The beach as (hu)man limit in Gold Coast narrative fiction

Authors

  • Kelly Palmer Queensland University of Technology

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2018.13

Keywords:

Gold Coast, literary fiction, textual analysis, spatial analysis, mythic space, conflict and estrangement

Abstract

Gold Coast beaches oscillate in the cultural imagination between everyday reality and a tourist’s paradise of ‘sun, surf and sex’ (Winchester and Everett 2000: 59). While these narratives of selfhood and becoming, egalitarianism and sexual liberation punctuate the media, Gold Coast literary fictions instead reveal the beach as a site of danger, wholly personifying the unknown. Within Amy Barker’s Omega Park, Melissa Lucashenko’s Steam Pigs, Georgia Savage’s The House Tibet and Matthew Condon’s Usher and A Night at the Pink Poodle, the beach is a ‘masculine’ space for testing the limit of the coastline and one’s own capacity for survival. This article undertakes a close textual analysis of these novels and surveys other Gold Coast fictions alongside spatial analysis of the Gold Coast coastline. These fictions suggest that the Gold Coast is not simply a holiday world or ‘Crime Capital’ in the cultural imagination, but a mythic space with violent memories, opening out onto an infinite horizon of conflict and estrangement.

Author Biography

  • Kelly Palmer, Queensland University of Technology

    Kelly Palmer lectures and tutors in popular culture, literary studies and writing at Queensland University of Technology. Her practice-led PhD looks to cultural and literary studies to explore how low-income locals practise belonging on the Gold Coast. She has recently published in The Routledge Handbook of Popular Culture and Tourism, Transnational Literature and Voiceworks.

References

ABC News 2011. ‘Gold Coast the “crime capital of Australia”’. 21 July, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-07-21/gold-coast-becoming-crime capital/2803830, accessed 18 February 2018.

ABC News 2016. ‘Schoolies statistics: Sex, drugs and binge-drinking’. 18 November, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-18/schoolies-year-12-celebrate-end-of-year/8038182, accessed 18 February 2018.

ABC News 2017. ‘Reports manipulated to mask rising Queensland crime rates, police sources allege’. 30 January, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-30/allegations-gold-coast-police-crime-managers-manipulating-stats/8217550, accessed 18 February 2018.

Assman, Jan 2011. ‘Communicative and cultural memory’. Cultural Memories, 4, 15–27.

Barcan, Ruth 2013. ‘Natural histories: Nature, history, and “regional consciousness” on the Gold Coast’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/9952/9839, accessed 18 February 2018.

Barker, Amy 2009. Omega park. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press.

Best, Ysola 1994. ‘An uneasy coexistence: An Aboriginal perspective of “contact history” in Southeast Queensland’. Aboriginal History, 18, 87-94.

Boyd, Robin 2010. The Australian ugliness. Melbourne: Text.

Braithwaite, Alyssa 2008. ‘Channel Nine drama The Strip: New underbelly on Gold Coast’. Daily Telegraph, 1 September, http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/entertainment/channel-nine-drama-the-strip-new-underbelly-on-gold-coast/news-story/0f9d804b8be6880b176fb80917be5927, accessed 18 February 2018.

Breen, Sally 2004. Future frontier. Unpublished PhD thesis, Griffith University.

Brewster, Anne 2003. ‘“The beach as “Dreaming place”: Reconciliation, the past and the zone of intersubjectivity in Indigenous literature’. New Literature Review, 40, 33–41.

Condon, Matthew 1991. Usher. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press.

Condon, Matthew 1995. A night at the Pink Poodle. Sydney: Random House [ebook].

Condon, Matthew 2008. ‘Gold Coast’s dark underbelly’. Courier-Mail, 10 June, http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/gold-coasts-dark-underbelly/news-story/3fd12f07f6588670c048721d8b48be8e?sv=c47644743139dc59fff4000019d4df8a, accessed 18 February 2018.

Ellison, Elizabeth 2010. Flagging space: Exploring the myth of the beach as an egalitarian space. Paper presented to Ignite10! Creative Industries Postgraduate Research Conference, 27–29 October 2, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, http://eprints.qut.edu.au/40207/2/40207.pdf, accessed 18 February 2018.

Ellison, Elizabeth 2016. ‘Badland beach: The Australian beach as a site of cultural remembering’. International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, 12(1): 115–27.

Ellison, Elizabeth 2017. ‘The gritty urban: The Australian beach as city periphery in cinema’. In David Forrest, Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner (eds), Filmurbia, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 79–94.

Ellison, Elizabeth and Hawkes, Lesley 2016. ‘Australian beachspace: The plurality of an iconic site’. Borderlands E-Journal, 15(1): 1–18, https://eprints.qut.edu.au/99620/1/EllisonHawkes_2016.pdf, accessed 18 February 2018.

