported sewage effluent between two and four kilometres off the coast where it was released about 60 to 80 metres below the ocean surface. Diffusers at regular intervals along the pipes ensured the flow was spread along the

ocean floor rather than concentrated in a single area, and the selection of locations was based on extensive fisheries and geological research. As the government had hoped, and experts predicted, the extension of the three largest ocean outfalls had an immediate and positive effect on the levels of pollution along Sydney’s coast. Beachwatch’s earliest reports, published when the cliff-face outfalls were still operating, identified unacceptably high levels of faecal coliform at the beaches between Long Reef and Little Bay. Two years later, all of Sydney’s ocean beaches were found to be suitable for bathing at least 90 per cent of the time, and were free of sewage in the water at least 95 per cent of the time.37 The water at many Sydney beaches was cleaner than it had been in up to a century. The deep ocean outfalls may have led to a reduction in visible sewage plumes close to the coast, and to cleaner beaches, but they did not eliminate ocean pollution. Local environmental groups expressed concern that the new outfalls were simply pushing the pollution problem offshore rather than adequately addressing it, and that fish would continue to be poisoned by toxic waste. Tighter restrictions on industrial waste and newer treatment processes contributed to improvements in water quality closer to the new outlets. But with barely treated sewage still being deposited directly into the sea at Kurnell, beaches around Cronulla continued to be affected by high levels of sewage pollution until the sewerage treatment works were upgraded to ‘tertiary and disinfectant’ in 2001. The design of Sydney’s sewerage system, which overflows into stormwater drains during periods of heavy rain, also meant that stormwater pollution was, and remains, a source of danger to swimmers’ health. Even once

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the deep ocean outfall had been constructed, Malabar remained heavily contaminated by runoff from 14 active stormwater drains and unsuitable for swimming for another two years.38 Public education campaigns in the 1980s and ’90s, which increased public awareness about the direct connection between stormwater drains and ocean beaches, played an important role in educating people about both the implications of polluting stormwater drains and the health risks that come with swimming at the beach after heavy rain. Despite the ongoing concerns in some sections of the community, the visibly cleaner beaches and associated promotional campaigns were credited with bringing more Sydneysiders back to the beach. The impact was most significant at the beaches closest to the former cliff-face outfalls. Surf Life Saving NSW attributed a sharp rise in the membership numbers of several clubs to the cleaner beaches. South Maroubra and North Steyne SLSCs, on beaches that had earlier been strongly affected by the sewage pollution, saw their membership increase by more than 30 per cent.39 By the mid-1990s, media reports of Beachwatch’s water-test results, which compared data across beaches to see which were the cleanest, became a normal part of living in Sydney. Pollution was no longer at the front of peoples’ minds when they went to the beach.

Joining forces

After more than a century of close collaboration between Sydney’s coastal councils in the battle against beach pollution, in 1989 the Sydney Coastal Councils Group was formally created. Formed when public attention on sewage pollution was at its peak, the group aimed to improve the councils’ capacity to work together. Their shared concerns about beach

and coastal management and pollution were central to their early work. The Sydney Coastal Councils Group continues to be an important body dedicated to the sustainable management of Sydney’s coastal environment, and pollution continued to concern the coastal councils. In 2004 the Manly Council banned

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smoking on its beaches to try and eradicate the nuisance of cigarette butts in the sand. Other coastal councils soon followed in the latest in a long line of actions taken by Sydney’s coastal councils to keep their beaches clean. A shared concern about polluted beaches had also galvanised beach-user groups. At the start of the 20th century, surf lifesavers established themselves as representatives of all beachgoers, representing ‘the public’ on a variety of forums concerned with coastal management. They were particularly active in the anti-pollution campaigns, and initiated one of the first joint deputations to government with local councils in 1914.40 Seventy years later, they continued to represent beachgoers and play a prominent role in the anti-pollution campaigns.41 But by the 1980s surf lifesavers were not the only beach-user group formally engaged in the public realm: surfers had broken through the stereotype of long-haired louts and had demanded their voices be heard in the management of the beach environment, joining surf lifesavers as respected spokespeople for matters affecting the nation’s coast. The Australian Surfrider Foundation, an affiliate of an international body that is dedicated to protecting ‘waves and beaches’, and has several branches in Sydney, and similar organisations consolidated surfers’ unofficial role as environmental protectors.

Still keeping watch

In August 2012, during stormy weather and large seas, a dead humpback whale washed into the pool at the southern end of Newport Beach. The 11-metre-long whale attracted a large number of onlookers keen to catch a glimpse of the huge marine mammal in the flesh. The adolescent male had died at sea on its annual migration. Full of the gases of decomposition it had

floated to the surface and was pushed to the coast by strong onshore winds. Dead whales washing onto beaches is becoming a regular occurrence in Sydney and particularly on this stretch of the northern beaches; a sperm whale had washed onto the rocks at the northern end of Newport Beach just one year earlier.

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A whale carcass decomposing on a beach may not be seen by most as ‘pollution’, yet for the authorities that had to decide how to dispose of it and manage divergent public opinions, this was a pollution management problem. The state and federal laws that prohibit dumping garbage at sea also apply to carcass disposal even though, had the whale not washed onto the beach, its carcass would have been subject to natural processes, in which sharks would have played an important role. In the ensuing debate, played out through both social and traditional media, the community wanted a say in the fate of the whale carcass. Some people challenged the idea that the carcass was a form of ‘pollution’, which required intervention by the state, and argued it should be left to natural processes. Others, particularly local residents, feared the whale might emit dangerous toxins and were impatient for it to be removed as quickly as possible. The broader Sydney community was divided about whether it should be towed to sea, buried on the beach or carved up and removed for land burial. But for one day, everyone had an opinion. Thirtyfive per cent of rather enthusiastic respondents to one online newspaper poll suggested the carcass should be blown up – unaware, perhaps, that this had already been tried to spectacular, unpleasant and dangerous effect in Oregon in 1970. 42 The preference among the authorities, too, was for natural processes to resolve the issue: the Co-ordinator of the National Parks and Wildlife Service’s Marine Fauna Program, Geoff Ross, decided, initially, to leave the whale in the pool, correctly anticipating that it would wash out in the high tides overnight. However, as he also anticipated, it washed straight onto the beach, where following examination it remained until workers used chainsaws to carve it up and remove it to a municipal waste facility on the other side of Sydney. Fifty years ago, the local council might have buried it in the sand, as they often did with shark carcasses. The Newcastle Council had tried this two years earlier, only for that whale to reappear, partially decomposed. There was no easy solution.

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Sydney’s beaches are now cleaner than they were for most of the 20th century. But as the appearance of the whale at Newport showed, keeping them as clean as the community demands and expects requires dedicated resources and systems to ensure appropriate pollution disposal methods. The Keep Australia Beautiful organisation has a ‘Clean Beaches’ program that recognises and rewards communities who take pride in maintaining clean coastal landscapes around the country. It represents a broader cultural shift towards a greater respect for clean coastal environments and a better understanding by government and people about the role we all play in keeping the beaches clean. When the colonial government built the first sewage outfall at North Bondi, and Manly Council first buried household garbage in the sand of the ocean beach, they did so with no thought of long-term environmental impacts on an ocean they considered infinite, and beaches they thought of as excess spaces. The ocean was understood to be a limitless entity with the power to purify the excesses of humanity. We now have a century of evidence to show this is not the case. To most Australians the ocean and our beaches are vulnerable environments that must be protected. They are a commodity worth fighting for.

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9 A shifting shoreline In the shadow of Long Reef, ‘a great precipitous bluff that often wore, in summer, a sparkling red coronet of bushfires’, the authors Ruth Park and D’arcy Niland briefly rented a room on Collaroy Beach in the mid-1940s.

Park would soon find fame with her 1948 novel The Harp in the South but the couple struggled professionally and financially in the preceding years. They spent their days at Collaroy ‘scribbling’ on the sand while their daughter played nearby, and their nights ‘close together in front of the gas oven … the only way to get warm enough to be able to write’ in the cold, draughty house. This was a boarding house, in which they had secured a room in desperation. They shared the house with other ‘refugees’ of the post-Depression housing shortage: a ‘cranky old bachelor’, a married couple with ‘half a dozen cats’ and ‘Australia’s Popeye’, a young man who had won a radio contest and was prone to bursting spontaneously into the cartoon’s title song. Neighbouring properties were leased to equally poor servicemen’s families.

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The house was full of cracks and creaking boards and ‘didn’t have a plank that wouldn’t squeal if you walked on it’. When winter came, the old house ‘groaned and muttered’, while the surf outside ‘thundered and snored’. The winter storms captivated Niland who, ‘with thrilled awe would lean out of the salt-encrusted back windows and watch that black sea’. But one night they experienced a storm worse than any other. Deafened by the roaring ocean, the family fled the house as waves began crashing onto the roof and water spurted into the room through one of the window frames. With Park pregnant with their second child, they grabbed some belongings and spent the night with others fleeing the storm in a nearby derelict fruit shop. Returning to survey the damage the following day, Niland found a scene akin to a shipwreck, with ‘piles of half-submerged bricks, bits of furniture, broken fences swinging in mid-air, and beyond them the houses, lopsided, sagging in one corner’. Cruelly, this was a ‘sparkling’ day, and ‘the ocean purred in over all this pathetic wreckage with a smile’. Their room had been inundated to a depth of more than a metre. The sea had smashed the windows, washed seaweed into the house, burst open the cupboard door and smashed the crockery: ‘wreaths of sand, sprinkled with tiny shells, lay everywhere on the buckled linoleum, and a huge black sucker of deep-sea kelp, with about four feet of blade adhering, lay in the middle of the floor’. The water, now receded, had left a pungent stench throughout the room.1 One week later the family fled to Petersham, a suburb safely inland from the city and the surf. Park and Niland’s evocative description of these events, recounted in their memoir several decades later, offers rare insight into the sights and smells that greeted Collaroy residents as they returned to their homes following destructive storms in 1944 and 1945. In experiencing only water inundation, Park and Niland were more fortunate than their neighbours. In May 1944 heavy seas had undermined the foundations of a number of homes on the Collaroy beachfront and washed away several small buildings, including outhouses. Just over a year later in June 1945 winter storms completely destroyed at least two homes on the edge of Collaroy Beach and damaged several more. The damage

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One of several houses damaged by a storm at Collaroy Beach in 1945. Curious onlookers gathered to look before this and neighbouring homes were demolished. The homeowners thought they had built their houses a safe distance from the sea.

at Collaroy, amid four days of heavy rain across the state, was front-page news; this is most likely the storm Park and Niland were caught in. Witnesses reported seeing the surf ‘breaking over the floors of the houses, tearing doors from their hinges and swirling around household furniture’. At the home of one local resident, Mrs Cookson, neighbours reported watching the flooring of her back two rooms ‘fall into the waves’. Her neighbour, Susette Justelius,

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lost two rooms, the laundry and kitchen which, along with their contents, were washed into the sea. Robert McGregor’s weatherboard cottage also ‘seemed to break in half and fell into the sea with a series of loud crashes’. The sea was depicted in the press – just as it was later in Park and Niland’s autobiography – as a predatory beast. It ‘hurled’ furniture and parts of houses around at Collaroy and at Coogee it ‘smashed down the door of the surf club boatshed and dashed one of the surfboats against the wall’. The ocean had launched a surprise attack against which these coastal residents were completely defenceless.2 Further north along the same stretch of sand at Narrabeen, it was windblown sand rather than raging surf that threatened beachfront homes. In November 1943, 13 residents from the northern end of Ocean Street had complained to the Warringah Council that sand was blowing off the beach onto their properties, a ‘menace’ which they feared was ‘engulfing not only land and buildings, but as the sand moves further after each … gale, even the sanitary arrangements, which have to be moved closer to some of the residences’. Six months later, while council employees were frantically sandbagging the disappearing beach at Collaroy, an Australian soldier, Gunner Hancock, became so anxious for the welfare of his Narrabeen family while serving in the war that his unit’s Chaplain sought assistance on his behalf. A visiting social worker confirmed that the sandhills had indeed ‘encroached’ on the house, and that the sanitary arrangements would have to be moved away from the beach’s edge. More than half a kilometre south of the Hancock’s house, Eda Gardiner’s beachfront property was also ‘partly engulfed’ by mid-1945, swallowed by the sand menace that pushed in the side of her garage and ‘worked its way’ around the front of the house so that the doors were beginning to cave in under the weight.3 Severe storms had damaged Sydney’s coastal infrastructure in the past, but the 1945 storm appears to have been the first to completely destroy beachfront homes in Sydney.4 Over the previous four decades, the Narrabeen–Collaroy beachfront had been progressively transformed from vegetated dunes into a suburban landscape that was vulnerable to an encroaching sea. At Narrabeen, Bilgola, Whale Beach, Newport and Mona Vale, houses were built on the edge

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of the sand. The grass of their backyards inched down towards the water and their back fences were built precariously on the edge of sand cliffs, marking the only visible line between private and public spaces. These parts of the northern beaches were included in land grants that originated in the 1810s and early 1820s, before regulations required reserves be set between private property and the ocean. These blocks of land were therefore bounded on the east side simply by the ‘high water mark of the ocean’ the ‘beach of the ocean’, or even just the ‘Pacific Ocean’ itself.5 At Bondi, Curl Curl and parts of Cronulla the government had resumed the beaches for public use in the 1880s, but at these northern beaches the original property boundaries remained, so homeowners could build to the edge of the sand. An attempt by the government to buy back the Collaroy–Narrabeen beachfront in 1908 to secure more ‘healthy’ coastal spaces for future generations had failed, leaving the beach divided among some 200 private lots, and leaving property owners free to build their homes on the sea’s edge. It was not until 1957, long after these storms, that the entire Narrabeen– Collaroy Beach was formally gazetted for public recreation. The disappearing beach at Collaroy and mounting sand at Narrabeen were part of the same natural beach process in which sand is moved by wind and waves usually, in Sydney, in a northerly direction. Few who built along the beach strip understood at the time that their homes, built in place of dunes, trapped the sand, removing the natural buffer against wave erosion and disrupting the beach’s ability to repair itself after storms. The destruction of most of the native dune vegetation associated with suburban development also exacerbated the effect of wind-blown sand. Not only did these houses interfere with the natural beach processes, it was their very presence that created the problem of erosion. Shorelines perpetually oscillate and dunes and beach systems are naturally mobile and unstable, but along these northern beaches, the resulting threats to property and infrastructure turned coastal erosion from a natural process into a disaster. The Narrabeen residents and their Collaroy neighbours, fearing future damage, deferred responsibility for saving and fortifying their homes to the

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Warringah Council. The council deferred upwards too, enlisting the government’s Soil Conservation Service to offer advice to the owners of sandinundated properties at Narrabeen. As the damage from storms and winds escalated, and larger numbers of property owners approached the council seeking assistance, the council became more reluctant to help, informing coastal property owners that they were responsible for protecting and repairing their own properties. The council invested, instead, in preserving and protecting its own coastal infrastructure, which had also been damaged in the storms.6 Collaroy property owners disagreed about the best method of protection against storm inundation. Some begged the council to extend the seawall to protect their properties, others requested that groynes be built along the beach to hold the sand in – all suggestions the council ignored. But those whose houses had been most damaged by the storms saw no future in occupying beachfront land, preferring to abandon their properties altogether. This was an approach the council and government did support. At the landowners’ request, the Warringah Council and state government together resumed Robert McGregor’s property and those of at least eight of his neighbours. They demolished the houses that remained along the eastern side of Pittwater Road from Jenkins to Fielding streets and halfway along the next block, turning this stretch of the beach into a recreation reserve and, later, a car park. The state government now acknowledged that the job of ‘combating’ sea erosion was too big for local government. It was also keen to provide a buffer that would protect its own road assets, so the resumption was mutually beneficial.7 Few realised in 1945 that the damage at Collaroy was the culmination of a series of severe storm events over several years, rather than the result of a single storm. Yet governments, property developers and coastal residents now had irrefutable evidence of the risks of building on the ocean’s edge. The investment by local and state governments in converting homes and gardens to open spaces suggests that in the mid-1940s the political tide was turning away from private investment towards risk prevention. Yet against the scale of the Collaroy–Narrabeen Beach, the resumption of a handful of private properties

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was insignificant. This would be the first and last major land resumption for the purposes of erosion mitigation in Sydney. Even after the storms of the mid1940s people continued to build new homes on the edge of the beach with the consent of the local government. As the size and volume of new beachfront developments increased, the stakes of future storm damage were raised.

Building on the beaches

The three decades that followed the 1944 and 1945 storms offered little respite for coastal property owners. Severe storms in 1946, ’49 and ’50 caused further damage, stripping sand from the beaches and destroying and damaging the seawalls, car parks, roads, promenades and surf-club buildings that framed Sydney’s coast. The Sutherland Shire Council

demolished the threatened North Cronulla surf lifesaving clubhouse in 1946, and in 1950 the roots of some of Manly’s famous Norfolk Island pines were exposed, leading to fears the trees might fall onto buildings. In September 1967, large storms coincided with king tides in the one of the most severe coastal storms on record. As a result of this powerful event parts of the road and parking area at Warriewood collapsed and, at Palm Beach, a length of the promenade was destroyed leading to fears the surf pavilion might collapse – vindicating the Town Planning Association’s warnings against constructing these facilities so close to the beach three decades earlier. The storm caused enormous damage to the east coast north of Sydney too. On Queensland’s Gold Coast an ‘army of workers’ laboured for nearly 36 hours in the storm filling sandbags and dumping old cars and concrete drums around buildings. But a $100 000 block of flats and several houses were destroyed.8 These storms temporarily transformed Sydney’s coastline, scouring millions of cubic metres of sand out of the beaches. Repairing the damage strained coastal councils’ resources and alarmed politicians who acknowledged the scale of the damage but provided no assistance to local government authorities.

