Tourism and Australian Beach Cultures

Christine Metusela is an early career researcher currently conducting research for Neuroscience Research Australia and the University of New South Wales on projects funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council that address key questions about Aboriginal health and ageing and improving service provision for early onset dementia. Her PhD thesis explored social geographies of the beach. In particular, it focused on the transformations of the social relationships that forged the Illawarra beaches in NSW, Australia as a leisure and tourism space.Gordon Waitt is Associate Professor in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Wollongong, New South Wales. He is part of a larger team of researchers at the Australian Centre for Cultural Environmental Research (AUSCCER). His research interests include gender, sexuality, place, cultures and tourism. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters he co-authored Introducing Human Geography (Longman-Pearson Education Australia, 2000) and Gay Tourism: Culture and Context (Haworth Press, 2006).

Tourism and Australian Beach Cultures is an original, sophisticated and revealing history of the 'geographical imaginary' of the Australian beach, which carefully maps the cultural and spatial politics which helped to shape the bodies displayed on it.

• Introduction: Stripping Off Chapter 1. Sex in Private: ‘Bathing in Perfection’ Chapter 2. The Public Bathing Reserve: Disciplining the ‘Insatiable Desire to Pose on the Sands’ Chapter 3. Rail and Car Mobilities: Technologies of Movement and Touring the Sublime Chapter 4. The ‘Brighton of Australia’ becomes the ‘Sheffield of the South’: Knowledge, Power and the Production of an ‘Industrial Heartland’ in an ‘Earthly Paradise’ Chapter 5. ‘Battle for Honours’: Surf Lifesavers, Masculinity, Performativity and Spatiality Chapter 6. Making Bathing ‘Modern’