Badland beach: The Australian beach as a site of cultural remembering

The image of the Australian beach as a place of beautiful waves and sand is popular on postcards and seen frequently in tourism campaigns around the world. And yet, the beach is a surprisingly complex spatial location. Despite its beauty, the beach can have a disturbing underbelly of crime and danger. The ongoing tension between its role as a cultural icon of myth as well as an ordinary, lived location makes it a layered landscape. This article uses the framework of Ross Gibson's 'badland' as a way of interrogating cultural memory in a lived, familiar space. By examining a combination of popular and literary texts such as fiction by Robert Drewe and the reality television show Bondi Rescue (2006-), as well as real life events, this article examines how the Australian beach can be a site of complex memory, and how this memory bleeds through and problematizes contemporary understandings and representations of the space.