Anthony Albanese is up in arms over some absolutely un-Australian behaviour he’s seen on a Facebook group. People, he’s discovered, own beach cabanas.
This is not a problem in itself but, according to reports made by the News Corp papers, brightly coloured bits of tarp are being hammered into the God-given sand and then – get this – no one even sits there. They just leave again. Sometimes they’re actually saving a bit of beach for later on. Allegedly.
Albanese condemned the practice when asked about it on Channel Nine’s Today show.
I’m pro-cabana. Australia receives about 58 petajoules of solar radiation every year – more than any other country on Earth. As a kid of the 80s, my childhood was a series of lectures about the importance of slip, slop, slap and collective terror at the disappearing ozone layer. A beach cabana offers full-coverage, portable and attractive shade, and in my view there is simply no place for “be less sun smart” in our fiery skin-cancer factory of a country.
They saved my life only last weekend. On Sunday, when it was too hot to live, I went to my local beach. Before me unfurled a tapestry of rustling plastic: striped marquees, rainbow umbrellas, tents with Marvel characters. It was a scorcher and – maybe because of heatstroke – I was wearing socks and runners.
At the water line, I carefully removed them and dipped my toes. I squished around. I saw a school of tiny silver fish. People divebombed off the jetty and dunked their sisters and an ice-cream truck came. It was so Australian I may as well have been wrapped in a Eureka flag.
Sufficiently cooked, I stepped out of the sea. I put one foot on the sand, then the other. My brain took time to register that it was the temperature of nuclear fusion and, too far gone to change my mind, I sprinted ridiculously back to the boardwalk, screaming at the top of my lungs as my soles blistered.
I had never been more grateful for patches of shade cast by beach huts and the people smart enough to get them down early.
But it’s not just that whacking down a cabana makes good logical sense. The PM has missed something even more important: actually, the act of holding a spot is the epitome of Australianness.
Who among us hasn’t been at the supermarket checkout and suddenly remembered we forgot the tomato sauce? Or asked someone to watch our kid while we ran to the loo? Or let our friend line up at the canteen so we could push in at the last minute? Even the unequivocally Australian experience of calling tech support for our NBN connection gives the option of a callback while keeping our place in the queue.
“Mate,” we may say, to the opening refrain of our national anthem, “can you hold my spot?”
But maybe Albanese is right. You let one person bang pegs into the sand and then what? People will start going to the park at 9am to claim a barbecue. They’ll put their bag on the next seat so no one else can sit there. Talk about un-Australian.
After all, if there’s one thing we’re famous for, it’s politely asking before taking something as our own. “Pardon me,” we venture, with definitely no intention of stealing what rightfully belongs to someone else, “is this yours?” We have hardly ever, in our minutes-long cultural history, laid claim to a plot already in use and simply decimated it beyond imagining.
Why should beaches be any different? As Albanese says, in this country the beach is owned by everyone. Well, not everyone. One person, mostly. Besides the tiny bits being encroached upon by billionaires, King Charles III owns literally all of it. But oh, if that isn’t the most Australian thing of all.