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More significantly, each new erosion event divided the community, reigniting debate about the relative responsibilities of governments and property owners and renewing fears about the precarious future of coastal development. By the 1960s, coastal property owners who continued to seek government assistance attracted little sympathy from other ratepayers who were becoming increasingly critical of those who chose to build their homes on the edge of the sea. Many ratepayers resented proposals to use public money to protect private property, and began to argue that it was the beaches that should be protected rather than private property. This sparked a battle over property defence that continues into the 21st century. A decision by the Warringah Council to permit the construction of multi-storey unit blocks along the Collaroy beachfront exacerbated tensions. It signalled to opponents of over-development that the council was more interested in rate revenue than ensuring appropriate construction in the fragile coastal environment. A new battle loomed over what constituted ‘appropriate’ development of the privately owned spaces that abutted the beach. In the early 1960s an advertisement appeared for home units in a new block on the edge of Collaroy Beach that would stretch seven storeys high. Built on the site of the Alexander family home ‘Shipmates’, the new block kept the name. All units in the block faced the ocean, boasting, according to the advertisement, ‘unrivalled panoramic views over a wide strip of golden sands and headlands’ and each with an ‘unusually spacious’ veranda to bring the beach into peoples’ homes. Soon Shipmates’ developer, ET Lennon, constructed ‘Flight Deck’, an apartment block twice as high on adjoining land. The two buildings towered above neighbouring beachfront properties, including the considerably shorter three-storey unit blocks that were springing up along the beach, and over the beach itself.9 Lennon was defiantly proud of the buildings, the first stages in his vision for Collaroy–Narrabeen Beach that would see it ‘properly’ developed like ‘a Miami [or] Honolulu’, and that included several more high-rise residential flats and ‘perhaps a first class tourist hotel’. Some beachfront property

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owners welcomed the potential for these and similar developments to increase local land values, and certainly the units were popular. But many more did not want their beach transformed into a Miami or Honolulu and demanded the council prevent the construction of more units. Under sustained pressure, the Warringah Council relented. It attempted to again rezone the strip along Collaroy Beach, intending to stop multi-storey development and resume more coastal land, to ensure the beach, which the Shire President now declared a ‘national asset’, was not ‘lost to the people for ever’. A state election in 1966 brought intervention from the new, prodevelopment Liberal Government. Under the leadership of the local Member for Collaroy, Robin ‘Bob’ Askin, the new government overruled the council in favour of a scheme that permitted apartment buildings according to so-called stringent new conditions. The council did not resume 50 per cent of the beachfront as it had proposed, but neither were new large-scale developments permitted, ensuring that Lennon’s vision for a shoreline overshadowed by high-rise apartment blocks and hotels was not realised. But in Shipmates, Flight Deck and ‘Marquesas’, which was constructed several blocks to the north, the Collaroy beachfront bore the scars of this brief battle for a low-rise coast-scape.10 Inevitably perhaps, Shipmates and Flight Deck were seriously undermined by the 1967 storms. Council workers and volunteers rushed to stack hundreds of tonnes of rock, cement and rubble against the buildings to stabilise them. Lennon denied they were at risk of collapse but the damage was plain to see. The cost was borne by the unit owners.11 That the apartments were just a block from the areas damaged and resumed in the late 1940s did not escape notice. For those who had opposed the high-rise developments several years earlier, the threats the 1967 erosion event posed to Shipmates and Flight Deck opened old wounds. Twenty-two years after a handful of Collaroy residents first lost their homes, the media no longer portrayed beachfront homeowners as victims. Most now considered those who built on the edge of the sand were responsible for their own fate. People from across Sydney condemned appeals by Collaroy residents to

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the Warringah Council in 1967 to build a retaining wall to protect their properties, and accused them of an ‘ostrich-like disregard’ for building so close to the sea in the first place.12 Leone Huntsman, who more than 30 years later would write a compelling history of Australia’s beach cultures, wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald accusing the homeowners of ‘greed and stupidity’: Everyone knows that homes should never have been built there, and that the sea will eventually claim them, no matter what is done. The only sane course is to demolish these unsightly structures.13

Huntsman and so many others were incensed at the suggestion public money might be spent on shoring up private property that was built with known risk. But they also resented private ownership over what many argued should be public spaces. At the heart of the argument was an assumption that it was up to the ‘people’ to decide what kind of beach they wanted. Those who spoke up made it clear they wanted beaches that were free from unsightly, overshadowing developments and bordered, instead, by open spaces. When one week later, Willoughby resident James Colman accused developers of ‘systematically rap(ing) many a beautiful stretch of coastline’, he articulated a growing concern about exploitation and destruction of the coastal environment that stretched from overdevelopment to sand mining: We have looked upon our foreshore land not as a precious community asset but, as an expendable commodity, to be divided and sold like any other consumer product. We have interfered with the ecological balance of nature, and have ignored the delicate relationships which exist between water, sand, vegetation, wind and climate. In the light of such behaviour we are in no position to complain when nature attempts to redress the situation. 14

Calls such as these, for a radical new approach to coastal zone management, were being heard more often. Local and state governments were increasingly reluctant to provide assistance to private property owners, and public protests would eventually see an end to large-scale mineral sand mining on the state’s

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beaches outside of Sydney. But neither governments nor homeowners nor developers were willing or able to abandon coastal property altogether. Private and public investment in land along the coast needed to be balanced against the growing community concerns.

T h e science of the beach

The

greater

environmental

awareness

among

Australians that was already fuelling aggression against polluted oceans and beaches was coming to influence the ways people thought about coastal development too. But the movement against buildings like Shipmates and Flight Deck was also informed by an improved understanding of the natural beach itself.

Since the early 20th century just a handful of scientists had studied and published reports on coastal erosion – the government botanist JH Maiden and geologist EC Andrews foremost among them. But until the 1960s expert advice rarely informed public debate. By 1967 there was an ‘expert’ group within the community who knew, from first-hand experience, the effects of storm events and sand drift. And now expert comment from a new generation of scientists and engineers was also becoming available. Their insightful explanations and observations, which were quoted in media coverage of significant erosion events, began to feed greater public knowledge about natural beach processes and the effects of coastal development on the environment. The University of New South Wales’ Water Research Laboratory at Manly and the University of Sydney’s Department of Geography were at the forefront of a new discipline – coastal studies. In America, coastal studies had been established in the 1950s, funded by the US navy that wanted better knowledge to improve wartime coastal operations. But by the 1960s the discipline was responding to the growing social and economic costs of coastal erosion in many regions of the world. An understanding of beach ‘morphodynamics’ (the study of relationships between different elements of a beach system, including waves,

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tides and sand movement) was pioneered in America and brought to Australia by scientists such as Bruce Thom, Don Wright and Andrew Short. By the early 1970s, they were among a new generation of Sydney-based coastal geographers and engineers who were sharing ideas, new knowledge and expertise. They were also conducting internationally valuable research along the Sydney coast. In 1976 Sydney University established its own Coastal Studies Unit, soon confirming its leading role in the field. As surfers were consolidating their claim on the waves, and nudists were finding a space on the sand, Sydney’s beaches were serving as the laboratories of these researchers. For the University of Sydney’s Andrew Short, Narrabeen Beach was both his office and his local surf break. The research conducted through these institutions brought new knowledge about when and how the modern coastline was formed, the ways beaches respond to wave heights and how beaches rotate and recede. It also improved the understanding of rips. Through coring and dating the sand, and related research, these scientists learnt that Australia’s modern coastline was formed when sea levels rose to their present position around 6000 years ago. Sydney’s beaches were created when sand, which originated on the continental shelf, was transferred to the inner shelf and then onshore by wave action, where it formed beaches backed by a series of dunes. Rising sea levels drowned coastal valleys, forming estuaries such as Narrabeen Lagoon, while the headlands were eroded to form sea cliffs. Coastal geographers were stunned to discover that Collaroy Beach lies above the remnants of a Pleistocene beach, which existed in a similar location around 110 000 years ago. This knowledge, and other new scientific evidence, also demonstrated that poorly designed seawalls, and other structures built to arrest sand drift, can interfere with natural beach processes and make erosion worse. These earlier strategies, which were put in place to prevent erosion, clearly needed a re-think. The new scientific understanding showed how those who had built their houses on the edge of the sea had inadvertently locked up the beach’s sand reserves and contributed to the very problems they were sporadically fighting against. This new scientific knowledge also proved that far from threatening the

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future of the beaches, significant storm events such as those in 1945, 1950 and 1967 were part of the natural cycle of coastal dynamics; the sand that particular storms washed away from beaches would eventually be returned by waves and wind. Human intervention, however, in the form of buildings, seawalls, the construction of stormwater drains and permanent removal of sand from the coastal dunes, disrupted the natural process. The team from Sydney University understood and demonstrated for the first time that the instability of eastern Once a common sight on Sydney beaches, horses and carts were used to remove thousands of tons of sand over many decades. While the impact of an individual cartload might seem small, the cumulative effect was devastating.

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Australia’s coastal dunes had a history many thousands of years old.15 Gradually the new science began to influence the thinking by governments at all levels about coastal protection. Nonetheless, governments and interest groups continued to disagree about the causes of the erosion, the longevity of the problem and also the best – or most affordable – solution. Meanwhile, houses and infrastructure remained unprotected along the shoreline.

The biggest storms

In 1974, Sydney experienced the most severe and damaging coastal storm on record. On 25 May, 28-year-old Angus Gordon, living at Narrabeen and working as a coastal engineer with the Department of Public Works, ‘became aware that things were most unusual at around midnight’. He walked out to see the beach being battered by heavy seas and later in

the night, attempting to drive north, he was stunned to see waves breaking over the Ocean Street bridge about three blocks inland from the beach. ‘It was frightening, there was no way you could cross there’, he recalled. Having returned home to collect his modified beach buggy, Gordon eventually crossed the flooded bridge and drove north along the coast to observe the damage as it unfolded. At Bilgola Beach, the seawall, which had been hastily constructed after the 1967 storm, had been wrecked. He watched the waves erode the sand from under a number of buildings and realised with horror that ‘some of the houses were starting to go in’. One Bilgola resident told reporters the following day that ‘the sea hit the beachfront homes like a huge tidal wave, entering rooms and sucking out furniture’ – an account that likely sent shivers down Ruth Park’s spine. The following morning, Gordon travelled to Balmoral, Manly and along the northern beaches to survey the damage. He saw a yacht that had been lifted by waves and the elevated waters into the Balmoral baths, somehow without damaging the boardwalk that skirted its perimeter. He saw boats on top of the

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seawall on the harbour side of Manly and yachts on beaches throughout Middle Harbour. Part of the Manly wharf on the harbour side of the peninsula had collapsed, the Manly baths were demolished – never to be rebuilt – and the adjacent boardwalk lay in pieces across the sand. Many amenity and surf lifesaving club buildings along the coast were damaged, some of their foundations were undermined, and at Newport two surfboats were swept out of the surf club building. Norfolk Island pines were uprooted at Palm Beach and Whale Beach, and the surf damaged or destroyed large sections of seawalls, rockpools, concrete paths, access steps and ramps across the city. Huge rocks, up to 15 cubic metres, were deposited in rockpools at Maroubra and Coogee. Waves came so far inland they undermined and caused the partial collapse of the seawall at Bondi, and washed sand onto Campbell Parade.16 Outside of Sydney the damage was also severe. Along the coast at least seven people drowned in boat accidents or by being swept into the sea; a 53 000-ton freighter, the Sygna was driven up on Stockton Beach at Newcastle where the stern remains today; and a waterside restaurant was destroyed at La Perouse. At the Central Coast north of Sydney, 100 beachfront homes were evacuated and the State Emergency Service used more than 150 000 sandbags and 4000 steel pickets to protect homes that were in imminent danger from encroaching waves.17 It would take the beaches years to recover. To the relief of their occupants, the Collaroy apartment blocks Flight Deck and Shipmates, which had been undermined in the 1967 storms, were spared. However ‘Marquesas’, the seven-storey apartment blocks that had been erected further north along the beach, were now at risk. Angus Gordon was among the engineers engaged to provide advice on stabilising Marquesas and the properties at Bilgola. The team arranged for huge rocks from Prospect quarry to be placed in front of Marquesas and for more than 2000 tonnes of rocks to be tipped onto the beach at Bilgola to temporarily replace the absent rock wall. The new erosion also threated houses at the southern end of Newport Beach.18 Residents and council workers had just finished the remediation works when a second storm hit in early June. Although this storm was less severe and

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the tides were far smaller than in May, with beaches already denuded of sand the waves ‘did the rest of the damage, and just kept tearing things out’. It was the cumulative effect of the two storms that made them so destructive. Around 60 homes on the Central Coast were again threatened, but fortunately the protection works only just completed at Collaroy and Bilgola – at the expense of the property owners – were sufficient to protect those properties from complete destruction.19 The damage bill in the wake of the storms overwhelmed coastal councils, prompting the Mayor of Manly, Alderman Manning, to declare that ‘I almost feel like putting Manly municipality up for sale’. His council requested The calm after the storm. In 1974 the seawall and promenade at North Cronulla were torn apart by powerful waves. The significant damage to homes and infrastructure along Sydney’s coast would take years to rebuild.

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$1 million from the federal government to repair the pool, baths, wharf and retaining wall on the harbour side of the peninsula. The cost of the repair and rebuilding of surf club buildings along the northern beaches alone was estimated at $100 000 [equivalent to around $750 000 in 2013] – money the councils did not have.20

Repairing the coast

Despite some government financial support, six months after the storms many beaches and beachfront infrastructure remained significantly damaged. The north end of Maroubra was still devoid of sand. At Cronulla Beach the promenade lay ‘smashed in half’ and there was still no sand at the southern end of the beach, only rocks and boulders, which were

exposed at low tide and posed a danger to swimmers during high tide. Concrete blocks, remnants of the promenade, still lay on the beach at North Cronulla. In a report commissioned by the Sutherland Shire Council the Water Research Laboratory proposed three solutions for repairing the Cronulla beaches and preventing future damage. At between $2 million and $4 million, none of the options was affordable.21 The NSW government had initiated the ‘Coastal Lands Protection Scheme’ earlier in the 1970s to resume thousands of hectares of coastal land to protect against ‘undesirable development’. The scheme resulted in the creation of substantial new national parks and state recreation areas along the state’s coast. But it excluded Sydney and Newcastle, where coastal property was considerably more expensive and coastal development was significantly more advanced. Now, in the wake of the 1974 storms, the government faced renewed pressure to address controversial coastal development and the impacts of coastal erosion on private and public property. It was being asked to provide not only financial assistance to councils and private property owners, but to produce a comprehensive long-term plan to deal with the ongoing damage to

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private and public property along the stretch of coast between Wollongong and Newcastle. In 1975, the government announced a $5 million ‘Beach Improvement Program’ to restore and improve storm-damaged beaches in Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong. Keeping to the view that homeowners were responsible for protecting their own beachfront properties, the program was restricted to protecting public assets. It included provisions to improve the public use of affected beaches to bring them to what the Liberal Premier Thomas Lewis considered to be ‘international standards’. In this sense the program represented a throwback to the 1920s philosophy of ‘beach improvements’ that had earlier inspired the transformation of Sydney’s coastal landscape. Like so many other state government programs it was an investment in the long-term tourist appeal of the city’s beaches as much as it was about repairing storm damage.22 Angus Gordon, who just a year earlier had watched the storm unfold, was appointed manager of the Beach Improvement Program at the Department of Public Works. He considered dunes, as ‘nature’s seawalls’, to be the best engineering solution to the erosion problem and used the program funds to experiment with different designs and materials in the reconstruction of sand dunes. Nearly a century after the first seawall was built at Coogee with very little understanding of coastal processes or the impact that such a structure would have, Sydney’s beaches would be ‘improved’ through the careful reconstruction of something akin to the ‘natural’ coastal landscape. Over the next decade, the program contributed to a complete reconfiguration of the coast between Newcastle and Wollongong. Severely eroded sand dunes were rebuilt and revegetated, new landscaping was carried out and access to the beaches was improved. Many of the coastal landscapes with which Sydney residents are so familiar and which appear ‘natural’ – beaches bordered by vegetated dunes interspersed by sandy pathways that run from car parks to the beach – were largely constructed by the Department of Public Works and local councils as part of this program between 1975 and 1985. At Freshwater a stone seawall remains buried beneath the dune that was reconstructed through

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this program, preserved by the council for its heritage value despite having contributed to the beach’s erosion problems. A training wall that was built at the entrance to the Dee Why Lagoon to protect the beach from overflows was also concealed under artificial dunes. Stormwater and drainage works were improved at Palm Beach, Mona Vale, Newport and Maroubra. Car parks were redesigned at Maroubra, Clovelly, Wanda, Elouera and Palm Beach, and at A truck tips yet another load of sand onto Cronulla Beach. Between 1977 and 1981, 80 000 cubic metres of sand were brought from the Kurnell sand dunes and deposited on this beach, including enough sand to replenish Wanda and Eleoura beaches through natural processes.

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Freshwater and Long Reef the sealed areas of the car parks were reduced and grassed areas created for overflow parking. The pavilion at Maroubra Beach was demolished and rebuilt. At North Cronulla a new seawall was designed to absorb rather than reflect wave energy, unintentionally creating a structure that would become an important ‘hangout’ for local young people. The injection of some federal employment scheme money in 1982 enabled the program to be extended onto beaches in front of private property, and funded the reshaping and revegetation of dunes on the northern parts of the Collaroy–Narrabeen Beach, Curl Curl and in front of the Mona Vale golf course.23 The Beach Improvement Program represented a substantial bipartisan commitment to repairing and improving the state’s most popular beaches and preparing them for future major storms. But many beachgoers remained concerned about the effect of overdevelopment on recreation areas and the integrity of the beaches. Coastal homeowners remained concerned about their properties. Interstate, the challenges of managing coastal erosion and development had led to the creation of a Queensland Beach Protection Authority in 1969 and South Australian Coastal Protection Board three years later, but the NSW government had resisted calls to create a similar central body. Eventually it too yielded to the pressure for a more cohesive approach, and the Labor Minister for Public Works, Jack Ferguson, oversaw the creation of the Coastal Protection Act 1979 to guide future planning in the state’s coastal zone. In an important acknowledgment of the potential environmental impacts of beachfront developments, the Act required ministerial approval for developments on beaches and dunes. This was the start of a new era of state intervention in coastal zone management. It also created the NSW Coastal Council to provide advice to the Minister for Planning and Environment on coastal matters. The appointment of Trevor Langford Smith, Professor of Geography at the University of Sydney, as chairman of the new body attested to the new political influence Sydney’s coastal scientists and engineers had attained in the wake of the 1974 storms. They were the experts to whom the government now turned to provide direction on future developments.

