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The Beach in Art.
Ian Mclean, University of Western Australia
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According to Fiske, Hodge and Turner 'Australia means the beach.' But the beach was invented by the English around 1750 (Corbin). Invented was the regulated clean bourgeois beach; and the English brought it with them to Australia.
During the colonial period the beach was mainly pictured as a place for Aborigines - maybe the colonists desired to leave the shifting sands of their disembarkment for more solid ground. Not until the impressionists, in the late 19th century, was the beach made a central subject of art, and claimed for modern white Australia. But this promising start in beach iconology lasted less than decade. During the first half of the 20th century, the beach pre-occupied European more than Australians artists. The European avant-garde moved to the south of France, while Australian artists wandered inland, to discover the dry red interior. Some Australian artists did picture the new iconic status of the beach, but they did it in the name of European modernity, not Australian identity. There is nothing particularly Australian about Dupain's The Sunbaker (1937) Meere's Australian Beach Patterns (1938-40) and Robertshaw's Beach Scene. The sunbakers could be as easily French, American or South African; but always white - or as Morris remarked in regard to Meere's painting, 'Aryan.' And as more and more Australians flocked to the beach in the second half of the century, less and less artists depicted it.
This paper asks why the beach is rarely pictured in high art when it so intoxicates the popular Australian imagination.
