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‘The Beach’ at the End of the Century: Liminality and Place in Sea Change.
Rosanne Kennedy, Humanities, ANU
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The popular ABC TV series, Sea Change, uses the iconic Australian beach town of Pearl Bay, and the characters associated with it, as site for interrogating issues of identity, gender, sexuality, lifestyle, spirituality, the environment, greed, capitalism, and globalisation, in the context of Australian culture at the turn of the 21st century. In Sea Change, Pearl Bay is a liminal site (between Port Deakin and the deep blue sea) where opposites -- outsiders and insiders, cosmopolitan and parochial – mingle, clash, and sometimes resolve their differences. It is a site of reinvention and habit, which is represented as both timeless and endangered by the pressures of consumer capitalism and globalisation. For ‘city’ characters such as Laura, Max and Jack, Pearl Bay offers an escape from urban pressures (but not problems) and an opportunity for self-renewal and reinvention. By contrast, the long-term residents of Pearl Bay are continuously engaged in struggles to retain and protect traditional practices and lifestyles associated with the beach. In this paper, I ask: what work is the ‘the beach’ as a cultural, material and geographic site doing in this television series? What difference does it make to the social issues the series addresses – such as sexuality, secret pasts, death, grief -- that the series is located in a beach town? How do representations of the beach in Sea Change revise earlier iconic Australian representations of the beach? How does it re-vision Australian conceptions of ‘the beach’ in relation to late 20th century practices of gender, sexuality and identity? What opportunities does the series offer Australian cultural studies scholars for rethinking notions of ‘the beach’ in Australian culture and cultural studies? In addressing these questions, I draw on Australian cultural studies of the beach, feminist theories of gender and sexuality, and the concept of ‘liminality’ in cultural studies.
