Jude Adams, School of Art, University of South Australia

jude.adams@unisa.edu.au

This paper will consider the importance of place in facilitating particular types of narratives. Landscape, with its basis on European traditions, has been central to Australian art and film. Theorised as an ‘essentialised other’, representations of the bush, the pastoral plains or the red centre have supported narratives of nation and identity. But what of that other landscape the landscape not of the continent’s ‘empty centre’ but the watery inhabited landscape at its edges? Does this landscape serve to fix identity on he same way? If, as has been argued, the bush/outback landscape is symbolically male, can it be proposed that the coastal landscape is a feminine space?

In undertaking a close reading of two films High Tide and Hotel Sorrento, this paper argues that the coast is a problematic and potent site. Complexity however can accommodate contradiction rather than closure and provide a space for the articulation of female subjectivity. This paper acknowledges that the beach may have overtaken the landscape as the primary signifier of national identity. As a site for cultural production, the coast is less weighed down by myths of nation and can evoke narratives that disrupt or subvert established notions of gender, identity and place.