Cirrus@Austlit

'One of the predominant icons associated with Australia today is the beach, often considered to be a landscape of vital importance for the nation's identity. Its significance asserts itself not only in material culture but, as Meaghan Morris remarks, a 'vast anthology could be compiled of beach scenes from literature, cinema, photography, painting, theatre, television drama and documentary, newspapers and magazines.'...While it might be tempting to hail the beach as the site of an Australia finally arrived at its 'real' postcolonial identity, Richard White argued already in 1980 that 'images of national identity, rather than describing an especially Australian identity, grow out of assumptions about nature, race, class, democracy, sex and empire, and are 'invented' to serve the interests of particular groups. This essay takes up White's argument in asking who these 'particular groups' are in the context of the beach and investigates those mechanisms of exclusion that keep certain people and their histories from the 'imagined memory' (Pierre Nora) where certain histories are remembered whereas others are excluded from national memory thus facilitating the beach's unifying national appeal. Contrary to these ostracising readings, Mudrooroo's 1991 poem 'Beached Australian Party,' Anne Zahalka's beach photography and Simone Lazaroo's novel The World Waiting to be Made will be treated as attempts to recover these excluded histories. (Author's abstract p. 125)