‘Un-Australian’ name-calling no solution to beach wars
The battle of the beach has long been an issue overseas, or as the British like to point out, it’s always a race to beat the Germans to a sun lounge. In Italy recently I tried to swim in Sorrento and had to pay something like 60 euros ($99) to sit there for a couple of hours by the sea. That’s the way of their world.
Such things have rarely been an issue in Australia, the land of sun and surf, where we have all the beach we could want, but with greater awareness of the threat the sun poses to our skin and a need to swim between the flags, that mass beach expanse seems to have shrunk somewhat.
Cabanas at Bondi Beach on Australia Day in 2023. Brook Mitchell
When CoolCabana’s Mark Fraser came up with a solution to protect from the sun, I am certain he never expected his product to cause such a hullabaloo.
The positives of cabanas are twofold: they save you from the sun and create ownership and boundaries. The negatives are: they take up space and create ownership and boundaries. Hmmm.
A quick cabana up-down activity should not hurt anyone, but given the effort to erect it, complaints arise that people are claiming their land rights for the day and coming and going at will. Occupied space is left in prime positions, and it has riled locals and other beachgoers.
Why do people behave that way? Well, it is only natural to want to own something, something so beautiful, even if only for a day. That’s a universal behaviour that anyone would strive for.
While the Baby Boomers are perhaps inspired by privilege, the question is, how selfish are the majority of Australians today?
Is this fair? This is where a little national culture comes into play rising as high as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese being asked on Nine’s Today program whether he agreed with frustrations about the cabanas, which the hosts declared were “un-Australian”.
Albanese said it was “not on” for Australians to use cabana shades to reserve space at popular beaches.
Visiting a limestone cave in Tasmania on a previous holiday, I asked the tour guide how he managed the delicate stalactites and stalagmites so close to use when little children wandered through on the tours. “Oh,” he said, “it’s not the little children you have to worry about, it’s the Baby Boomer men.” As I turned around to tell my Baby Boomer husband how funny that was, I found him with his hand firmly on one of the stalactites. Da dum.
While the Baby Boomers are perhaps inspired by privilege, the question is, how selfish are the majority of Australians today?
Well, the first question to ask is how anxious and fearful are we, because those issues will impact largely on the selfishness factor.
On Friday morning an email from Microsoft told me of the increase in subscription from $139 to $179. That’s a 30 per cent rise. Together with all the rises in the cost of living, it’s enough to send one spiralling to the beach, setting up a cabana and saying, “This, at least, is mine.”
The Australian Institute tells us Australians today are up to their eyeballs in debt. Hundreds of thousands of people have looked at their partner across the table and said, “If the interest rates go up, we are stuffed.”
As a consequence, financial preoccupations can lead to a rise in private greed which drives out social good.
This loss of empathy can become what some say is “un-Australian”. But should cabanas be an issue for the prime minister to step into as he did on breakfast television this week?
Probably not. While it appears, his strategy is of linking more and more of the “everyday” activities of all Australians, the drip, drip of these experiences is building a picture of a man concerned with the irrelevant and does little for his image for an upcoming federal election with so many under economic duress.
What’s the solution? Well, when I was a young girl, and I went to leave the house in inappropriate clothing my mother would say in a sarcastic tone, “I wouldn’t wear that.” In retrospect, I can see that this was not really helpful and just led to a fight. Similarly, naming the behaviour with cabanas and e-bikes as “un-Australian” does not help anyone.
The answer, as with just about everything in life is … wait for it … because we seem to have let this go over the last decade … education. Australia, as the youthful cousin, needs help and guidance with our thinking. We don’t have to follow our older siblings like Germany and Italy. We need to do it our own way.
So, let’s decide what to do, give guidelines for behaviour and then implement them. For example, could there be sections of the beach next to the flagged area reserved for cabanas?
What is the plan team? Name-calling won’t solve a thing.
We are all Australian, want to be Australian and, as we approach an Australian celebration, let’s be proud Australians.