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The Gold Coast cringe

Despite the new legislative controls coastal developments remained contentious. Those who protested the Collaroy apartment developments in the 1960s had been among the first in a line of anti-development crusaders who fought against a boom in the building of apartment blocks along the coast. Soon, local residents were fighting proposed developments at

Avalon and North Bondi. The people who argued against high-rise buildings were part of a global backlash against new urban planning powers that favoured developers. They joined other Sydney residents who fought rezoning of their neighbourhoods in the 1960s and ’70s due to fears it would place new strains on infrastructure, cause traffic congestion, change local community dynamics and reduce property values. Aesthetic concerns were also central.24 Closer to the beach, residents had other concerns too. Opposition to new coastal development continued to be tied up with fears about its impact on the shifting shoreline and the vulnerability of new buildings. The crusaders also reacted strongly against what they believed were threats to coastal amenity, arguing that beaches needed to be preserved for the enjoyment of the community and that new large developments might threaten access to the beach, or remove open spaces around the beaches. The apparent concern for the wellbeing of the entire beach-going community by some local action groups is ironic given they were often fighting to protect their own backyards from unwanted development and the new residents and tourists they may attract. Opponents to high-rise developments along the coast were also driven by a ‘Gold Coast cringe’. They condemned the towering post-war buildings along the southern Queensland coast for desecrating the coastal landscape and casting shadows on the beach. They fought attempts to replicate such developments on the Sydney coastline, even, as was the case at Bondi, if they were at some distance from the beach itself. In the face of criticism from across Australia, the Mayor of the Gold Coast and a major local developer, Bruce Small, used a novel defence. He claimed that the shadows his buildings cast

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on beaches created spaces where people could enjoy themselves safe from the newly discovered risks of skin cancer.25 But while the Gold Coast attracted a particular type of investor and resident who may have sympathised with Small, opposition to the ‘crass commercialism’ that was associated with high-density development echoed along the NSW coast.26 Sydney’s coastal anti-development crusaders attracted widespread support from organisations keen to preserve and promote the aesthetics of a more natural or low-rise coastal environment, including the National Trust and the Parks and Playgrounds Movement. The Builders’ Labourers Federation imposed one of its famous ‘Green Bans’ on the second of two high-rise towers being erected at Manly in 1973. The support of these groups was crucial in articulating, and reinforcing in the public mind, not just what a beach should be but how areas surrounding beaches should appear.27 The Land and Valuation Court’s 1970 ruling against an eight-storey block of flats at Harbord on the basis it would ‘scar or mar’ the beach and create an undesirable precedent sent a powerful signal to governments and developers that these public expectations needed to be taken seriously – although development pressures here would soon win out. Bob Carr – the Member for Maroubra in the Labor government led by Neville Wran – was also a powerful ally. An avid bushwalker, Carr’s renowned passion for environmental conservation included a commitment to protecting the coastal environment. He felt the Gold Coast cringe more strongly than most, and he had the power to shape the coast. Future Premier and Minister for Planning and the Environment from 1984 until 1988, Carr set a five-storey limit on developments on the NSW south coast and declared, according to one newspaper, that he would not allow ‘tacky, Queensland-type development like that of the Gold Coast to spread along the NSW coast’. Carr also intervened in the planning process at Manly in 1986, ordering developers to redesign a hotel and unit complex to ‘protect’ the beach from shadows, insisting that ‘the State Government supported hotel development but it wanted to avoid the problems that beset the Gold Coast’.28

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In 1985, Carr also intervened in a planning fight over Bondi Beach. He claimed the beach’s significance as a tourist destination made the council’s proposal to redesign the park and rezone private land more than a local issue. The Waverley Council had briefly considered redeveloping Bondi Beach in the early 1970s, but abandoned its $60 million plan for high-rise residential towers and the relandscaping of Bondi Park – which would have included demolition of the iconic Bondi Pavilion – due to its prohibitive cost. When a later council considered ‘upgrading’ the beach and suburb in the mid-1980s, residents – now consisting of more young, middle-class professionals – revolted. The Mayor claimed he wanted to ‘put a bit of life into Bondi: it’s stale and grotty and it’s got to be done’, but residents, fearing they would be priced out of the suburb, denied that Bondi needed fixing and demanded that its character be preserved.29 In their fight to protect the local use of Bondi against the forces of development, they found support in Carr, whose vision of a Bondi Beach that enhanced its tourist potential was aesthetically, although not philosophically, aligned with their own ideals. At issue in this battle was the ‘character’ of Bondi. Bondi Beach had been heralded as the glory of Australia in the inter-war years but by the 1960s the gloss had faded. The beach and surrounding suburb were becoming increasingly degraded and less inviting to families. The Bondi that author Peter Corris depicted in his 1983 novel (and later film) The Empty Beach was a violent, sleazy suburb, riddled with junkies and with drugs being sold ‘in the pubs, in cars, on the beach’. The media also portrayed Bondi – rightly or wrongly – as a suburb defined by ‘the sleaze, the junkies, the petty thefts and the hotel overflow of raucous drunks and smashed bottles’.30 In the minds of many, the pollution in the water symbolised the decay of the entire suburb. Carr ordered the Waverley Council to involve local residents in the planning for a new Bondi. Two years later, still concerned about the council’s management of the beach and surrounding area, he placed development restrictions on the area that required the council to refer to his department for any development applications because of Bondi’s ‘significance to State tourism

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and regional planning and the need to ensure the best design possible’.31 Under so much scrutiny the council abandoned its most radical plans for redeveloping Bondi. But despite locals’ attempts to quarantine the beach, Bondi inevitably continued to attract tourists, beachgoers from across the city, developers and governments keen to make the most of income from tourism. Carr himself acknowledged the importance of tourism when he permitted the construction of an international hotel at the northern end of Campbell Parade. Low- and Shoreline erosion, seen here at Palm Beach, is an ongoing challenge. Decades of development has altered the coastal landscape across Sydney, interfering with natural beach processes and limiting regeneration after storms.

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middle-income workers would soon be priced out of the suburb, as they had feared. But their initial protests, and Carr’s aversion to a high-rise coast-scape, had ensured the architectural character of Sydney’s most iconic beach suburb was largely preserved. In 2000 another battle would erupt over the construction of an Olympic volleyball stadium on Bondi Beach. With experts including Andrew Short finding a 25 per cent probability the stadium would be washed away, its construction was a considerable risk in the face of substantial community opposition. Again, people showed through public action that they did not want their beach desecrated and closed off, no matter how significant the event. But they ultimately had little say in the use of a beach that held such broader political significance. Such was the perceived international appeal of Bondi Beach that the government and Olympic organisers were willing to gamble the stability of the stadium for an opportunity to showcase Bondi Beach to the world.32

Protecting property

Along the coast where private property is threatened by erosion or severe storm events, the subject of property protection continues to polarise the community. The Beach Improvement Program had transformed much of Sydney’s coastal landscape in the late 1970s and early 1980s but it did little to protect private property. The Warringah Council tried on

several occasions to erect a seawall along the Collaroy–Narrabeen Beach but met resistance from a handful of property owners and majority of beach users who cited environmental, social, visual and economic concerns.33 This is a substantially different outcome to America where, according to the science journalist Cornelia Dean, ‘in a contest between the somewhat abstract idea that a wall may eventually damage the public’s beach and the property owners’ all-too certain knowledge that their buildings are about to fall to the sea,

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political reality usually dictates the decision: save the buildings, not the beach’.34 The vocal opposition to a seawall at Collaroy–Narrabeen confirmed that scientific knowledge about the potentially negative impact of seawalls on the beach system had penetrated public consciousness. Scientific studies continue to be critical in the early 21st century as governments and communities seek to understand the implications of predicted sea-level rise associated with climate change. Semi-regular erosion events along the NSW coast have also ensured that coastal erosion, and its potential threat to built structures, continues to attract media attention and remains high on government agendas. The scientific research that began on Sydney’s beaches in the 1960s and ’70s has both contributed to global understanding of long-term shoreline change and provided a critical knowledge base for more recent studies conducted to better understand and predict the impacts of a changing climate. Coastal science has expanded into the public arena in other ways. In 1990 Andrew Short, in partnership with Surf Life Saving Australia, began a comprehensive analysis of all of Australia’s more than 11 000 beaches. The study included the development of a database containing information on each beach, partly to improve beach safety by giving surf lifesavers and swimmers new knowledge. The work represented a new frontier for coastal geomorphological research, and the information Short’s team developed is now available online for all beachgoers to view before heading to the beach. Rob Brander, a coastal geographer widely known as ‘Dr Rip’, also works closely with surf lifesaving authorities in Sydney. His team’s research into rip currents is the most in-depth rip-current research conducted in Australia to date. It ensures that our understanding of rip behaviours is far superior to that of a century ago when the cursed ‘undertow’ was blamed for luring swimmers to their death on many Sydney beaches. Brander famously uses purple dye to educate the public about rips. His team also enlists volunteers to jump into rips so that they can study the effectiveness of different escape strategies. They are the human guinea pigs in Sydney’s beach laboratory of the 21st century.

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Standing on the beach at Collaroy today, you can see the gaps – now car parks – where resumed houses once stood. Few visitors would realise the dramatic events that unfolded in these spaces in the mid-1940s. Seventy years later we have a far better understanding of coastal processes and wave dynamics than ever before, but development pressures remain strong. As governments, developers and communities continue to try and strike a balance between private property rights, environmental protection and preserving the beaches for recreation, the battle for Sydney’s beaches rages on.

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Epilogue: Beyond the breakers Coogee is my beach. In the northern corner, past the breakers and away from the crowds vying for space between the flags, we dive into the surf, the cool water washing away the intense summer heat.

We watch snorkellers paddle around the rocky outcrops and listen to teenagers leaping into the remnants of Giles’ baths. On the headland above them, the old doorway to the baths reminds us that people once paid for the privilege of swimming in this safe, gender-segregated space, now little more than a ruin of rocks and cement. The park on the headland is now known as a memorial to the victims of the 2002 Bali bombings and is the starting point for the popular five-kilometre walk to Bondi Beach. It was also here, on the edge of the cliff below the old baths entrance, that our friends Megan and Rob were married one magnificent November day in a more recent Sydney beach ritual.

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To the south, the beach spreads out. Backpackers recovering from the night before fry in the sun, yesterday’s sunburn glowing pink as they add another layer. The volunteer surf lifesavers, a stark contrast in shorts, hats and long-sleeved shirts, and protected from the sun in their red and yellow tent emblazoned with a sponsor’s logo, watch the crowds swimming between the flags – perhaps the most widely spaced red and yellow flags in Sydney. Behind them, under the promenade skirting the beach, are the paid council lifeguards in their distinctive blue uniforms. Unlike the lifesavers they are here every day. The grassed area behind the promenade is full of families and social groups cooking barbecues and eating fish and chips and ice creams: typical beach food. On the southern corner of the beach, nestled below the yellow clubhouse built for male lifesavers, the surf gently washes over the edge of the free baths in which elderly people and young families cool themselves. But Coogee Beach doesn’t end here at the limits of the sand. Around the corner are two more baths: Wylie’s, first built by the father of Olympian Mina Wylie in 1907 and now displaying distinctive blue and yellow awnings, and McIvers Baths, built in the 1880s and listed on the NSW Heritage Register for its significance as the only continuous female-only bathing site and for its significance to the female community of New South Wales. Here, women of all ages and from diverse cultural backgrounds swim or lounge about in the water and lie on grass and rocks around the headland – alone or with friends, lovers, sisters, mothers and daughters. There’s a sense of relaxed camaraderie between the women, wearing from next-to-nothing to completely covered, and a freedom that comes from the absence of male eyes. In 2012, it still cost twenty cents to visit these baths, paid through an honesty system by throwing coins through a grate into a blue bucket a couple of metres away. For someone with bad aim who doesn’t like to miss, it can cost a little more. Each of Sydney’s beaches is physically, socially and culturally distinct; the extent of adjoining parkland and car parks, the proximity of houses and even the accessibility for beachgoers were mapped out by historical decisions that weighed possible private interests and expense against public demand. Each

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beach has its own culture, partly determined by historical factors and local demographics that have evolved over more than a century. But like Coogee, they share a strong sense of the past, which is present in buildings and infrastructure and in the ways people use and think about the beaches. Fashions and the limits of socially acceptable behaviour may have changed, but Sydneysiders continue to think of time spent at the beach as ‘healthy’ recreation – good for mind, body and soul. Each beach also has its own locals and its own regulars from further afield, with their own attachments. Some people have a tribal connection – they see the beach as their beach; a place to which they have a right to go; a place worth protecting and preserving as clean, free and always there. They may take this for granted but, if history is anything to go by, should the need arise again they would fight for their beach.

Two centuries after the first coastal land grants were issued by the colonial authorities, Sydneysiders are still learning about the coast. We have a better understanding of currents, swells and how to extricate ourselves from trouble, and surf lifesavers and paid lifeguards have access to new technologies to aid their work. We have more information about which shark species are most likely to attack humans. We have scientific evidence of the harm polluted waters can cause to swimmers – and a dedicated monitoring program to make sure that bathers are informed about water quality. After more than a century of reshaping our coastal environments we have also developed a greater awareness of the fragile ecosystem of the coast – and the damage inflicted on it through sand mining, altering beach landscapes, building new structures and introducing new

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plant species – which now influences the ways our beaches are used and managed. But managing the social, economic and environmental values of the coastal environment in a way that balances public and private interests continues to challenge governments at all levels. Councils no longer charge for access to dressing sheds but lease the very same buildings (or their more modern replacements) to restaurants, cafes and gyms, which draw the crowds willing to pay for a spot by the sea. The Bondi Pavilion, financially crippling for the council in the 1930s and maligned in the 1980s, now hosts film festivals, concerts and theatre performances. The ever-growing field of personal and group outdoor fitness training presents coastal councils with a new funding source but can cause resentment among other beachgoers, a situation that needs to be carefully negotiated. Coastal residents continue to resist pressures for developments on the edge of the city’s beaches that are promoted in the name of ‘progress’. But the biggest challenge is yet to come. The Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change has forecast rises in sea levels and more frequent severe weather events that will create significant new challenges for the beach-lovers, homeowners and governments of the 21st century and beyond. This book challenges the utopian ideal of Sydney’s beaches by exposing their multiple layers. Not everyone imagines Sydney’s beaches to be symbols of democratic freedom. They hold different meanings for different people. They are and have been the laboratories of coastal geographers and climate scientists; the stage of environmental battles with implications far beyond clean beaches; the scene of death, rape, violence and injury; the backyards of residents; the snapshot of tourists; the ‘office’ of professional surfers, maritime archaeologists, ichthyologists, lifeguards and other local government employees; the social life of surf lifesavers; a sensual space for lovers; the race track of surf-sport competitors; the muse of artists; the weekend getaway for campers; the source of sustenance for fishers; the site of failed commercial enterprises; the weak point in a nation’s wartime defence; and even a political opportunity for Tony Abbott in his ‘budgie smugglers’. For so many people, the beach is more than just sun, sand and surf

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Floating in the gentle swell at the northern end of Coogee, I realise that the beach and beach culture I take for granted are the result of close to two centuries of surging forces between political, commercial, private and public interests. Yet in the battle for the beaches it was Sydney’s beachgoers who fought for, and won, the right to free beaches. Their determined actions would have an enduring legacy on a city and nation’s relationship with its coast, and on its physical environment. They are at the heart of our beach history.

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Jean Howat and J Prentice display their agility in an impressive balancing act during the 1930s ‘beachobatics’ craze on Bondi Beach. Beaches have always been a place for creativity, imagination and freedom of expression.

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Acknowledgments Much of the research for this book took place well away from the beaches, at the State Records NSW reading room in Kingswood, almost as far as you can get from the coast without leaving Metropolitan Sydney. In that cold reading room I spent countless days, months and years engrossed in the history of the places we associate with warmth and sunshine – Sydney’s beaches. The vast records of the Department of Lands are particularly insightful, revealing unprecedented detail about how and why particular decisions were made about Sydney’s beaches over the course of a century. These documents facilitated a new perspective on the history of Sydney’s coast. I am grateful to Arts NSW and State Records NSW for supporting this research through a NSW Archival Research Fellowship, without which this book could not have been written. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the archivists and collections staff at State Records NSW who delivered dusty files and huge crumbling registers by the trolley load with unrivalled grace and efficiency over several years, and

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who helped to solve archival mysteries that threatened to derail my research. In particular I would like to thank Christine, Gail, Emily and Wendy. The local history librarians at Sydney’s coastal councils also took an interest in my work and provided generous research support, as well as supplying images: John MacRitchie (Manly Library), Georgina Keep (Randwick Library), Tina Graham (Warringah Library), Elida Meadows and Kimberley O’Sullivan (Waverley Library) and Sarah Thompson (Pittwater Library). Thank you also to John West from Taronga Zoo and members of the Randwick and District Local Historical Society for assisting with particular enquiries. For their generosity in providing a number of images on display in this book, I would like to thank Sue Talbot, Albe Falzon, Judy Bail, Tim Read and the picture staff at the State Library of NSW. I would like to thank Phillipa McGuinness and the team at NewSouth Publishing for both giving me the space I needed to complete this work and gently persuading me to finish it; Averil Moffat for her sharp editorial eye and warm patience; and Di Quick for her spectacular and very fitting design. The history of Sydney’s beaches is important and fascinating because the beaches themselves are intertwined with the lives and stories of so many Sydney residents. I was heartened by those who generously volunteered to share their beach stories with me, each of which enriched my understanding of the power and diverse history of our coast. For this I would like to thank Ray Brennan, Paul Burman, Paul Finnane, Russell Hardy, who welcomed a stranger off the street into his home, Michael Hogan, Louise Hume, Caroline Lawrance, Tim Lee, Winnie and Judy McGrath, Neil Purcell, Andrew Sekel, Joyce White, Kirk Willcox, Dianne Wincote, John Witzig, the Bondi swimmers corralled by Robert Mann, Stan Vesper and his fellow Bronte lifesavers, and Drew Lambert, Grant Beaumont and the ‘Lifesavers with Pride’, who not only informed but entertained me. This book also benefited from the perspectives of people who have spent their working lives on the beach and I am grateful to Angus Gordon, Andrew Short, Bruce Thom, Cris Hickey and Geoff Ross for their valuable input.

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I would also like to thank the fellow historians who provided comment on my work and suggested avenues for further enquiry, particularly Toby Martin, Pauline Curby and Virginia McLeod, with a special thank you to Terry Kass and Jennifer Sloggett who also generously shared their own research. Douglas Booth and John K Walton also provided thoughtful feedback on earlier versions of this work, as did Nancy Cushing who has been an ongoing and welcome source of knowledge and guidance. I am particularly grateful to Denis Byrne for encouraging me to pursue this project and showing an astute understanding of the time and space I needed to focus on the work. I would like to thank Denis and other friends and former colleagues at the Office of Environment and Heritage who patiently endured my musings, read and discussed draft chapters and generally broadened my perspective, especially Emma Dortins, Bronwyn Batten, Genevieve von Black, Steve Brown, Chanelle Burman, Damian Lucas, Alex Roberts and Katrina Stankowski. Richard White has been an enduring source of knowledge, strength, support, guidance and friendship over the life of a much bigger project. I am indebted to Richard for his dedication to this work while it was the subject of my PhD, for subsequently encouraging me to write this book and giving me the confidence to take it on and to persevere. This book is dedicated to my family and friends who have been an indefatigable source of support and who have kept me afloat, particularly Rachael and Sarah with whom I shared my first waves and later spent hours treading the concrete of Cronulla Esplanade (with extra thanks to Sarah, my long-suffering project manager); to Kerrie and Sid, beachlovers themselves who not only provided critical emotional support but became my de facto research assistants, sounding boards and readers; and to Brano, my favourite beach companion who has endured with good humour all the neuroses that arose from this research to threaten a relaxing day at the beach. Hopefully we’ll have more time now to enjoy Sydney’s glorious sun and surf.

