Like Harriet from D.H. Lawrenceâs Kangaroo, our culture has a fascination with the coast. While she resembles the quintessential English character who migrates from Britain to the shores of Australia enraptured by the sights, scenes and smells, she also reflects a certain admiration and desire to live by the sea. Throughout Australian culture in particular, the coast has played a major role in shaping much of our national identity and how others have seen us. We fought wars on beaches across lands unknown that have become treasured public holidays where solemn assemblies come together in silent reverie, and inspire younger generations to join others in secular pilgrimage to the shores of Gallipoli (Scates 2006, 2007; Osbaldiston and Petray 2011; West 2008). We have periodically in the past spent summers in small coastal villages/hamlets where families imbued a nostalgia for the shore in their children (Booth 2001). Soon we realised the potential for this resource as something of market value beyond domestic tourism however. We advertised our natural beauty to the world through images of pristine, open and often untouched beaches where golden sands meet glistening crystal clear waters (Osbaldiston 2012). In addition to this, the coasts of Australia were pushed as alternatives to the international resorts found in Spain, America and other coastal meccas. Our coasts were seen as playgrounds for the wealthy, but also places of escape where the ills of modernity can be healed temporar ily (cf. Shields 1991).
Like Harriet though, we have not just had a fascination with the coast, but have actively sought to live on it. In Australia alone, 85% of the population lives within 50 km of the coastline (ABS 2001). Of course, this continent is bound to what demographers Burnley and Murphy (2004, 23) call âmetropolitan primacyâ wherein large coastal city centres such as Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide house most of Australiaâs population . Non-metropolitan coastal places , and other regional locations, outside of these major cities pale in comparison in terms of population size (Burnley and Murphy 2004). In fact, non-metropolitan townships have suffered for some time a trend of population decline where in particular younger people seek the opportunities of the bigger cities (Farrugia 2016). Nevertheless, over the past three decades or so, some coastal places have reversed this trend as people seek for the peacefulness and perceived authenticity of living by the sea (Burnley and Murphy 2004; Osbaldiston 2012). This phenomenon has been labelled in Australia âseachange â but reflects the wider international trend called lifestyle migration or amenity migration (Benson and OâReilly 2009; Benson and Osbaldiston 2014; Hoey 2014; Moss 2006).
A significant amount of academic interest has focused on the motivations of these lifestyle migrants including the manifestation of class-based habits and ideals post-migration (Benson 2011; Oliver and OâReilly 2010). In the past, my own research attempts to explain this in the context of place and the cultural narratives of authenticity (Osbaldiston 2012; Smith 1999). In particular, the arguments contained in former works relied upon the representations of place in policy, planning and tourism documents that highlight distinctions between what is perceived of as the regional versus what is the urban (Osbaldiston 2012). Similarly, rural researchers such as Keith Halfacree (2006) centre their attention on the spatial representations within rural geographies and how these are transforming (see also Mitchell 2013). For Halfacree (2006, 19), the rural locality is distinctive through âspatial practicesâ, âformal representations of the ruralâ via institutions either market or politically driven and the âeveryday lives of the ruralâ where âindividual and social elementsâ are found and negotiated daily.
This book in some ways follows Halfacreeâs (2006) logic wherein coasts are spaces that are defined by a multitude of different practices, representations formally and informally and the everyday lives of those who live there. However, it seeks to not be ahistorical in examining this. Rather, following sociologist Max Weberâs methodological and theoretical work, this book examines how coasts have developed, what changed within modernity about them and how these modern mentalities have proceeded to influence coastal practices today. There has been, as shown in this book, a transition from a coastal space that was seen as important for production or industry, through to one that is bound to ideals of consumption today. In rurality, this process has been well rehearsed in discussions about the transition of the rural from a productivist space, to a post-productivist countryside where consumption of space entails practices such as agri-tourism (Halfacree 2006; Marsden 1999; Murdoch et al. 2003). In addition to this is the increase of contestation of spatial practices where authentic practices in particular are lauded, while those that are seen as failing to adhere to the rural idyll are shunned (Halfacree 2006; Macnaughten and Urry 1998).
While this works effectively perhaps for the question of rurality within smaller geographical countries like Britain, this neat transition between a productivist and post-productivist countryside is less clear in a place like Australia (Holmes 2002). The heterogeneity of rural/regional places and sheer size of this continent means that there are a number of different and distinct understandings of place/space and the resultant spatial practices that occur within them (Holmes 2002; cf. Wilson 2001). The argument of this book is similar in a sense. Coastal places firstly cannot be simply understood as non-urban or rural spaces. Secondly, coastal places themselves in this continent have developed in their own distinctive patterns culturally that differ from other coasts. In short, there is not a one size fits all way of theorising coasts today as each has its own unique histories, cultures and importantly future aims and ambitions.
Within sociology, the coast has been a focal point for some investigation, but it has been largely ignored (Poole 1981; Cocco 2013; Hannigan 2017, Longo and Clark 2016). It begins perhaps innocuously however in the studies of Norbert Elias (Moelker 2003) on the naval profession and the development of a strong English navy and maritime supremacy. Yet following from this there was a void in understanding maritime/oceans as a serious site for sociological investigation. In more contemporary times, the creation of what is now known as âmaritime sociology â attempted to rectify this somewhat with Poole (1981) setting out some ideas that would guide further research. The argument within this still developing research agenda seeks to overcome the terrestrial bias that sociology has and move into questions about life on the sea (Cocco 2013; Picken 2015). This requires a shift away from thinking of the sea as merely a place for normal sociological investigation however. As Cocco (2013, 11) argues, âmaritime topics of investigationsâ are often âsimply brought into already existing theoretical perspectives and treated like objects of empirical workâ. The sea however challenges in many ways some of the fundamental assumptions of contemporary sociology. Cocco (2013, 12; Hannigan 2017) for instance argues that the sea has its own âdevi...