Evers, Clifton 2009. ‘“The Point”: Surfing, geography and a sensual masculinity on the Gold Coast, Australia’. Social & Cultural Geography, 10(8): 893–908, http://dx.doi.org.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/10.1080/14649360903305783, accessed 18 February 2018.

Fiske, John, Hodge, Bob and Turner, Graeme 1987. Myths of Oz: Reading Australian popular culture. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

Frankland, Kathy 2009. ‘A brief history of government administrations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Queensland’. http://www.slq.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/93734/Admin_History_Aboriginal_and_Torres_Strait_Islanders.pdf.

Garbutt, Rob 2011. The locals: Identity, place and belonging in Australia and beyond. New York: Peter Lang.

Gold Coast Tourism 2014. The new Surfers Paradise lifestyle. YouTube video, posted 16 September, http://www.visitgoldcoast.com, accessed 18 February 2018.

Griffin, Grahame 2003. ‘Beyond the beach and into the blue: Gold Coast highrises and the oceanic gaze’. Cultural Studies Review, 9(1): 124–38.

Hutton, Grey 2014. ‘Australia’s crime capital looks like a paradise’, https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/mv5b38/ying-ang-photography-gold-coast, accessed 18 February 2018.

Jones, Michael 1986. A sunny place for shady people. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

Lucashenko, Melissa 1997. Steam pigs. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press.

McKay, Belinda 2005. ‘Natural imaginings: Literary representations on Southeast Queensland beyond the Brisbane Line’. Queensland Review, 12(1): 59–73.

McKay, Belinda 2007. ‘Natural imaginings: The literature of the hinterland’. In Patrick Buckridge and Belinda McKay (eds), By the book: A literary history of Queensland. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 92–110.

Moreton-Robinson, Aileen 2003. ‘I still call Australia home: Indigenous belonging and place in a white postcolonizing society’. In Sarah Ahmed (ed.), Uprootings/regroundings: Questions of home and migration. Oxford: Berg, 23–40.

O’Carroll, John 1999. ‘Upside-down and inside-out: Notes on the Australian cultural unconscious’. In Ruth Barcan and Ian Buchanan (eds), Imagining Australian space: Cultural studies and spatial inquiry. Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 13–36.

O’Connor, Rory 1997. The Kombumerri: Aboriginal people of the Gold Coast. Brisbane: National Library of Australia.

Osbaldiston, Nick 2017. Writing the Australian beach, conference paper, Central Queensland University, 18 August.

Pocock, Douglas C. D. 1988. Geography and literature. Environment and Planning 12(1): 87–102.

Potts, Andrew. 2016. ‘Gold Coast underbelly: Sunny days, shady people’. Gold Coast Bulletin, http://www.goldcoastbulletin.com.au/lifestyle/gold-coast-130/gold-coast-underbelly-sunny-days-shady-people/news-story/229120d86a366b0c9cfe39082e1cd0db, accessed 18 February 2018.

Potts, Ruth, Dedekorkut-Howes, Ays¸?n and Bosman, Caryl 2005. ‘Gold Coast is not only all that glitters: Understanding visitor and resident perceptions of the Gold Coast’. Australian Planner, 50(4): 316–27.

Preston-Whyte, Robert 2004. ‘The beach as liminal space’. In Alan, A. Lew, C. Michael Hall and Alan M. Williams (eds), A companion to tourism. Melbourne: Blackwell, 349–59.

Savage, Georgia 1992. The house Tibet. Ringwood: Penguin.

Shanahan, Brendan 2004. The secret life of the Gold Coast. Camberwell: Viking Press.

Stockwell, Stephen 2012. ‘Crime capital of Australia: The Gold Coast on screen’. Studies in Australasian Cinema, 5(3): 281–92.

Sutton, Chern’ee 2018. Genesis of the Gold Coast. Yugambeh Museum, Beenleigh.

Thompson, Elaine 1994. Fair enough: Egalitarianism in Australia. Sydney: UNSW Press.

Urry, John 2005. The tourist gaze (2nd ed.). London: Sage.

Ward, Susan and O’Regan, Tom 2009. ‘The film producer as the long-stay business tourist: Rethinking film and tourism from a Gold Coast perspective’. Tourism Geographies, 11(2): 214–32.

Winchester, Hilary P. M. and Everett, Kathryn 2000. ‘Schoolies Week as a rite of passage: A study of celebration and control’. In Elizabeth Kenworthy Teather (ed.), Embodied geographies: Spaces, bodies and rites of passage. London: Routledge, 59–76.

Published

2018-06-01

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Palmer, K. (2018). The beach as (hu)man limit in Gold Coast narrative fiction. Queensland Review, 25(1), 149-162. https://doi.org/10.1017/qre.2018.13