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Playing the Beaches and Patrolling the Shores; Rhetoric, Refugees and the Politics of Uncertainty.
Katrina Schlunke, Lecturer in Politics, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst
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The beach has been read as a theatre of colonial contact (Denning) and a flexible wash of meaning where profound oppositions are negotiated (Fiske, Turner, Hodge). It is also the beach in the form of unpatrolled shores that exposes the nation to the global usually figured through the threat of refugee 'swamping'. All these make the beach the site of historicised racial tensions. To stand against the unannounced arrival of strangers is to make the nation stand against its founding formation. But that breaching of the beaches, simultaneously colonised and coloniser has produced in turn a fractious whiteness that dreads and needs the idea of disordered strangers. Across the shores and beaches Australia performs its patrolled Morris figuration of being 'dubiously postcolonial and prematurely postmodern'.
