Abstract
Gold Coast beaches oscillate in the cultural imagination between everyday reality and a tourist’s paradise of ‘sun, surf and sex’ (Winchester and Everett 2000: 59). While these narratives of selfhood and becoming, egalitarianism and sexual liberation punctuate the media, Gold Coast literary fictions instead reveal the beach as a site of danger, wholly personifying the unknown. Within Amy Barker’s Omega Park, Melissa Lucashenko’s Steam Pigs, Georgia Savage’s The House Tibet and Matthew Condon’s Usher and A Night at the Pink Poodle, the beach is a ‘masculine’ space for testing the limit of the coastline and one’s own capacity for survival. This article undertakes a close textual analysis of these novels and surveys other Gold Coast fictions alongside spatial analysis of the Gold Coast coastline. These fictions suggest that the Gold Coast is not simply a holiday world or ‘Crime Capital’ in the cultural imagination, but a mythic space with violent memories, opening out onto an infinite horizon of conflict and estrangement.
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