Acknowledgments

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Notes Introduction: Making waves 1 2

3

Wilson, FS (1867), ‘Loose Leaves from an Australian’s Portfolio: Along the Coast’, Colonial Monthly. Tiffin, Helen (2010), ‘The shark’ in Harper, Melissa and White, Richard (eds) Symbols of Australia, UNSW Press and National Museum of Australia, Sydney, p. 68. Manzo, Lynn and Perkins, Douglas (2006), ‘Finding common ground: the importance of place attachment to community participation and planning’, Journal of Planning Literature, 20 (4), p. 339.

1 Battle for the beach 1

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Ford, Caroline (2009), ‘A Summer Fling: The Rise and Fall of Aquariums and Fun Parks on Sydney’s Ocean Coast, 1885–1920’, Journal of Tourism History, 1 (2) pp. 95–112.

2

3

4

5

6 7

White, Richard with Ballard, SarahJane, Bown, Ingrid, Lake, Meredith, Leehy, Patricia and Oldmeadow, Lila (2005), On Holidays: A History of Getting Away in Australia, Pluto Press, North Melbourne. Ford, Caroline (2007), The First Wave: the Making of a Beach Culture in Sydney 1810–1920, Doctoral thesis, University of Sydney. Brawley, Sean (2007), The Bondi Lifesaver: A History of an Australian Icon, ABC Books, Sydney; Lynch, WB and Larcombe, FA (1959), Randwick 1859–1959, Ziegler, Sydney. State Records NSW: Department of Lands, Miscellaneous Branch; NRS 8258, Letters received 1867–1979. [85/15232]. Ford 2007. Howell, Sarah (1974), The Seaside, Cassell and Collier Macmillan, London, pp. 45–46.

Notes to pages 10–27

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8 Knight, RL (1967), ‘Lowe, Robert [Viscount Sherbrooke] (1811–1892)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, (2) Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, pp. 134–137. 9 Patchett, Martin (1893), Life and Letters of the Right Honorable Robert Lowe, Viscount Sherbrooke, G.C.B., D.C.L., Longmans, Green and Co., London, pp. 281–82. 10 Ford 2007. 11 Ford, Caroline (2010), ‘The Battle for Public Rights to Private Spaces on Sydney’s Ocean Beaches, 1854– 1920s’, Australian Historical Studies, 41 (3), pp. 253–268. 12 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [85/15232]. 13 Surveyor General’s Report, 29 September 1854 [Waverley Library Local History File]. 14 Ford 2007. 15 Holdsworth named his subdivision after the Lowe’s house, and from this point onwards ‘Bronte’ replaced ‘Nelson Bay’ as the name of both the beach and local suburb. 16 Ford 2010. 17 Sydney Morning Herald 1 October 1887, p. 8. 18 Ford 2009. 19 Sydney Morning Herald 15 November 1906, p. 2; 1 December 1906, p. 2; 3 December 1906, p. 4; Evening News 14 November 1906, p. 2. 20 Ford 2009. 21 Sydney Morning Herald 3 December 1906, p. 4. 22 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [22/1517]. 23 Ford 2007. When Wonderland City closed in 1911 the Waverley Council lobbied the government for a resumption of its land to create a park for the people around Tamarama Beach. This was finally achieved in 1919 when the government purchased a portion of the land that was subdivided for sale. 24 Ford 2009. 25 Waverley Council Minutes 27 February 1906.

26 Ford 2009. 27 Sydney Morning Herald 28 December 1906 pp. 3–4; 4 December 1907, p. 12. 28 Sydney Morning Herald 21 July 1911, p. 6. 29 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [22/11031]. 30 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [21/7561]. 31 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [22/11031]. 32 Truth 11 November 1929, p. 1. 33 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [33 7088].

2 Surf city 1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14

Evening News 18 January 1902, p. 3; Sydney Morning Herald 9 March 1903, p. 6. Randwick Council Minutes 24 September 1901; 22 October 1901; Waverley Council Minutes 11 November 1902; Brawley 2007, p. 16; Booth, Douglas (2001), Australian Beach Cultures: The History of Sun, Sand and Surf, Frank Cass, London, p. 30. For more detail on events around the repeal of daylight bathing bans, see Booth 2001 and Brawley 2007. Sydney Morning Herald 12 November 1910, p. 7; 7 September 1907, p. 6; 11 September 1909, p. 5. Sydney Mail 7 March 1906, p. 604; Ford 2007. Sydney Morning Herald 11 March 1907, p. 6; 20 June 1910, p. 10. Ford 2007. SRNSW: NRS 8258 [34/18]; Curby, Pauline (2001), Seven Miles from Sydney: A History of Manly, Manly Council, Sydney, p. 134; Sydney Morning Herald 18 July 1907, p. 3. Sydney Morning Herald 11 March 1907. SRNSW: NRS 8258 [34/18]. Sydney Morning Herald 25 January 1907, p. 8; SRNSW: NRS 8258 [11/13085]. SRNSW: NRS 8258 [34/18]. SRNSW: NRS 8258 [08/1471]. Sydney Morning Herald 8 January 1909, p. 9; 9 January 1909, p. 11;

Notes to pages 27–60

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15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25

26

27

28 29 30

31 32 33

292

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14 January 1909, p. 8; SRNSW: NRS 8258 [34/18]. NSW Surf Bathing Committee Report 2012, pp. 18–19. NSW Surf Bathing Committee evidence. Brawley 2006, p. 30. Waverley Council Minutes 9 January 1906; Curby 2001, pp. 138, 148. Daily Telegraph, 3 January 1907, p. 6. Ford 2007. Brawley 2006. Curby 2001, pp. 149–53. Ford, Caroline (2010B), ‘The Lifesaver’ in Harper, Melissa and White, Richard (eds) Symbols of Australia, UNSW Press and National Museum of Australia, Sydney, p. 154. Evening News 29 February 1908, p. 9. Souvenir Programme, New South Wales Surf Bathing Association Combined Surf Carnival, North Steyne, Manly, 22 October 1910, Surf Life Saving Australia Archives. Cushing, Nancy and Huntsman, Leone (2006), ‘A National Icon: Surf Lifesaving and Australian Society and Culture’ in Jaggard, Ed (ed), Between the Flags: One Hundred Summers of Australian Surf Lifesaving, UNSW Press, Sydney; Saunders, Kay (1998), ‘“Specimens of Superb Manhood:” The Lifesaver as National Icon,’ Journal of Australian Studies, 22 (56), pp. 96–105. Sydney Morning Herald 8 March 1910, p. 6; 31 January 1911, p. 9; Saunders 1988; Cushing & Huntsman 2006, pp. 10–14. Sydney Morning Herald 18 May 1908, p. 6. Cushing and Huntsman 2006, p. 13. Booth 2001, pp. 65–66. See also Booth, Douglas (1991), ‘War Off Water: The Australian Surf Life Saving Association and the Beach’, Sporting Traditions 7 (2), pp. 135–62. Brawley 2007, p. 39. Australian Star 19 October 1907. SRNSW: NRS 8258 [23 12224].

Ford 2010B, p. 158. Sydney Mail 7 March 1906. Ford 2007. For a detailed description of these complaints, see White, Cameron (2005), Pleasure Seekers: A History of the Male Body on the Beach in Sydney, 1811–1914, Doctoral thesis, University of Sydney, pp. 135–146. 38 Osmond, Gary (2010), ‘Honolulu Maori: racial dimensions of Duke Kahanamoko’s tour of Australia and New Zealand, 1914–15’, New Zealand Journal of History 44 (1), p. 22. 39 Ford 2007. The fact that Freddie Williams, self-proclaimed surf shooting pioneer had apparently been taught the art by a Pacific Islander became cause for celebration, a sign of the authenticity of the activity being practised along the New South Wales coast [Sydney Mail 16 January 1907, p. 154]. For more about racial constructions of Pacific Islanders as embodying ‘natural’ aquatic abilities, see Osmond 2010. 40 Report, New South Wales Surf Bathing Committee, (1912) Sydney, p. 21. 41 Sydney Morning Herald 25 November 1913, p. 8. 42 Ford 2010B, p. 154. 43 Sydney Morning Herald 7 February 1914, p. 6. 44 Sydney Morning Herald 21 January 1902, p. 8. 45 Ford 2007. 46 Metusela, Christine and Waitt, Gordon (2012), Tourism and Australian beach cultures: revealing bodies. Channel View, Bristol. 47 Garner, Alice (2005), A Shifting Shore: Locals, Outsiders, and the Transformation of a French Fishing Town, 1823–2000, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, p. 86; Brawley, Sean (2006), ‘Surf Bathing and Surf Lifesaving: Origins and Beginnings’ in Jaggard, Between the Flags, p. 24. 48 Rodwell, Grant (1999), ‘The Sense 34 35 36 37

Notes to pages 60–76

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49 50 51 52 53 54

of Victorious Struggle: The Eugenic Dynamic in Australian Popular Surf-Culture, 1900–50’, Journal of Australian Studies 23 (62), pp. 56–63; Stern, Alexandra (2005), Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America, University of California Press, Berkeley. White, Richard (1981), Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688– 1980, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, p. 127. Sydney Morning Herald 28 October 1914, p. 7. Trivett, NSW Statistical register 1912, p. 10. Sydney Morning Herald 26 September 1911. p. 13. Sydney Morning Herald 20 June 1910, p. 10. SRNSW: NRS 8258 [14/425].

3 A canvas sea change 1

Garner, Bill (2013), Born in a Tent: How Camping Makes Us Australian, NewSouth Publishing, Sydney, pp. 233–34; Sydney Morning Herald 6 August 1912, p. 5; Daily Telegraph 11 November 1911, p. 13. 2 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [42/3119]. 3 Symonds, Tom (1982), Maroubra Surf Club: The First 75 Years, LesterTownsend Publishing, Sydney, p. 7. 4 Sydney Morning Herald 2 May 1910, p. 6; 7 September 1923, p. 12; Warringah Council to Deputy Postmaster General, 17 August 1923 [Warringah Library Local Studies File]. 5 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [42/3119]. 6 Sydney Morning Herald 30 April 1913, p. 7. 7 Rodwell 1999. 8 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [23/12244; 52/3683]. 9 The Country Woman in NSW, April 1947, pp. 12–17. 10 SRNSW: NRS 8166 [27 8073]. 11 The brainchild of the Teachers’ Federation Hospital and Relief

Society, and built with the generous financial assistance of philanthropist and ‘bus proprietor’ Frederick Stewart, Stewart House was open to children from both the country and the city. Guardian 28 October 1929; 3 December 1929. 12 Sydney Morning Herald 31 March 1925, p. 10; 6 July 1929, p. 16. 13 Sydney Morning Herald 6 February 1925, p. 10; 18 February 1925, p. 14. 14 White et al 2005, p. 108. 15 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [23/12224]. 16 Irish, Paul and Ingray, Michael (2014). ‘Marking their footsteps: Aboriginal People and Places in Nineteenth Century Sydney’ in Hansen, Christine and Butler, Kathleen (eds) Exploring Urban Identities and Histories, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, pp. 80–81. 17 Advertiser 28 August 1913, p. 9 18 SRNSW: NRS 8515 [3 2417 4]; Spearritt, Peter (1978), Sydney Since The Twenties, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, p. 59. 19 Sunday Sun 8 February 1931. 20 Garner 2013, p. 128. 21 State Records NSW: Metropolitan Land Board; NRS 8515, Miscellaneous Files [3 2417 4]. 22 Garner 2013, p. 137. 23 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [52/3683]. 24 SRNSW: NRS 8515 [3 2417 4]. 25 Lawrence, DH (1923), Kangaroo, Penguin, London, pp 30–32. 26 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [36 957]; Sydney Morning Herald 27 November 1926, p. 21; 26 January 1933, p. 5; 13 January 1925, p. 7. 27 Sydney Morning Herald 12 August 1922. 28 Dove, Castledon, ‘Untrodden Green’, Sydney Morning Herald 16 May–9 July 1930. 29 Brawley, Sean (1996), Beach Beyond: A History of the Palm Beach Surf Club, 1921–1996, UNSW Press, Sydney, p. 18; Curlewis, Jean (1923), Beach

Notes to pages 76–100

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Beyond, Ward Lock, Melbourne, pp. 13, 187. 30 Warringah Shire Council Minutes 2 October 1923, 23 December 1940; Sydney Morning Herald 27 November 1934, p. 5; 26 November 1935, p. 6. 31 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [41/6988]; Roberts, Jan (2011), Remembering Avalon: Growing up in the 1940s and ‘50s, Ruskin Rowe Press, Avalon Beach, Sydney, p. 47. 32 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [41/6988]; Sydney Morning Herald 1 January 1940, p. 8. 33 Warringah Council Minutes 10 and 24 September 1923. 34 Sydney Morning Herald 15 January 1930, p. 19; Warringah Council Minutes 2 April 1940. 35 Warringah Council Minutes 1940. 36 Hassan, John (2003), The Seaside, Health and the Environment in England and Wales since 1800, Ashgate, Hampshire, pp. 115–118; Presa, Donald G (2006), ‘Orchard Beach Bathhouse and Promenade’, Landmarks Preservation Commission, p. 7; Jones, Roy and Selwood, H John (2012), ‘From “Shackies” to Silver Nomads: Coastal Recreation and Coastal Heritage in Western Australia’ in Robertson, Iain (ed.) Heritage from Below, Ashgate, Surrey, p. 140. 37 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [41/6988]. 38 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [53/2296]. 39 Warringah Council Minutes 1 October 1940. 40 Read, Peter (2000), Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne; Warringah Council Minutes 1 March1938; Goodall, Heather and Cadzow, Allison (2009), Rivers and Resilience: Aboriginal People on Sydney’s Georges River, UNSW Press, Sydney; Laidlaw, Aub, quoted in Dominic Steele Consulting (2009), Waverley Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Study, p. 86.

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4 Castles in the sand 1 2

SRNSW: NRS 8258 [37/64; 26/6905]. SRNSW: NRS 8258 [29/6333; 28/9232]. 3 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [28/3444; 26/6905]. 4 Lencek, Lena and Bosker, Gideon (1998), The Beach: The History of Paradise on Earth, Secker & Walburg, London; Walton, John K (2010), The British Seaside: Holidays and Resorts in the Twentieth Century, Manchester University Press, Manchester. 5 Simon, Bryant (2004), Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America, Oxford University Press, New York, p. 3; Cross, Gary S and Walton, John K (2005), The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century, Columbia University Press, New York, p. 135. 6 Sydney Morning Herald 12 March 1934, p. 9. 7 White 1981, p. 155; Cushing and Huntsman 2006, p. 14; Rickard, John (1988), Australia: A Cultural History, Longman, London pp. 192–93. 8 Cushing, Nancy (n.d.) ‘Modernity and the 1935 bathing costume controversy’, Unpublished article; Booth 2001; Sydney Morning Herald 17 January 1935, p. 12. 9 Sydney Morning Herald 26 January 1933, p. 10; See also Quinn-Boas, Patricia (1967), Bondi 1920–1940: The Development of an Urban Recreation Area by Waverley Municipal Council, MA Thesis, University of Sydney, p. 48. 10 Wotherspoon, Garry (1991), City of the Plain: History of a Gay Sub-culture, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, pp. 64–66. 11 Spearritt 1978; Kelly, Max (1980), ‘Pleasure and Profit: the Eastern Suburbs Come of Age 1919–1929’ in Roe, Jill (editor) Twentieth Century Sydney: Studies in Urban and Social History, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney. 12 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [26/12567].

Notes to pages 101–118

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13 Spearritt 1978, p. 24. 14 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [29/6333]. 15 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [27/11115; 30/10761]. 16 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [40 4619]. 17 This was happening at the same time localised environmental movements were forming elsewhere: Parks and Playground movement, Federation of Bushwalking Clubs and Tree Lovers’ Civic Leagues which lobbied for the conservation of spaces that had been left over in the development process as public parks. James, Peggy (2013), Cosmopolitan Conservationists: Greening Modern Sydney, Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne. 18 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [34/1197]. 19 Smith, Walter (1902), ‘Treatment of Drift-Sand, as Applied to the Bondi Sand Dunes’, Journal and abstract of proceedings of the Sydney University Engineering Society, p. 7; SRNSW: NRS 8258 [34/18]; Ford 2007. 20 Bondi sand hills subdivision communication file, Waverley library. 21 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [30 6658]; Curby, Pauline (2009), Randwick, Randwick City Council, Sydney, p. 283; Randwick Council Minutes 16 November 1929. 22 Commissioner Jenkins. Report of public inquiry into application to borrow £120 000 for Bondi Improvement Scheme, 3 May 1927 [Waverley Library – Bondi Improvements communications file]; Bondi the Beautiful, Waverley Council 1929; Bondi: The Playground of the Pacific, Waverley Council 1933. 23 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [28/7228]; Quinn-Boas 1967, pp. 24–25. 24 Sydney Morning Herald 23 December 1929, p. 12. 25 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [25/11033]. 26 Quinn-Boas 1967, p. 54; SRNSW: NRS 8258 [33/7088]. 27 Jenkins 1927 [Waverley Library – Bondi Improvements communications file].

28 Sachs, Wolfgang (1992), For Love of the Automobile: Looking Back into the History of our Desires, University of California Press, Berkeley, p. 10; Quinn-Boas 1967, p. 28. 29 Cross & Walton 2005, pp. 136–37, 142; Presa 2006, p. 9. 30 Clarsen, Georgine (2008), Eat My Dust: Early Women Motorists, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, p. 106; Davison, Graeme (2004), Car Wars: How the Car Won our Hearts and Conquered our Cities, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, p. 49. 31 Randwick Council Minutes 14 October 1929; Manly Council Minutes 3 April 1934. 32 Sydney Morning Herald 11 January 1938, p. 5; Ashton et al 2006 pp. 127–79; Mary Ford nee Vallis pers com. 33 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [41/6781]. 34 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [30 6658]. 35 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [41/7891; 30/6658]. 36 Eastern Suburbs and South Sydney News 23 March 1929. 37 Eastern Suburbs and South Sydney News 15 June 1929, p. 1. 38 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [30/6658] 39 Sydney Morning Herald 15 October 1929, p. 8. 40 Curby 2001, p. 233. 41 Gordon 1989. 42 SRNSW: NRS 8166 [40/11899]

5 The shark menace 1 2

3 4 5

Sydney Morning Herald 6 February 1922, p. 8; 7 February 1922, p. 9. Quoted in Phillips, Murray (2006), ‘Dissension and Challenges in Surf Lifesaving: Amateurism and Professionalism’ in Jaggard, Between the Flags, p. 93. Brawley 2007, p. 105. Sydney Morning Herald 25 November 1907, p. 6. Sydney Morning Herald 3 March 1922, p. 9; 6 March 1922, p. 9; 8 March 1922, p. 13.

