ABSTRACT
The epigraph from Phillip Adams derives its force from its direct opposition to what has become a national institution, the beach. This chapter looks at the specific meanings of the beach in Australian culture. If Australia meant, among other things, closeness with a harsh but still bountiful nature, such meanings could not be found in the city—unless it was on the surf beaches. The beach is neither land nor sea, but has some characteristics of both. It therefore carries the meanings of both and is thus almost ‘overloaded’ with potential meanings. The surfers might be the contemporary version of the lifesavers in their ubiquity on our beaches, but in other respects they are their antithesis, both in the use they make of the beach and in the myths upon which that use are predicated. Youth, like the beach, is an anomalous category, the one between child and adult. The surfers are anomalous, lying between the solid citizen and the criminal.
