This book explores the ever-changing relationships between bodies, oceans, beaches and tourism. Drawing on feminist scholarship, the book focuses on the emergence of Australian beach cultures beyond metropolitan centres from the early 19th century to the early 20th century on the Illawarra beaches, some 80 kilometres south of Sydney.

This book explores the ever-changing interconnections between bodies, subjectivities, space, beach cultures and tourism, engaging with the geographies of the beach: its makings, boundaries and meanings for the West. Drawing on feminist scholarship, Christine Metusela and Gordon Waitt explore the reciprocal relationship between bodies and beaches, focusing on the shifting intersection between age, race, class, sex, gender and national discourses that naturalise particular bodies as belonging on the beach. The authors critically examine how subjectivities of bodies are produced under specific circumstances - the Illawarra beaches from 1830-1940, some 80 kilometres beyond the metropolitan centre of Sydney. Drawing on modernisation and nation building discourses, the paradoxical qualities of the Illawarra are highlighted; imagined as both the New Brighton of Australia and the Sheffield of the South.

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’