Notes to pages 118–147

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6

Sydney Morning Herald 4 March 1922, p. 12; 24 March 1922, p. 6. 7 Sydney Morning Herald 14 January 1929, pp. 11, 12; 9 February 1929, p. 17; 19 February 1929, p. 11. 8 Sydney Morning Herald 28 March 1929, p. 13; 10 August 1929, p. 15. 9 SRNSW: NRS 8515 [3/2420.2]. 10 State Records NSW: Department of Lands, Leases Branch; NRS 8166, Correspondence Files 1924–37, 1940 [31/18668]. 11 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [72/1457]. 12 SRNSW: NRS 8515 [3/2420.2]; NRS 8166 [31/18668]. 13 SRNSW: NRS 8166 [37/1066]. 14 Manly Council Minutes 11 April 1934. 15 Sydney Morning Herald 1 August 1934, p. 12; 23 August 1934, p. 10. 16 Sydney Morning Herald 30 August 1934, p. 9. 17 Sydney Morning Herald 12 September 1934, p. 16. 18 Sydney Morning Herald 17 October 1934, p. 10; Capuzzo, Michael (2001), Close to shore, Headline, London, pp. 159, 198. 19 Sydney Morning Herald 9 January 1934, p. 10. 20 Sydney Morning Herald 28 September 1934, p. 11; 29 January 1935, p. 9. 21 Report of the Shark Menace Advisory Committee on Suggested Methods of Protecting Bathers from Shark Attack, NSW Legislative Assembly, 1935. 22 Sydney Morning Herald 6 March 1922, p. 9. 23 Sydney Morning Herald 12 March 1935, p. 9. 24 Sydney Morning Herald 31 January 1935, p. 7; 22 March 1935, p. 11. 25 Green, M, Ganassin, C, and Reid, DD (2009), Report into the NSW Shark Meshing (Bather Protection) Program, NSW Department of Primary Industries, Sydney. 26 Krogh, Martin and Reid, Dennis (1993), ‘Shark Meshing in NSW’. In National Parks Journal 37 (6), p. 15. 27 Sydney Morning Herald 22 March

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1935, p. 11. 28 McLachlan, Noel (1989), A history of Australian nationalism, Penguin, Melbourne, p. 2; Edwards, Hugh (1997), Shark: the shadow below, Harper Collins, Sydney, p. 262. 29 Quoted in Capuzzo 2001, p. 194. 30 Tiffin 2010. 31 Souter, Gavin and Molnar, George (1968), Sydney Observed, Angus & Robertson, Sydney p. 16. 32 Eastern Free Press 10 April 1930, p. 1. 33 Castles, Alex (1995), The Shark Arm Murders, Wakefield Press, Kent Town, p. 13–14. 34 Benchley, Peter (1974), Jaws, Doubleday, New York, pp. 254, 263. 35 Saunders, Becca (1996), ‘Shark Meshing: Is the Net Result Justifiable?’, in Geo 18 (3), p. 18. 36 Sydney Morning Herald 2 October 1937. 37 SRNSW: NRS 8515 [3/2420.2]; Sydney Morning Herald 2 September 1942, p. 8.

6 A military invasion 1

Sydney Morning Herald 13 June 1935, p. 10S; NAA: SP16/4, 2468. 2 NAA: SP857/1, 2001. 3 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [26/4772]. 4 Palazzo, Albert (2001), The Australian Army: A History of its Organisation, Oxford University Press, South Melbourne, p. 115; Horner, David (1995), The Gunners: A History of Australian Artillery, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, p. 203. 5 AWM 528: Land Settlement in the vicinity of strategical positions along the coastline of Australia 1932–35. All AWM material courtesy Jennifer Sloggett. 6 AWM 123 [473]: Special Collection II Defence Committee Records: Proclamation of Defence Areas 1937–38. 7 AWM 193 [357 part 6]: Eastern Command ‘G’ Branch Records. 2

Notes to pages 148–177

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District Base Defence Scheme: Part III Plan for the Defence of Sydney Fortress; NAA SP553/1, 59. 8 Warringah Council Minutes 23 December 1941. 9 Rickard 1988, p. 193. 10 Sydney Morning Herald 31 January 1942, p. 9; Neil Purcell pers com; Brawley, Sean (1995), Vigilant and Victorious: A Community History of the Collaroy Surf Life Saving Club 1911–1995, Collaroy Surf Life Saving Club, Sydney, p. 126. 11 NAA: SP16/4, 973; 2204. 12 NAA: SP857/6, PH/2143. 13 NAA: SP16/4, 847. 14 NAA: SP16/4, 2283; 3421. 15 Warringah Council Minutes; Sydney Morning Herald 1 March 1946, p. 2. 16 Winnie McGrath pers com. 10 June 2012; NAA SP16/4: 2050; 982. 17 NAA: SP16/4, 4120; 1896. 18 Warringah Council Minutes 1942. 19 Brawley 2007, p. 166; Warringah Council Minutes 14 April 1942. 20 Horner 1995, pp. 379–81; Argus 31 December 1941, p. 1; Jennifer Sloggett. ‘Military and civil defence planning in south-east Australia, 1932–1945’. Draft doctoral thesis, University of Newcastle. 21 Barker, Anthony and Jackson, Lisa (1996), Fleeting Attraction: A Social History of American Servicemen in Western Australia During the Second World War, University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands, p. 69. 22 Waverley local studies file: World War II. 23 Australian War Memorial: ‘Australia Under Attack 1942–1943’. www.awm. gov.au/exhibitions/underattack/end/ tide.asp 24 Waverley local studies file: World War II; NAA: SP16/4, 1163. 25 Horner 1995, pp. 388, 448. 26 Collins, Alan Alva (2006), ‘Memoir of a Jewish boyhood: my war and welcome to it’, Jewish Museum of

Australia Journal, p. 15; Brawley 2007, pp. 165, 321. 27 NAA SP16/4 2332A. 28 SRNSW: NRS 8515 [3/2149.1]. 29 SRNSW: NRS 8515 [3/2420.2] 30 Darian-Smith, Kate (1990), On the Home Front: Melbourne in Wartime 1939–1945, Oxford University Press, South Melbourne, p. 160; Cusack, Dymphna and James, Florence (1973), Come in Spinner, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, pp. 235–39. 31 Sydney Morning Herald 10 January 1944, p. 3; Brawley 2007, pp. 167–68; NAA: SP16/4, 4207. 32 McKernan, Michael (1995), All in! Fighting the War at Home, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, pp. 200–203. 33 Paul Finnane; Jon Donohoe; Joyce White: pers com. 34 Curby, Pauline (2007), Freshie: Freshwater Surf Life Saving Club: The First 100 Years, UNSW Press, Sydney, p. 102; Jon Donohoe pers com. 35 Brawley 2007, pp. 172–73. 36 Brawley 1996, pp. 90–91. 37 Brawley 1995, p. 161; Brawley 2007, pp. 174–75.

7 Yo u n g a n d r e s t l e s s 1

Connors, Jane (1993), ‘The 1954 Royal Tour of Australia’ in Australian Historical Studies 25 (100), pp. 371–74. 2 Brawley 2007, p. 203. 3 Osmond, Gary (2011), ‘MythMaking in Australian Sport History: Re-evaluating Duke Kahanamoku’s Contribution to Surfing’, Australian Historical Studies, 42; Evening News 21 September 1910, p. 2. 4 Booth 2001; Jaggard, Ed 2014. ‘Americans, Malibus, Torpedo Buoys and Australian Beach Culture’, Journal of Sport History. 41 (2) 5 Arrow, Michelle (2009), Friday on our Minds: Popular Culture in Australia Since 1945, UNSW Press, Sydney, p. 86; Sydney Morning Herald 28 December 1963, p. 1; Sid Ford pers com.

Notes to pages 177–199

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6 Arrow 2009, pp. 48–51; Evans, Raymond (1997), ‘“… To Try to Ruin”: Rock ‘n’ Roll, Youth Culture and Law ‘n’ Order in Brisbane, 1956–1957’ in Murphy, John and Smart, Judith (eds) The Forgotten Fifities: Aspects of Australian society and culture in the 1950s; Australian Historical Studies (109), pp. 106–119. 7 Booth 2001, p.108; Daily Mirror March 1963. 8 Daily Mirror 7 March 1963, p. 5. 9 Daily Mirror 5 March 1963, p. 3; Legislative Assembly, 5 March 1963. 10 Booth 2001, p. 108; Cohen, Stanley (1980), Folk Devils and Moral Panic: the Creation of the Mods and Rockers. St Martin’s Press, New York, pp. 149–150. 11 Evans 1997, pp. 106–119. 12 Daily Mirror 6 March 1963, p. 1; 11 March 1963, p. 1; Tracks February 1972, p. 3. 13 Quinn-Boas, p. 73. 14 Booth 2001. 15 North Narrabeen Boardriders Club (1994) North Narrabeen Boardriders Club: Thirtieth anniversary, p. 6. 16 Booth 2001, p. 111. 17 Legislative Council Minutes and Proceedings 13 October 1966, p. 1813; Sydney Morning Herald 28 November 1968, p. 4; 27 December 1968, p. 2; 11–15 January 1969. 18 Sydney Morning Herald 14 January 1969, p. 2. 19 Booth 2001, pp. 109, 118. 20 Marlin, Mick (1994), ‘Early Days Empty Waves’ in North Narrabeen Boardriders Club: Thirtieth Anniversary, p. 16. 21 Tracks November 1970, p. 1; January 1971, p. 4. 22 Evers, Clifton (2004), ‘Men Who Surf’, Cultural Studies Review 10 (1), pp. 27–41. 23 Scott, Paul (2003), “We shall Fight on the Seas and the Oceans…We shall” M/C: A Journal of Media and

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Culture 6 (1). 24 Ray Brennan, Neil Purcell pers com. 25 Paul Burman and Chanelle Burman pers com. 26 Booth 2001, p. 102; Stell, Marion (1992), Pam Burridge, Angus & Robertson, Pymble, Sydney, pp. 30, 38; Gordon, Michael with Beachley, Layne (2008), Layne Beachley: Beneath the Waves, Ebury Press, Sydney, p. 42. 27 Galton, Barry and Jaggard, Ed (2006), in Jaggard (ed) Between the Flags, p.151; Booth 2001, pp. 142–49; Cousins, Sarah (2011), ‘“The Hard men of the Surf Club”: an Exploration of Masculinity within Victorian Surf Life Saving Male Surf Boat Crews’, Honours thesis, School of Geography and Environmental Science, Monash University, Melbourne. 28 Caroline Lawrance pers com. 29 Lette, Kathy and Carey, Gabrielle (2002), Puberty Blues, Picador, Sydney, pp. 3–5. 30 It is likely nuns had always used these and other ladies’ baths for swimming, including the ‘nun’s pool’ at Cronulla, after which a nearby restaurant is named. 31 Michael Hogan pers com. 32 Souter 1968, pp. 3, 91–92. 33 White et al. 2005, pp. 122–137; Davidson, Jim and Spearritt, Peter (2000), Holiday Business: Tourism in Australia since 1870, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, pp. 176–79. 34 Cross & Walton 2005, p. 241. 35 Davison, Graeme 2004, p. 134; Sydney Morning Herald 27 December 1966, p. 6. 36 Douglas Booth provides a detailed account of the early bikini battles and nudist campaigns in Sydney. Booth 2001. 37 Simon 2004; Cross & Walton 2005, pp. 146, 241; Culver, Lawrence (2010), The Frontier of Leisure: Southern California and the Shaping of Modern America, Oxford University

Notes to pages 199–218

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Press, New York, p. 72. 38 White 1981, pp. 160–61. 39 O’Grady, John (1957), They’re a Weird Mob, Ure Smith, Sydney, p. 67. 40 Davis, Kristen (2007), ‘Bondi’s Underbelly: the ‘Gay Gang Murders’’, Queer Space: Centres and Peripheries (Conference), UTS, Sydney. 41 ‘Justin’, quoted in ABC PM (radio program); Tim Lee pers com. 42 Allon, Fiona (2008), Renovation Nation: Our Obsession with Home, UNSW Press, Sydney, pp. 177–78; The Australian, 14 December 2005, p. 4. 43 Evers, Clifton (2009), ‘“The local boys”: Violence, Care, Masculinity and the Riots’ in Noble, Gregory (ed). Lines in the Sand: the Cronulla Riots, Multiculturalism and National Belonging, Institute of Criminology Press, Sydney, p. 189. 44 Sydney Morning Herald, 12 December 2005, p. 7. For more about the racial context of the events, see Noble (ed) (2009). 45 Franck, Karen and Stevens, Quentin (2007), ‘Tying Down Loose Space’ in Franck and Stevens (eds) Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life, Routledge, London; Huntsman 2001. 46 Drew Lambert pers com.

8 Surfing in sewage 1

Sydney Morning Herald 5 October 1932, p. 12. 2 Sydney Morning Herald 7 October 1932, p. 13. 3 See Coward, Dan (1988), Out of Sight: Sydney’s Environmental History, 1851–1981, Department of Economic History, Australian National University, Canberra, pp. 208–9; Sydney Morning Herald 17 March 1900, p. 14. 4 Waverley Council Minutes 1 May 1900. 5 Sydney Morning Herald 17 December 1913, p. 19. 6 NSW Parliamentary Debates: Legislative Assembly, 18 October

1928, p. 985. Sydney Morning Herald 14 March 1929, p. 12. 8 NAA: A461 [E418/2/9]. 9 Sydney Morning Herald 14 November 1932, p. 9; NAA: SP485 /2 /F3. 10 NAA A461 [E418/2/9]. 11 Sydney Morning Herald 16 November 1933, p. 5; Curby, Pauline and Macleod, Virginia (2003), Good Riddance: A History of Waste Management in Manly, Mosman, Pittwater and Warringah, Joint Services Committee of Warringah, Manly, Mosman and Pittwater Councils, Sydney, p. 28. 12 In 1883 the Royal Commission into Noxious and Offensive Trades had recommended the establishment of an industrial area on the coast at Long Bay so the runoff from noxious trades, particularly those processing animal by-products, could be drained into the ocean. The Randwick Council and its residents successfully fought the proposal. 13 Hassan 2003, pp. 45, 72. Tarr, Joel (1996), The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective, University of Akron Press, Akron, p. 12; Coward 1988. 14 Sydney Morning Herald 9 March 1880, p. 5; 10 April 1880, p. 3; 26 April 1880, p. 3; 4 May 1880, p. 6. 15 Guardian 22 November 1929; Sydney Morning Herald 15 February 1935, p. 5; 9 January 1970, p. 2; Curby 2009, p. 341; Hassan 2003, pp. 140–46. 16 Coward 1988, p. 254; Beder, Sharon (1989), Toxic Fish and Sewer Surfing: How Deceit and Collusion are Destroying our Great Beaches, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, p. 77. 17 Cushing, Nancy (2012), ‘An Environmental Success Story? Clean Air Activism in Australia in the 1950s and 60s’. Australian Historical Association Conference, University of Adelaide. 7

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18 Curby & Macleod; Goodall, Heather, ‘Mangrove Bush Battlers: Mangrove Actors in the Conflicts to Save Bushland on the Georges River, 1945–1985’, Rethinking Invasion Ecologies conference, University of Sydney 18 June 2012. 19 Beder, p. 76. 20 Sydney Morning Herald 7 July 1965, p. 6; 22 September 1972, p. 2; Hassan 2003, pp. 172–73. 21 NAA A463 [1970/717]; Sydney Morning Herald: Look! 14 December 1972, p. 3; Curby 2009, pp. 342–43. 22 Walsh, Maximilian (1971), ‘Eco-nuts in a political environment’, Financial Review 24 September, p. 44 (reprinted in Dempsey, Rob (ed) (1974), The Politics of Finding Out: environmental problems in Australia, Cheshire, Melbourne, pp. 155–57). 23 Coward 1988, pp. 258, 260; Beder 1989, p. 33. 24 Sydney Morning Herald 9 November 1976, p. 3. 25 Smith, Garry (1990), Toxic cities and the fight to save the Kurnell Peninsula, UNSW Press, Sydney, p. 8. 26 Hutton and Connors 1999, pp. 216– 18; Sindermann, Carl (2006), Coastal Pollutions: Effects on Living Resources and Humans, Taylor & Francis, Boca Raton. 27 Sydney Morning Herald 17 January 1985, p. 8; Pilger, John (1992), A Secret Country, Vintage, London, p. 10; Dodkin, Marilyn (2003), Bob Carr: The Reluctant Leader, UNSW Press, Sydney. 28 John Witzig pers com. 29 Harper, Melissa (2007), Ways of the Bushwalker: On Foot in Australia, UNSW Press, Sydney; Young, ‘nat track’ in Tracks October 1970, p. 4. 30 Kirk Willcox pers com; Tracks June 1981, p. 29. 31 Lea Hill pers com. 32 Sydney Morning Herald 21 December 1984, p. 1; 30 December 1986, p. 3; Sindermann 2006, pp. 47–48.

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33 Andrew Sekel pers com. 34 Sydney Morning Herald 7 January 1989, p. 8. 35 Beder 1989. 36 Beder 1989, p. 134. Sydney Morning Herald 25 March 1989, p. 5. 37 Beachwatch: Summer Season Report 1989–1990; 1991–1992, p. 17. This was according to faecal coliform tests, which were standard at the time. In the mid-1990s, Beachwatch began to test the water for the bacteria enterococci, as well as the long established water tests for faecal coliform. It found that while levels of faecal coliform in the waters of Sydney’s beaches had improved substantially, enterococci existed at dangerous levels along much of the coast, particularly after rain. Enterococci has since become the sole standard for determining sewage traces in recreational waters. 2008 NHRMC Guidelines. 38 Eastern Herald 3 October 1991, p. 11. 39 Beachwatch: Summer Season Report 1991­–1992, p. 1. 40 Waverley Council Minutes 3 November 1914. 41 Brawley 2007, p. 271. 42 Geoff Ross, pers com.

