Maria Pieter Aquilia, Division of Electronic and Broadcast Media, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

tmpaquilia@ntu.edu.sg

While the beach has been the traditional domain for white anglo-saxon drama, the interplay of ethnic issues in Australasian film and television drama has largely been relegated to the inner city, industrial waterways or seedy harbours. However, recent film and television productions in Australia and Singapore are using the man-made beach, in the form of the swimming pools and constructed foreshores such as Sentosa Island, as new sites in which both the dominant and ethnic cultures share a level playing field. This paper explores the cultural role of the beach to host and minority cultures, and investigates the relationship of the man-made beach to the changing politics of ethnic identity in Australian and Singaporean drama.