9 A shifting shoreline 1

Park, Ruth and Niland, D’Arcy (1970), The Drums Go Bang, Ure Smith, North Sydney. 2 Sydney Morning Herald 13 June 1945, p. 1; 14 June 1945, p. 4; Daily Telegraph 13 June 1945, p. 9. 3 SRNSW: NRS 8258 [45 3269]. 4 Anecdotal evidence suggests a storm in the 1920s destroyed a small number of homes but I have been unable to find any record of this event. It is possible it was confused with the storm of May 1925, in which a number of Collaroy homes several blocks from the beach were destroyed by wind rather than waves. Sydney Morning Herald 27 May 1925, p. 15.

Notes to pages 235–257

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5 6

SRNSW: NRS 8258 [16/799]. Warringah Council Minutes June–July 1944. 7 NSW Legislative Assembly: Estimates 1945–1946, p. 1253. 8 Sydney Morning Herald 25 June 1946, p. 4; 7 September 1967, p. 1; 23 September 1967, p. 1; Daily Telegraph 29 June 1967, p. 1. 9 Shipmates Advertisement, Warringah Library Local Studies Collection. 10 Sydney Morning Herald 27 February 1964; 16 January 1965, p. 9; 8 September 1967, p. 6. 11 Sydney Morning Herald 5 September 1967, p. 1, 6 September 1967, p. 1; 8 September 1967, p. 6. 12 Sydney Morning Herald 30 August 1967, p. 2. 13 Sydney Morning Herald 28 August 1967, p. 2. 14 Sydney Morning Herald 7 September 1967, p. 2. 15 Thom, Bruce (1974). ‘Coastal Erosion in NSW’. Search 5 (5), p. 204. 16 Angus Gordon pers com; Bruce Thom pers com; Sydney Morning Herald 27 May 1974, p. 3; Daily Telegraph 27 May 1974, p. 3; Chapman, DM, Geary, M, Roy, PS and Thom, BG (1982), Coastal Evolution and Coastal Erosion in New South Wales, Coastal Council of NSW, Sydney. 17 Chapman et al 1982, p. 135. 18 Angus Gordon pers com; Warringah Council Minutes 24 June 1974. 19 Angus Gordon pers com. 20 Sydney Morning Herald 28 May 1974.

p. 1; Warringah Council Minutes 27 May 1974. 21 Sydney Morning Herald 26 December 1974, p. 6. 22 Sydney Morning Herald 26 March 1975, p. 1. 23 Angus Gordon pers com; NSW Department of Public Works, NSW Beach Improvement Program, Coastal Project Sheet 4. 24 Spearritt 1978, p. 108; Hutton and Connors 1999, p. 128. 25 Sydney Morning Herald 8 November 1972, p. 11. 26 See for example Goodall, Heather (2008), Invasion to Embassy, Sydney University Press, Sydney, pp. 391–92. 27 Sydney Morning Herald 3 June 1970, p. 7. 28 Sydney Morning Herald 13 July 1985, p. 11; 8 January 1986, p. 2. 29 Sydney Morning Herald 15 January 1985, p. 2; Sydney Morning Herald 1 May 1985, p. 4. 30 Sydney Morning Herald 16 January 1985, p. 3; Brawley 2007, p. 237; Corris, Peter (1983), The Empty Beach, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, p. 24; Sydney Morning Herald, Good Weekend 20 December 1980, p. 30. 31 Sydney Morning Herald 8 May 1987, p. 5. 32 Andrew Short pers com; Booth 2001, p. 20. 33 Report of Warringah Council Meeting 25 February 2003. 34 Dean, Cornelia (1999), Against the Tide: The Battle for America’s Beaches, Columbia University Press, New York, p. 12.

Notes to pages 258–279

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Selected bibliography Allon, Fiona (2008), Renovation Nation: Our Obsession with Home, UNSW Press, Sydney. Aron, Cindy (1999), Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States, Oxford, New York. Arrow, Michelle (2009), Friday on our Minds: Popular Culture in Australia Since 1945, UNSW Press, Sydney. Ashton, Paul, Cornwall, Jennifer and Salt, Annette (2006), Sutherland Shire: a history, UNSW Press, Sydney. Barker, Anthony and Jackson, Lisa (1996), Fleeting Attraction: A Social History of American Servicemen in Western Australia During the Second World War, University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands. Beder, Sharon (1989), Toxic fish and sewer surfing: How deceit and collusion are destroying our great beaches, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Benchley, Peter (1974), Jaws, Doubleday,

New York. Booth, Douglas (2001), Australian Beach Cultures: The History of Sun, Sand and Surf, Frank Cass, London. Brawley, Sean (1995), Vigilant and Victorious : A Community History of the Collaroy Surf Life Saving Club 1911– 1995. Collaroy Surf Life Saving Club, Sydney. Brawley, Sean (1996), Beach Beyond: A History of the Palm Beach Surf Club, 1921–1996, UNSW Press, Sydney. Brawley, Sean (2006), ‘Surf Bathing and Surf Lifesaving: Origins and Beginnings’ in Ed Jaggard (ed), Between the Flags: One Hundred Summers of Australian Surf Lifesaving, UNSW Press, Sydney, pp. 23–48. Brawley, Sean (2007), The Bondi Lifesaver: A History of an Australian Icon, ABC Books, Sydney. Capuzzo, Michael (2001), Close to shore, Headline, London.

302

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Castles, Alex (1995), The Shark Arm Murders, Wakefield Press, Kent Town. Chapman, DM, Geary, M, Roy, PS and Thom, BG (1982), Coastal Evolution and Coastal Erosion in New South Wales, Coastal Council of NSW, Sydney. Clarsen, Georgine (2008), Eat my dust: early women motorists, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. Cohen, Stanley (1980), Folk Devils and Moral Panic: the Creation of the Mods and Rockers, St Martin’s Press, New York. Connors, Jane (1993), ‘The 1954 Royal Tour of Australia’, Australian Historical Studies (100), pp. 271–382. Cousins, Sarah (2011), ‘“The Hard men of the Surf Club”: an Exploration of Masculinity within Victorian Surf Life Saving Male Surf Boat Crews’, Honours thesis, School of Geography and Environmental Science, Monash University, Melbourne. Coward, Dan (1988), Out of Sight: Sydney’s Environmental History, 1851–1981, Department of Economic History, Australian National University, Canberra. Cross, Gary and Walton, John K (2005), The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century, Columbia University Press, New York. Culver, Lawrence (2010), The Frontier of Leisure: Southern California and the Shaping of Modern America, Oxford University Press, New York. Cuneen, Chris (1980), ‘“Hands off the parks!” The Provision of Parks and Play Grounds’ in Roe, Jill (editor), Twentieth Century Sydney: Studies in Urban and Social History, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, pp. 105–119. Curby, Pauline (2001), Seven miles from Sydney: A history of Manly, Manly Council, Sydney. Curby, Pauline (2007), Freshie: Freshwater Surf Life Saving Club: The First 100 Years, UNSW Press, Sydney. Curby, Pauline (2009), Randwick, Randwick City Council, Sydney. Curby, Pauline and Macleod, Virginia

(2003), Good Riddance: A History of Waste Management in Manly, Mosman, Pittwater and Warringah, Joint Services Committee of Warringah, Manly, Mosman and Pittwater Councils, Sydney. Cusack, Dymphna and James, Florence (1973), Come in Spinner, Angus & Robertson, Sydney. Cushing, Nancy (n.d.), ‘Modernity and the 1935 bathing costume controversy’, Unpublished article. Cushing, Nancy and Huntsman, Leone (2006), ‘A National Icon: Surf Lifesaving and Australian Society and Culture’ in Jaggard, Ed (ed), Between the Flags: One Hundred Summers of Australian Surf Lifesaving, UNSW Press, Sydney pp. 1–22. Darian-Smith, Kate (1990), On the Home Front: Melbourne in Wartime 1939– 1945, Oxford University Press, South Melbourne. Davidson, Jim and Spearritt, Peter (2000), Holiday Business: Tourism in Australia since 1870, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne. Davis, Kristen. (2007), ‘Bondi’s Underbelly: the ‘Gay Gang Murders’’. Queer Space: Centres and Peripheries (Conference), UTS, Sydney. Davison, Graeme (2004), Car wars: how the car won our hearts and conquered our cities, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Dean, Cornelia (1999), Against the Tide: The Battle for America’s Beaches, Columbia University Press, New York. Dodkin, Marilyn (2003), Bob Carr: The Reluctant Leader, UNSW Press, Sydney. Edwards, Hugh (1997), Shark: the shadow below, Harper Collins, Sydney. Evans, Raymond (1997), ‘“… To Try to Ruin”: Rock ‘n’ roll, youth culture and law ‘n’ order in Brisbane, 1956–1957’ in Murphy, John and Smart, Judith (eds) The Forgotten Fifities: Aspects of Australian society and culture in the 1950s, Australian Historical Studies (109), pp. 106–119.

Selected bibliography

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303

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Evers, Clifton (2004), ‘Men Who Surf’. Cultural Studies Review 10 (1), pp. 27–41. Evers, Clifton. (2009), ‘“The local boys”: Violence, Care, Masculinity and the Riots’ in Gregory Noble (ed). Lines in the Sand: the Cronulla Riots, Multiculturalism and National Belonging, Institute of Criminology Press, Sydney. Ford, Caroline (2007), The First Wave: the Making of a Beach Culture in Sydney 1810–1920, Doctoral thesis, University of Sydney. Ford, Caroline (2009), ‘A Summer Fling: The Rise and Fall of Aquariums and Fun Parks on Sydney’s Ocean Coast, 1885–1920’, Journal of Tourism History, 1 (2), pp. 95–112. Ford, Caroline (2010). ‘The Battle for Public Rights to Private Spaces on Sydney’s Ocean Beaches, 1854–1920s’, Australian Historical Studies, 41 (3), pp. 253–268. Ford, Caroline (2010). ‘The Lifesaver’ in Harper, Melissa and White, Richard (eds) Symbols of Australia. UNSW Press and National Museum of Australia, Sydney. Franck, Karen and Stevens, Quentin (2007), ‘Tying Down Loose Space’ in Franck and Stevens (eds) Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life, Routledge, London. Garner, Alice (2005), A Shifting Shore: Locals, Outsiders, and the Transformation of a French Fishing Town, 1823–2000, Cornell University Press, Ithaca. Garner, Bill (2013), Born in a Tent: How Camping Makes Us Australian, NewSouth Publishing, Sydney. Goodall, Heather (2008), Invasion to Embassy, Sydney University Press, Sydney. Goodall, Heather and Cadzow, Allison (2009), Rivers and Resilience: Aboriginal People on Sydney’s Georges River, UNSW Press, Sydney. Gordon, Angus (1989), Sydney’s Sea Defences [online]. In: Ninth Australasian Conference on Coastal and

304

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Ocean Engineering, 1989, Preprints of Papers, Institution of Engineers, Australia, Barton, Canberra, pp. 149–154. Gordon, Michael with Beachley, Layne (2008), Layne Beachley: Beneath the Waves, Ebury Press, Sydney. Green, M, Ganassin, C, and Reid, DD (2009), Report into the NSW Shark Meshing (Bather Protection) Program, NSW Department of Primary Industries, Sydney. Harper, Melissa (2007), Ways of the bushwalker: On Foot in Australia, UNSW Press, Sydney. Hassan, John (2003), The seaside, health and the environment in England and Wales since 1800, Ashgate, Hampshire. Horner, David (1995), The Gunners: A History of Australian Artillery, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Hoskins, Ian (2013), Coast: A History of the New South Wales Edge, NewSouth Publishing, Sydney. Huntsman, Leone (2001), Sand in Our Souls: The Beach in Australian History, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. Hutton, Drew and Connors, Libby (1999), A history of the Australian environmental Movement, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Inglis, Andrea, (1999), Beside the Seaside: Victorian Resorts in the Nineteenth Century, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. Irish, Paul and Ingray, Michael (2014), ‘Marking their footsteps: Aboriginal People and Places in Nineteenth Century Sydney’ in Hansen, Christine and Butler, Kathleen (eds) Exploring Urban Identities and Histories, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, pp. 71–86. Jaggard, Ed (2014), ‘Americans, Malibus, Torpedo Buoys and Australian Beach Culture’, Journal of Sport History 41 (2). James, Peggy (2013), Cosmopolitan Conservationists: Greening Modern Sydney, Australian Scholarly

Sydney Beaches

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Publishing, North Melbourne. Jones, Roy & Selwood, John H (2012), ‘From “shackies” to Silver Nomads: coastal recreation and coastal heritage in Western Australia’, in Robertson, Iain (ed), Heritage from Below, Ashgate, Surrey, pp. 125–145. Kelly, Max (1980), ‘Pleasure and profit: the eastern suburbs come of age 1919– 1929’ in Roe, Jill (ed), Twentieth century Sydney: studies in urban and social history, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, pp. 1–17. Krogh, Martin and Reid, Dennis (1993), ‘Shark meshing in NSW’, in National Parks Journal 37 (6) December, pp. 15–17. Lawrence, DH (1950), Kangaroo, Penguin, London. Lencek, Lena and Bosker, Gideon (1998), The Beach: The History of Paradise on Earth, Secker & Walburg, London. Lette, Kathy and Carey, Gabrielle (2002), Puberty Blues, Picador, Sydney. Manzo, Lynn and Perkins, Douglas (2006), ‘Finding common ground: the importance of place attachment to community participation and planning’, Journal of Planning Literature, 20 (4), pp. 335–350. McKernan, Michael (1995), All in! Fighting the War at Home, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. McLachlan, Noel (1989), Waiting for the Revolution: A history of Australian nationalism, Penguin, Melbourne. Metusela, Christine and Gordon Waitt (2012), Tourism and Australian beach cultures: revealing bodies, Channel View, Bristol. O’Grady, John (1957), They’re a Weird Mob, Ure Smith, Sydney. Osmond, Gary (2010), ‘Honolulu Maori: racial dimensions of Duke Kahanamoko’s tour of Australia and New Zealand, 1914–15’, New Zealand Journal of History 44 (1), pp. 22–35. Osmond, Gary (2011), ‘Myth-making in Australian sport history: re-evaluating Duke Kahanamoku’s contribution to surfing’, Australian Historical Studies, 42, pp. 260–276.

Palazzo, Albert (2001), The Australian Army: A History of its Organisation, Oxford University Press, South Melbourne. Park, Ruth and Niland, D’arcy (1970), The drums go bang, Humorbooks, Sydney. Quinn-Boas, Patricia (1967), Bondi 1920– 1940: The development of an urban recreation area by Waverley Municipal Council, Unpublished Master’s thesis, University of Sydney. Read, Peter (2000), Belonging: Australians, Place and Aboriginal Ownership, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne. Rickard, John (1988), Australia: A Cultural History, Longman, London. Roberts, Jan (ed) (2011), Remembering Avalon: Growing up in the 1940s and ‘50s, Ruskin Rowe Press, Avalon Beach, Sydney. Rodwell, Grant (1999), ‘The Sense of Victorious Struggle: The Eugenic Dynamic in Australian Popular SurfCulture, 1900–50’. Journal of Australian Studies 23 (62), pp. 56–63. Sachs, Wolfgang (1992), For love of the automobile: looking back into the history of our desires, University of California Press, Berkeley. Saunders, Kay (1998). ‘“Specimens of Superb Manhood:” The Lifesaver as National Icon,’ Journal of Australian Studies 22 (56), pp. 96–105. Scott, Paul (2003), “We shall Fight on the Seas and the Oceans…We shall “ M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 6 (1). Simon, Bryant (2004), Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America, Oxford University Press, New York. Sindermann, Carl J (2006), Coastal pollution: effects on living resources and humans, Tayor & Francis, London. Smith, Garry (1990), Toxic cities and the fight to save the Kurnell Peninsula, UNSW Press, Sydney. Souter, Gavin and Molnar, George (1968), Sydney Observed, Angus & Robertson, Sydney.

Selected bibliography

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305

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Spearritt, Peter (1978), Sydney Since The Twenties, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney. Stell, Marion (1992), Pam Burridge, Angus & Robertson, Sydney. Stern, Alexandra (2005), Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America, University of California Press, Berkeley. Tarr, Joel (1996), The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective, University of Akron Press, Akron. Thom, Bruce (1974), Coastal Erosion in NSW, Search, Vol. 5, No 5, pp. 198–208. Walton, John K (2010), The British Seaside: Holidays and Resorts in the Twentieth Century, Manchester University Press, Manchester. Wheatley, Nadia (1980), ‘Meeting Them at the Door: Radicalism, Militancy and the Sydney Anti-Eviction Campaign of 1931’ in Roe, Jill (editor), Twentieth Century Sydney: Studies in Urban and Social History, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, pp. 208–230. White, Cameron (2005), Pleasure Seekers: A History of the Male Body on the Beach in Sydney, 1811–1914, Doctoral Thesis, University of Sydney. White, Richard (1981), Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. White, Richard with Ballard, Sarah-Jane, Bown, Ingrid, Lake, Meredith, Leehy, Patricia and Oldmeadow, Lila (2005), On Holidays: A History of Getting Away in Australia, Pluto Press, North Melbourne. Wotherspoon, Garry (1991), City of the Plain: History of a Gay Sub-culture, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney.

Archival sources Australian War Memorial 528: Land Settlement in the vicinity of strategical positions along the coastline of Australia 1932–35. Australian War Memorial 123 [473]. Special Collection II Defence

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Committee Records: Proclamation of Defence Areas 1937–38. Australian War Memorial 193 [357 part 6]: 2 Eastern Command ‘G’ Branch Records. District Base Defence Scheme: Part III Plan for the Defence of Sydney Fortress. National Archives of Australia: Prime Minister’s Department; A461 Correspondence files, multiple number series 1934–50. National Archives of Australia: Works and Services Branch New South Wales; SP16/4 Property files for sites in NSW hired or acquired for the Department of Defence during World War II, 1940­ –48. National Archives of Australia: Deputy Director of Lighthouses and Navigation, NSW; SP485/2 Correspondence files 1929–60. National Archives of Australia: 2 District Base, Australian Military Forces, NSW Headquarters; SP553/1 Records of Fortress Installations (NSW Coast) 1934–50. National Archives of Australia: Works and Services Branch, New South Wales; SP857/1 Correspondence on acquisition of and claims re Commonwealth properties, NSW, 1913–69. National Archives of Australia: Works and Services Branch New South Wales; SP857/6 Correspondence re Army Hirings 1942–51. State Records NSW: Department of Lands, Leases Branch; NRS 8166, Correspondence Files 1924–37, 1940. State Records NSW: Department of Lands, Miscellaneous Branch; NRS 8258, Letters received 1867–1979. State Records NSW: Metropolitan Land Board; NRS 8515, Miscellaneous Files. Report of the New South Wales Surf Bathing Committee (1912), Sydney. Report of the Shark Menace Advisory Committee on Suggested Methods of Protecting Bathers from Shark Attack (1935), NSW Legislative Assembly.

Sydney Beaches

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Picture credits NAA NLA SLNSW SRNSW

National Archives of Australia National Library of Australia State Library of NSW State Records NSW

colour picture section

C. G. Coulter, Bondi Beach pleasure park, at Tamarama, ca 1880, SLNSW: V1A/ Bond/1 Charles Conder, 1868 England – 1909, Bronte Beach 1888. Oil on paper on cardboard, 22.6 x 33 cm, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Purchased from Gallery admission charges 1982 Balloon ascent, Wonderland, n.d., SLNSW: PXA 635/848 Warringah Shire Council, Long Reef Park (plan), 1912, SRNSW: NRS8258 [42/3119] Palm Beach Estate 1912 (cover), SLNSW: Mitchel Library Q981.3/R Fly to Australia by BOAC and Qantas, ca. 1950s, reproduced by permission Qantas Airways

Glorious Beach Estate, Cronulla (poster), 1937, SRNSW: NRS8258 [41/8649] Australian Women’s Weekly, 6 March 1943 (cover), The Australian Women’s Weekly/bauersyndication.com.au Tim Read, Bondi to Bronte ocean swim, December 2013 Beach closed, near Dee Why Lagoon, n.d., Beachwatch, Office of Environment and Heritage NSW Dallas Kilponen, Locals cop a pounding as huge waves crash over the pool at Bronte, 16 March 1923, Fairfax syndication. Michael Perini, Little Madison Frederickson runs in front of police on patrol on North Cronulla Beach, 17 December 2005, Newspix Di Quick, Sculpture by the Sea 2008

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1

Jim Browning on Manly Beach, 12 November 1929, Sue Talbot personal collection 2–3 Dallas Kilponen, Locals cop a pounding as huge waves crash over the pool at Bronte, 16 March 1923, Fairfax syndication 6 Di Quick, Inlet 17 Di Quick, Coast 21 Fairy Bower, Manly, n.d., SLNSW: PXE 711/262 22 Ocean Beach, Manly, n.d., SLNSW: SPF/690 24 Unidentified people swimming in rockpool, Avalon Beach, NSW, 1930, NLA: pic-an24770604 30 View of the sand hills fronting the sea after being protected by fascine fence for two years, Journal and abstract of proceedings of the Sydney University Engineering Society, vol. 7 1902 33 O’Brien vs Minister for Public Works, 1885, Exhibit C, SRNSW: PWD 4/7541 37 Hall & Co, ‘Dirigible’ over Tamarama, 1908, SLNSW: Home and Away – 34701 42 Albert James Perier, Clipper ship ‘Hereward’ wrecked on north end of Maroubra, 1898, SLNSW: Home and Away - 34608 48 Di Quick, Surf 51 Bathing, Little Coogee, n.d., Colin Caird collection, SLNSW: PXA 388/vol 1/243 53 In the breakers, Narrabeen, 1907, Colin Caird collection, SLNSW: PXA 388/vol 1/323 54 Max Dupain, Surf race start, Manly Beach, 1940, image supplied by the Max Dupain Exhibition Negative Archive 58 Interior women’s dressing sheds, Manly 1907, Colin Caird collection, SLNSW PXA 388/vol 1/342 64 Lifesaver watches the surf next to the Avalon SLSC reel, n.d., Walkabout, SLNSW: PXA 907/4 66 David Moore, Lifesavers man the

308

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reel at a Manly surf carnival, n.d., Walkabout, SLNSW: PXA 907/6 68–69 North Steyne, 1929, Sue Talbot personal collection 73 Interior, men’s dressing sheds, 1907, Colin Caird collection, SLNSW: PXA 388/vol 1/340 79 Di Quick, Pelicans 81 Austin family camping at Shelly Beach, 1906, Picture Sutherland Shire: MF001813 86 Lethington Maitland, Children from western areas of the state learn to swim at Stewart House Preventorium, South Curl Curl, 10 January 1935, SRNSW: Home and Away – 1600 88–89 Ted Hood, Far West children in the water, Bondi Beach, 27 December 1934, SRNSW: Home and Away – 1425 93 Approach to cave dwellers house near Kernell [ie Kurnell], NSW, 1930s, NLA: pic-vn3705987 97 Sam Hood, Wrestling, ca. 1930s, SLNSW: Home and Away – 5312 Sam Hood, Country socialites, 99 ca. 1930s, SLNSW: Home and Away – 2981 Camping area, Palm Beach, ca. 102 1950, Warringah Council Library: 40/WAR40106 110 Di Quick, Shell lines 113 March Past, Manly, n.d., Sue Talbot personal collection 114 Carnival crowd, 1929, courtesy Manly Library 115 Phyllis Stroud, ‘Sun Surf Queen’ with members of the North Cronulla SLSC outside their clubhouse, 1927, Picture Sutherland Shire: MF01399 116 Samuel Wood, Postcard photonegatives of Bronte, ca. 1928, SLNSW: a1470 Online 120–21 Southern end of Newport Beach with Farrell’s Lagoon and footbridge in foreground, 1910, Pittwater Image Library: NEW\NEW-044 126–27 Manly SLSC members, 25 March

Sydney Beaches

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1928, Sue Talbot personal collection 128–29 E.B. Studios, Surf carnival, Bondi, December 1929, SLNSW: SPF/3104 130–31 E.B. Studios, Coogee Beach, November 1929, SLNSW: SPF/1141 135 Beach just beyond Newport, 1909, Allen family collection, SLNSW: PXéD 591/3686 136–37 Cronulla Park and Cronulla Beach, panoramic view with Hotel Cecil at left, ca. 1924, Picture Sutherland Shire: MF002588 140–41 Myrle’s reception, North Steyne, July 1926, Sue Talbot personal collection 145 Di Quick, Rocks 152–53 Samuel Wood, Shark net, Coogee, ca. 1930s, SLNSW: ON 275/219 154 Sam Hood, Huge crowd of surfers at night, ca. 1930s, SLNSW: Home and Away – 7707 163 E.W. Searle, Shark tower, Manly, NSW, 1939, NLA: pic-vn4655933 169 T. Fischer, A 15 foot tiger shark is caught at Maroubra Beach in Sydney, 7 February 1936, Fairfax Syndication 172 Di Quick, Sneakers 180 Max Dupain, Tank obstacles, Harbord Beach, 1940s, image supplied by the Max Dupain Exhibition Negative Archive 187 Joyce Curtin and Reg White on Maroubra Beach, ca. 1943, Judy Bail personal collection 194 Di Quick, Coogee beach 195 Queen at Bondi surf carnival, 1954, SLNSW: Government Printing Office 2 – 05138 202 Sam Hood, Surfboard and surfoplane riders, n.d., SLNSW: PXE 789/10 204 ‘Midget’ Farrelly of Sydney World

Surfboard Champion, 1964, NAA: A1200, L47648 206 Manly, New South Wales, Surfers and surfboard riders at the beach, Norfolk pines in background, 1965, NAA: A1200, L50619 208 Bob Weeks, Maybe after this one, DY ‘62 211 Jeff Carter, In the late 1960s, girls were mostly spectators (of surfing), 1968, NLA: pic-vn3548972, by permission Estate of Jeff Carter 215 Bob Weeks, Greenhills Carpark, 1964 217 Bob Weeks, Wanda Girls 1968 226 Di Quick, Waves 240 Albe Falzon, John Witzig in gasmask, Whale Beach, 1970, image courtesy Albe Falzon 243 Beach fishing at Curl Curl, near Manly, 1954, NAA: A1200, L17104 246–47 Kirk Willcox, Crowd at Turn Back the Tide concert, Bondi Beach, March 1989 254 Di Quick, Seagull 256 A. O’Hara, Homes are damaged at Collaroy and Narrabeen in Sydney during heavy seas, 13 June 1945, Fairfax Syndication 266 Hall & Co., Two carts loading sand on dunes, n.d., SLNSW: Home and Away – 34713 269 Storm damage at North Cronulla Beach, 1974, Picture Sutherland Shire: MF004237 272 Cronulla Beach restoration, 29 July 1978, SLNSW: Government Printing Office 3 – 46320 277 Caroline Ford, Palm Beach erosion, 2012 281 Di Quick, Wylie’s Baths 286 Ted Hood, Mr J Prentice and Miss Jean Howatt doing acrobatics, Bondi Beach, January 1935, SLNSW: Home and Away – 1435

Picture credits

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Index Page numbers in italics refer to images. Aboriginal people 14, 27, 91, 96, 106–107, 210, 214 see also racial intolerance Aboriginal reserves 90–91, 92, 106 advertisements picture section, 36–38, 81, 115 Allon, Fiona 220–21 amusement parks 18, 36–42, 45–47 Anderson, William 36–41, 65 aquariums picture section, 18–20, 34–41, 168 architecture 125, 128–30, 142–43, 163, 172 Arthur, Richard 87–89 Ashton, James 40, 41, 55, 56–7 Askin, Robin ‘Bob’ 200, 236, 262 Atlantic City 62, 113, 216 Australian Professional Surfing Association 242 Australian Surfrider Foundation 251 Australian Surfriders Association 203, 207 Australian Women’s Army Service (AWAS) 181, 185 Avalon 274

Avalon Beach 11, 24, 64, 101, 103, 105, 143, 181 bathing see surf bathing bathing costumes 68–69, 116 see also bikini baths see ocean baths Bavin, Thomas 138 Baywatch 11 Beach Beyond 100 Beach Boys 11, 198 beach culture American influences 36 British influences 20–22, 35, 36, 39, 45, 67 unwritten rules 209–10, 218, 221 Beach Improvement Program 271–72, 278 beach inspectors 69, 147, 216 beaches attachment 14, 28, 100, 102, 159, 283 contrasted against other environments 23

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early uses 10, 26–27, 137–38 economy 43, 45, 56, 61, 83–84, 112, 132, 155–57, 160, 165, 170, 175, 177, 187, 205, 215, 227, 231, 244–45, 276 escape 23, 78, 79, 96, 97, 118, 187 formation 265, 266–67 free access 18–19, 28–35, 39, 40–41, 43–45, 46, 57, 60, 77, 158–60 games 20 healthy 10, 13, 22–23, 31, 32, 43, 53–55, 57, 76, 78, 79, 85, 87, 89, 95, 104, 222 ‘loose space’ 222 national space 11, 43, 75, 115, 133, 177, 221, 262 perceptions of 13, 16, 42, 75–76, 78, 167, 231, 276 privately owned 10, 29–31, 32, 43–45, 258 shoreline change 258, 260 visual amenity 159–60, 185, 275, 278 Beachley, Layne 211 Beachwatch 248, 249–50 Beaumont children 219 Beaurepaire, Frank 146 beauty competitions 115, 116–17, 140–41 Beder, Sharon 245 Bells Beach 197 Benchley, Peter 168 bikini 216, 217 Bilgola 85 Bilgola Beach 103, 257–58, 267–69 Blackpool 39, 215 boarding houses 97, 111, 254 bodies 58–59 moral opposition to 50 body surfing 52 see also surf bathing Bondi 26, 77–78, 118, 175, 181, 219 Park 32, 45–46, 129, 132 Pavilion 117, 129–30, 132, 143, 151, 276, 284 redevelopment 276–78 sand dunes 30, 124–25, 143, 228 Bondi Amateur Swimming Club 63 Bondi Beach picture section, 9–11, 20, 23–24, 25, 33, 47, 49, 62, 88–89, 106, 128, 128–29, 134, 188, 193, 194–95, 195, 214, 218, 243, 246–47,

248, 268, 286 amusement parks 41–42, 45–47 commercial ventures 57, 187 dressing sheds 56, 57, 59–60 military defences 178, 181, 182–83, 184, 186, 189–90 Olympic volleyball stadium 11, 278 pollution 228, 233, 241, 244–45 popular 81, 114 private ownership 28, 31 public access 19, 31–34, 160, 258 shark attacks 147, 148, 167 shark net 155–57 Bondi Improvement Scheme 125, 129–33 Bondi Rescue 133, 190 Bondi Surf Bathers’ Life Saving Club 42, 57, 63–65, 68, 188, 192, 210 Booth, Douglas 50, 210 Botany Bay 91–94, 142 Brander, Rob 279 Brawley, Sean 63 Breath 224 British seaside 20–22, 27, 39, 90, 104, 113, 200, 233, 236 Bronte 110–12, 178, 182 baths picture section, 26, 97, 156, 187 Estate 26–31 House 27–28 Park 34, 111, 143 Bronte Beach picture section, 20, 24, 25, 59, 62, 63, 81, 114, 116, 117, 148, 181, 190, 235 military defences 182, 184–85, 186 public access 15, 19, 28, 32, 33 Bronte Surf Life Saving Club 65, 192, 209 Bryson, Bill 12 built environment 16, 24, 36, 46, 57, 117–18, 128, 129–30, 133, 138, 160, 172–74, 176, 182, 191, 193, 255–64, 267–70, 276–78 Burridge, Pam 210–11 bush walking 95, 241, 295 Buttenshaw, Ernest 157, 159–60 California 113, 198, 217, 234, 238 camping 63, 78, 81, 87, 91, 102, 107–109, 138, 175, 177, 214 bans 80, 83, 94, 102–106, 144 criticisms 80, 82–83, 84, 90, 94,

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103–106, 108–109 homeless 91–96, 93, 101, 175 institutions 86, 90, 100–101 military 173, 178–9, 181 motor camps 100–101 regulations 70, 83 reserves 83–84 weekender 79–84, 96, 101–109, 197 Careel Headland 172–73 Carey, Gabrielle 211–12, 222 car parks 106, 118–19, 133, 134–37, 139, 143, 214, 215, 259, 260, 272, 280 fees 215–16 Carr, Bob 275–78 Carruthers, Sir Joseph 39–40, 57 Carson, Rachel 234 cattle 32, 98 Centennial Park 34 Central Coast 166, 268–69 Chalmers, Jack 146 charitable homes 84–90, 293 children 84–89, 86, 88–89, 95, 111, 125, 189, 202, 219 City of Sydney Council 228–31 class 55, 60, 79–85, 98, 101, 114, 133–34, 199–200, 207, 216–17, 276 climate change 279, 284 Clovelly Beach 49, 51, 59, 128, 272 Coast Hospital 22 Coastal Anti-Pollution League (Britain) 236 Coastal Lands Protection Scheme 270 coastal modifications 15, 32, 122, 119–28, 136, 257–58, 265, 266, 271–73 protection 259, 261, 263–64 studies 264–67, 279 Collaroy 44, 84, 90, 179, 190, 274 Collaroy Beach 43, 57, 87, 112, 118, 143, 182, 235, 258, 261–63, 278–79, 280 storm damage 254–60, 256, 262, 268–69 Come in Spinner 188 commercial enterprise 18–19, 34–42, 45–46, 57, 83–84, 155–56, 158–60 community action 14, 29–30, 40, 42–43, 46, 59–60, 61–63, 101–103, 119–22, 138–42, 157, 158–60, 170, 233, 235– 36, 248, 252, 261, 263, 273, 274–79 Conder, Charles picture section

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Coney Island 39, 114, 134, 217 Coogee 26, 118, 125 Aquarium 18, 35–36, 168 ocean baths 26, 117, 170, 213, 268, 281–82 park 23 Coogee Beach 23–25, 32, 38–39, 130–31, 134–35, 148, 150, 154, 156–57, 165, 168, 185, 257, 271, 281–83 dressing sheds 49, 56, 59, 227 military defences 178, 181, 182 pier 38–39, 45, 151, 170, 227 pollution 226–27, 232, 234, 235 popular 20, 23, 49, 81, 114 shark attacks 145–47, 148 shark net 132, 150–55, 152–53, 156–57, 170 Coogee Surf Life Saving Club 145 Coppleson, Victor 162 Corris, Peter 276 Cottesloe 75, 184 Country Women’s Association (CWA) 85–86, 90 Cronulla 77, 91, 108, 201 beaches 81, 81, 128, 136–37, 212–13, 224, 249, 272, 299 esplanade 182 Fisheries 175 ocean outfall 233, 249 riots picture section, 11, 220–22 Cronulla Beach 34, 44, 77, 87, 136, 136–37, 142, 166, 193, 258 military defences 175, 178, 181–82, 185, 186 pollution 249 storm damage 270, 272 Cronulla Surf Life Saving Club 65 Crosio, Janice 244 cultural diversity 210, 218–19 Curl Curl 26, 86, 88, 178, 182 lagoon 235 Curl Curl Beach 34, 81, 86, 102–103, 168, 243, 245, 258, 273 Curlewis, Adrian 100, 161, 186 Curlewis, Jean 100 Cusack, Dymphna 188 dancing 20, 35, 130, 136, 151, 185, 188–89, 198, 214, 223

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Darling, Sir Ralph 28 day trips 13, 20, 35–36, 100, 108, 118 Dean, Cornelia 278 Dee Why 79, 85, 178, 182 lagoon 103, 272 Dee Why Beach picture section, 208, 245 Department of Lands 40, 44–45, 122–23, 155–57 Department of Public Works 271–73 defence reserves see reserves Dooley, James 147 dredging 119–24 criticisms 122–23 dressing sheds 49, 56–61, 58, 73, 132 free entry 57, 60–61 inadequate 58–59 drowning 12, 25, 48–49, 52, 62, 63, 67, 123, 133, 219, 268 see also surf rescues Dupain, Max 54, 180 Eastern Suburbs 32, 43, 91, 117–18, 134, 138, 177, 184, 210, 213, 247 environmental awareness 15, 123, 231, 232, 234–35, 238–39, 241–42, 264, 274–75, 278, 283–84 campaigns 235, 238–39, 242–44, 248, 249, 251, 261–64 movement 238–39, 295 politics 123–24, 236–27, 261 protection 46, 104, 169, 224, 231, 253, 273 erosion 258, 259, 262, 264, 265, 279 Eucalyptus Town 91 eugenics 55, 76, 85, 89 Evers, Clifton 209 Exxon Valdez 247 Eyre, Edward ‘Appy’ 62 Fairy Bower 21, 157 Far West Children’s Home 87, 88, 178, 181 Farrelly, Bernard ‘Midget’ 204 Ferguson, Jack 273 fishing 10, 27, 75, 80, 83, 92, 147, 149, 155, 168, 202, 214, 231, 243, 245–46 Fletcher’s Glen see Tamarama

foreshores see reserves, resumptions Foreshores Resumption Scheme 44, 80 Freshwater Beach 142, 271–72 camping 81–82, 90, 197 military defences 180, 182, 190 surfing 196–97, 204–05, 224 Freshwater Surf Life Saving Club 210 Furlough House 86, 87, 178 Garrett, Thomas 19 gay ‘beats’ 117 gender segregation 26, 117 Georges River 106, 136, 166 Glenelg 219, 221 Gocher, William 50 Gold Coast 260, 274–75 golf 84, 95, 101, 106, 175, 182 Gordon, Angus 267–68, 271 government – colonial/state 75, 149, 150, 165–56, 200, 205, 232, 248, 259, 263–64, 267, 271, 273, 275, 279 camping 80, 82–84, 91–95, 104, 106, 108 free beach access 19, 28–34, 40–41, 43–45, 46, 57, 60, 156, 159–60 investing in beaches 56–57, 59–60, 62–63, 111–12, 125–28, 258, 259, 270–71 pollution management 227–31, 234, 236–38, 243–44, 248 regulations 59, 155–57, 196 revenue 57, 138–42, 155–56, 277 supporting business 19, 34, 39–40, 119–24, 155–56, 262 private interests 34 government – Commonwealth 175, 230–31, 270 see also military authorities government – local 68, 118, 183, 244, 270 revenue 39, 41, 42, 43, 56, 61, 80, 83–84, 102, 132, 155, 156, 157, 158–60, 161, 187–88, 261 seeking state assistance 56, 61–62, 75, 131–32, 156–57, 216, 260 Great Depression 91–96, 93, 100, 101, 125–28, 132, 142, 156 Green Bans 239, 275 Greenhills 212–13, 215

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Greenpeace 238–89 Griffith, Arthur 80 Happy Valley 91–96, 175 Harbord 82, 103, 215–16, 236, 275 see also Freshwater Harbour Foreshores Vigilance Committee 43 Hartt, Cecil 79–80, 82 Hawaii 196–97 health and fitness, promotion of 23, 53–55 Heffron, Robert 200 high rise development 193, 261–63, 274–79 holiday houses 97–101, 134, 172–4, 178, 182 holidays 71, 85–87, 96, 98, 105, 115, 212, 214 Holdsworth, J.B. 29–31 Holman, William 44–45 Holt, Harold 219 hotels 20, 24, 82, 98, 113, 136, 181, 261–62, 275 Home and Away 11 Hunt, Alfred 87 Huntsman, Leone 263 Illawarra 59, 75, 166, 201, 271 immigrants 210–11, 218–19 Ingray, Michael 91 investors 20, 46, 97, 118, 160, 275 Irish, Paul 91 Jackson, Joseph 227 James, Florence 188 Jaws 162, 168 Kahanamoku, Duke 196–97, 224 Kangaroo 96–97 Keep Australia Beautiful 253 Keera House 85, 87 Kellerman, Annette 167 Knox, Malcom 224 Kurnell 91, 93, 143, 175, 249 La Perouse 90–96, 106, 138, 175, 268

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lagoons 10, 26, 79, 111, 119–24, 128, 143, 235, 265, 272 land values 19, 43, 56–57, 77–78, 117–18, 124, 125, 262 Langford Smith, Trevor 273 Lawrence, DH 96 legislation Beaches, Fishing Grounds and Sea Routes Protection Act 1932 230–31 Clean Waters Act 1970 237 Coastal Protection Act 1979 273 Crown Lands Alienation Act 1861 29 Local Government Act 1919 118, 231 Lette, Kathy 211–12, 222 Lewis, Thomas 271 lifeguards (professional) 62, 133, 226, 246, 282, 283 lifesavers see surf lifesavers Lifesavers With Pride 223 Little Bay 22 Little Coogee see Clovelly Local Land Board Inquiry 46, 159 Long Bay 77 Long Reef picture section, 27, 44, 77, 90, 182, 254, 272 camping 79–80, 82–84, 91, 94, 96, 105, 181 Loughin, Peter Ffrench 45 Lowe, Robert and Georgiana 26–29 Luna Park 45–46 Lyne, William 228 Macleay, William Sharp 28 Malabar ocean outfall 233, 238, 249 pollution 233, 235, 236, 249–50 sewage treatment works 234 Manly 21, 23, 24, 82, 87, 199, 201, 267–68, 275 Aquarium 18, 35–36 Catholic seminary 213–14 harbour baths 29, 49, 157, 213, 268, 270 lagoon 123–24 Manly Beach 11, 22, 23, 28, 43, 48–49, 54, 62, 63, 66, 70–71, 113, 114, 126–27, 163, 188, 196 amusements 38, 42

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dressing sheds 58, 59, 158–60, 73 military defences 181, 185, 186 Norfolk Island Pines 129, 260 pavilion 143, 158, 160, 163 pollution 228, 229, 235, 253 popular 20, 81–82, 114, 134–35 shark net 157–61, 165 surfing 204, 204, 206, 210–11, 224 Manly Municipal Council 32, 56, 60, 65, 135, 161, 165, 215, 228, 250–51, 253, 269–70 regulations 50 supporting commercial initiatives 41, 123–24, 157–61 Manly Surf Club 53, 65 marine drive 133, 138, 142 marketing 23, 32, 36–38, 67, 115, 130, 151, 158, 250 Maroubra 77, 85, 90–91, 98, 185, 221 market gardens 144 sand dunes 125–28, 143 Maroubra Beach 42, 43, 57, 59, 135–36, 137–42, 169, 187, 209, 224, 268, 270, 272 camping 77, 81, 94–5 military defences 178, 181–82, 185 pollution 227, 242 shark attacks 149, 150, 166 Martin, Sir James 30, 232 McCarthy, Robert 200 McGowen, James 43–4, 80, 84 McIvers’ Ladies Baths 213, 282 media 43, 53, 55, 56, 61, 63, 72, 74, 76, 122, 139, 147, 148, 156, 164, 197, 199–201, 205, 220, 234–35, 238–39, 243, 245–46, 250, 252, 262, 264, 276, 279 Mediterranean beaches 75, 113 Melbourne 46, 79, 99, 146, 212, 215, 219 Metcalfe, AJ 41 Metropolitan Water, Sewerage and Drainage Board (MWSDB) 237, 244, 245 ‘miasma’ 124, 232 military authorities 175–81, 184 Mills, Samuel 70–71 Mitchell, Sir Thomas 28, 31 modernity 130, 132–33, 142–43 Mona Vale 27, 100, 178, 182, 236 Mona Vale Beach 77, 98, 181, 235, 257–58, 272–73

Moore, Samuel 57 morality 50, 56, 59 motor vehicles 108, 133–37, 197, 214 Mutch, Thomas 138–39 Napper, James 44 Narrabeen 86, 193 camping 103, 107, 181 lagoon 106, 107, 123, 181 Narrabeen Beach 26, 53, 143, 166, 257–59, 261, 265, 267, 273, 278–79 national parks 270 National Roads and Motorist’s Association (NRMA) 100–101, 106, 139 National Trust 275 national type 13, 67, 70, 72, 74, 75–76 Nelson Bay see Bronte New South Wales Anti-Pollution of Air and Water League 232 New South Wales Coastal Council 273 New York 104, 134, 216–17, 230, 239 Newcastle 49, 75, 85, 95, 148, 161, 166, 167, 177, 205, 221, 228, 230, 236, 252, 268, 270, 271 Newport 98, 103 lagoon 111, 119–23, 120–21, 143 Newport Beach 111–12, 119–22, 135, 142, 143, 212, 251–52, 257–58, 268, 272 Newport Surf Life Saving Club 119–20 Nielsen, Niels 44 Nielsen Park 44, 155 night swimming 151, 154, 156, 158, 170, 187–88 Niland, D’arcy 254–55 North Bondi 63, 106, 124–25, 130, 132, 176, 202, 274 ocean outfall 232, 238, 249 sewage treatment works 234 North Cronulla Beach picture section, 137, 205, 220, 269, 270, 273 North Cronulla Surf Life Saving Club 115, 260 North Curl Curl Surf Life Saving Club 181 North Head 175, 176, 181, 219 ocean outfall 233, 238, 245, 249 North Narrabeen Beach 11, 198, 207–09, 224 North Narrabeen Boardriders’ Club 203, 208

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North Narrabeen Surf Life Saving Club 210 North Steyne 113, 135, 140–41, 161 North Steyne Surf Life Saving Club 68, 113, 186, 210, 250 northern beaches 26–27, 28, 77, 96–98, 101, 108, 118, 134, 177, 181, 205, 245, 258 nudity 216 O’Brien, Francis 31, 33 ocean baths picture section, 24, 26, 281–82, 299 infinite 231–33, 253 outfalls 232–34, 238, 249 swims picture section, 10 O’Grady, Frank (author) 218 O’Grady, Frank (surf shed manager) 150, 226–27, 230 ‘outsiders’ 207–10, 220–23, 274 ozone 22–23, 124 Palm Beach picture section, 44–45, 98–101, 99, 203, 272, 277 camping 101, 102, 103, 106 storm damage 260, 268 Palm Beach Surf Life Saving Club 100, 192 Parkes, Sir Henry 18–19, 32 parks see reserves – recreation Parks and Playgrounds Movement 275 Park, Ruth 254–55, 267 People Opposed to Ocean Outfalls (POOO) 243–44, 246 Perth 14, 66, 75 petitions 29–30, 33, 90, 103, 158, 242, 247 picnicking 10, 17, 20, 23–25, 98, 100, 102, 106, 129, 135, 142 Pilger, John 241 pollution air 231, 234 garbage 227–31 industrial 237, 249, 300 landfill 235 oil 234, 247–48 sewage see sewage pollution

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stormwater picture section, 249–50 Port Stephens 164 Portsea 99, 219 progress associations 56, 90, 105, 105 property boundaries 28, 31, 44, 258 Puberty Blues 193, 212–13, 222 public holidays 20, 23, 111, 137, 188 public park movement 13, 34 quarries 10, 31 Queenscliff 123–24, 178 Queensland 13, 14, 166, 235, 260, 273, 274–75 racial intolerance 71–2, 217 Randwick Municipal Council 94, 138–42, 156–57, 170, 205, 226–27 commercial initiatives 151–52 investing in beaches 23, 26, 32, 56, 138, 150–55 regulations 49–50 Read, Peter 107 reserves camping 83, 103 defence 92, 175–76, 177 one hundred foot foreshore 18–19, 28–31, 45, 175, 258 recreation 32–34, 40–41, 43–45, 57, 77, 80, 83, 84, 92, 94, 98, 104, 105, 111–12, 137–42, 258, 259 surfing 224 resumptions 31–44, 44–45, 80, 98, 105, 110–12, 118, 134, 136–37, 143, 258–60, 262, 270, 291 roads 23–24, 30–31, 33, 125, 128, 133–34, 142, 175, 214, 259, 260 Robertson and Marks (architects) 130 Robertson, Sir John 29 romance 10, 70–71 romantic aesthetic 27 Roughley, Theodore 162–64 Royal Life Saving Society 61, 65 Royal National Park 34, 85, 91, 94, 104, 107, 231, 234 Royal Shipwreck Relief and Humane Society 61 Royal Tour, 1954 133, 194–96, 195 rural visitors 48, 70, 84–90, 101

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salt water health benefits 22–23 Salvation Army 83, 123 sand drift 30, 124–25, 257–59, 264, 265 dunes 10, 30, 124–29, 138, 143, 215, 228, 271–73 mining 70, 125, 263, 266, 283 scientists 162, 233, 264–66, 273, 279 Sculpture by the Sea picture section, 17–18 Seaside Camp Association 84–85 seaside camps 70, 87 seawalls 15, 129, 136, 143, 259, 260, 265–66, 267–68, 271, 273, 278–79 sewage pollution picture section, 13, 32, 232–50, 276, 301 denial 233–36, 244 health 233, 236, 242 244–45, 247 opposition to 232–33, 241–44, 246–47 scientific evidence 236, 244 treatment 233–34, 238, 249 sex 117 shacks 92, 95, 104, 106, 107, 178 shark 12, 18–19, 72, 169, 252 arm murders 168 attacks 145–46, 147–50, 156, 157, 160, 165–67, 170 ‘baiting’ 149, 150 conservation 169–70 fear of 52, 146–47, 148, 158–59, 164, 165, 167–69, 171, 218 fishing 83, 147, 148 meshing program 163–67, 231 proof enclosures 128, 132, 150– 60 protecting swimmers 148, 149–50, 161–64 species 147, 148, 283 towers 149, 150, 163 Shark Menace Advisory Committee 70, 161–4, 166 shipwrecks 42 Short, Andrew 265, 278, 279 Silent Spring 234 Small, Bruce 274–75 Smith, Charles Kingsford 65 Smith, Henry Gilbert 23 Soil Conservation Service 259 Souter, Gavin 167–68, 214 South Africa 151, 166

South Australia 273 south coast, NSW 198, 275 South Maroubra Surf Life Saving Club 250 State Pollution Control Commission 237, 245 Stead, David 164 Stephen, Sir Alfred 28 Stevens, Sir Bertram 46 Stewart House 86, 86, 87–88, 293 stomps 198 Stop The Ocean Pollution (STOP) 242–44, 246 storm damage 122, 128, 170, 254–60, 256, 267–70, 269, 301 stormwater drains 143, 236–37, 249–50, 272 subdivisions picture section, 26, 29, 33, 44–45, 77, 81, 98, 118, 123, 125, 138–39, 175 suburban development 97–98, 117–19, 123, 128, 138, 143, 261–64, 270, 274–79 sun bathing 11, 71–74, 73, 76, 113 dangers 11, 74 promotion of 70–71 sun tans 66, 71–74, 116 Sunday recreation 20 surf 39, 43 movies 198 music 198 rescues 48–49, 50, 52, 61–63, 65, 133, 145, 185, 203 surf bathing 13, 25, 35, 40, 48–63, 75–78 bans 25, 49–50 healthy 43, 51–55, 62, 75, 87, 164 moral opposition to 53, 67 political support 49, 55, 57, 65, 67, 77–78 promotion of 51–55 regulation 49–50 revenue 56–57, 60–61, 77–78 Surf Bathing Association of NSW (SBA) 68, 146 Surf Bathing Committee 60, 70, 72, 149 Surf Life Saving Association of Australia (SLSAA) see Surf Life Saving Australia Surf Life Saving Australia (SLSA) 52, 69, 100, 161, 196, 197, 211–12, 219, 223,

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227, 242, 246, 279 surf lifesavers 11, 13, 63–70, 64, 66, 67, 68–69, 113, 115, 115, 145–46, 186–87, 197, 198, 201, 202–04, 207, 214 authority 60, 70, 149, 199, 202–03, 223, 227, 233, 239, 251 influence 68–70, 161, 231 physique 67, 72, 117, 282 see also national type surf lifesaving 75 carnivals 65–67, 66, 113, 114, 131, 145, 158, 187, 195, 214 clubs 63–65, 192, 201 see also club names diversity 209–10, 220, 223 education 52–53, 279 equipment 61–65, 64, 68–69, 197, 207 women 211–12 surfboards 76, 197, 203–05, 207 surfers 197, 205–09, 208, 223, 251 criticisms of 196, 199–209 environmentalism 224, 241–42 territorialism 208–09, 223 surfing 11, 76, 126–27, 206, 224 bans 197, 203–05 clubs 203 early history 76, 196–97 regulations 202–07 ‘rules’ 209 women 210–11, 213 Surfline 244, 248 surfoplanes 202, 203 Sulman, John 130 Sutherland Shire Council 166, 187, 205, 260 investing in the beaches 136–37, 270 swimming pools 115 Sydney Coastal Councils Group 250 Sydney Harbour 23, 26, 43–44, 91, 142, 146, 148, 155, 165, 177, 228, 232, 267–68 Tamarama 142 Tamarama Beach 17–19, 28, 34–41, 37, 52, 57, 62, 65–67 fence 18, 34, 40, 41 military defences 184 public access 19, 32–34, 40–41, 77, 291

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Royal Aquarium and Pleasure Grounds picture section, 18–19, 35–36 Wonderland City picture section, 36–41, 37, 45, 65–66 territorialism 200, 208–10, 221–22 The Empty Beach 276 The Life 224 They’re a Weird Mob 218 Thom, Bruce 265 tourism 49, 95, 102, 107, 144, 161, 165, 188, 214, 227, 231, 244–45 investments 23, 34, 56, 102, 113, 118, 122, 131, 138, 155, 261, 271 tourists 11, 18, 218–19, 223–24, 274, 276–77 Town Planning Association 139, 260 Tracks 240, 241–42 transport 23, 44, 77, 118, 222 Tully, John 115–16 Turn Back the Tide 248 Turner, Ethel 100 unemployment schemes 125–28, 273 United States of America 90, 264–65, 278 beaches 39, 75, 104, 113–14 class 134 pollution 234, 236, 239 racial segregation 216–17 violence 11–12, 200–01, 219, 220 Wade, Sir Charles 43, 55, 57, 75, 77 walking 9, 10, 20, 23, 28, 281 Wanda Beach 217, 272 Wanda murders 219 Wanda Surf Life Saving Club 191–92 Warren, Mark 208–09 Warriewood Beach 260 ocean outfall 233 Warriewood Surf Life Saving Club 186 Warringah Shire Council 98, 106, 142, 183, 215–16, 235, 257 coastal zone management 259, 261–63, 278–89 camping 80, 83–84, 102–06, 177 commercial initiatives 83–84, 107 regulations 197, 204–05

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Waverley Cemetery 10 Waverley Municipal Council 25, 35, 50, 62, 125, 131, 186, 188, 205, 227, 228, 276 beach management 57, 202 investing in beaches 24, 49, 56, 125, 129–33, 155–7 public beach access 19, 29–34, 40, 111, 117, 291 regulations 50, 72, 203, 205 revenue 41, 45–46, 187 Wearne, Walter 85, 98 Western Australia 104, 169–70, 183, 184 western suburbs 108, 207–08, 210, 214, 220, 222 Whale Beach 98, 172–74, 240, 257–58, 268 camping 101–102, 103, 105 Whale Beach Surf Life Saving Club 101–102, 105 whales 17, 166, 251–52 Willcox, Kirk 242–43 Williams, Frederick 52 Winton, Tim 224

Witzig, John 240, 241 Wollongong see Illawarra women 74, 76, 85, 87, 90, 116–17, 210–13, 216, 282 working-class 25, 79–80, 82–96, 114, 134, 199, 207, 216 benefits of beach recreation 43–44, 57, 80, 84–85 World Surfing Championships 196, 204 World War II 177–91, 187 coastal evacuation 178 American servicemen 188–89 beach recreation 185–89 coastal defences picture section, 173, 176–85, 186, 180, 189–91 Wright, Don 265 Wylie’s Baths 281, 282 Yarra Bay 92–96 Young, Nat 242 youth 71, 82, 117, 136, 196, 198–207, 212, 214, 273 ‘rockers’ and ‘surfies’ 198–201

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