HOW I DO LIKE TO BE BY THE SEASIDE
ANDREW LEACH
Since the middle of the 20th century, we have tested the image of the Gold Coast against the city’s relationship to the water. Specifically, and for the long-20th century, this has meant the beach—both the ocean beaches of the Pacific coast and the calmer edges of the Broadwater through which the Nerang River passes. It has also meant the river itself, manipulated by generations of developers to give private houses an outlook over engineered canals. Bound up in this test is an idea of the city as, first, a setting for recreation and vacation, and then as the setting for something of an ideal life. Certainly this is how it was sold by Alfred Grant and Bruce Small as they developed their canal estates behind Broadbeach and Surfers Paradise. Just as it was embedded in the high-rise real estate development boom that has persisted—ebbs and flows notwithstanding—from the mid-1960s until today.
Back in 1959, just as the first 10-storey high-rise was completed, the editors of Architecture Australia expressed their astonishment (in an unsigned editorial) that “people can be so completely oblivious of the shortcomings and coarseness of their surroundings.” They went on:
For a holiday the respectable family from the south is happy to leave drab and cold orderliness behind; for a holiday the visiting business man is eager to explore the tight alleys and dim restaurants; for a holiday mothers are pleased to loosen the carefully built and maintained family ties and children seize the opportunity of casting tighter controls off; for a holiday business girls at their prettiest and young men at their keenest find the wilderness of flickering neon signs, the throng, the perpetual crowds, the climate dictated exposure, the ceaseless offerings and lures of every kind [of] synonym to their own desire for the satisfaction denied them in their distant, orderly and boring suburban surroundings.
For a holiday. But nobody would want to live with it. (1959, n.p.)
In 1959, the informality of this small but tempting city gave architects cause for concern, not least because it seemed that what was happening there might spread—as though the risk was of Queenslanders giving up on the opera rather than that urban life and commerce had become irrevocably collapsed together. That the work of the Gold Coast’s “shady people” (Jones 1988) underpins the image of the city to be cultivated in the 1997 Gold Coast Urban Heritage and Character Study is, therefore, a paradox of some note (Allom Lovell Marquis-Kyle, et al. 1997). Through its agency, a period in which an idea of the Gold Coast as a “wild jungle of indecorum” (Editors 1959, n.p.) immune to the effects of culture on one’s experience of the city, has come to serve as a yardstick for the city’s identity.
Consider, though, a complication. Among the consequences of the developments initiated in the mid-1950s by Grant in Broadbeach Waters was the reconfiguration of the waterways to allow for Radburn planning to maximise access to the waterfront. These houses, many built off standard plans, were in themselves pockets of idealised domestic life, sold and raffled as such. In sourcing good soil for these new gardens, contractors in 1963 unearthed human remains—these originating from the area roughly aligned with what is today the cricket pitch of the Merrimac State High School. The story of how these remains were unearthed, documented, and removed is long and sobering (Haglund 1976). A number of people involved in the greater geographical reformation of Broadbeach and Surfers Paradise in the 1950s and 60s were from Yugambeh-speaking families (Best and Barlow 1997). Some of the people whose remains are held there lived in the eighth century of the Common Era; others were alive in the 1850s, as timber getters and farmers had begun to treat the country of the Saltwater People as their own territory, squatting and selecting their way towards building the foundations of the present-day city. We know, of course, that even those interred in those grounds who were alive in the time of Charlemagne were preceded by many thousands of years of ancestors and events, drawn to waters rich in seafood and shellfish, which they in turn cultivated.
The capacity to see ourselves in our cities is a deep-seated aspect of urban citizenship, heavily mediated by a city’s fabric and its representation, the narratives of life lived therein, the sense of legitimacy we infer from it, and a wide range of forces of cultural and economic inclusion and exclusion. This could be a starting definition for a city, where what begins with an ecological interdependency becomes something more heavily mediated by culture. The first citizens of the Gold Coast occupy the deep substrate on which the layers of the city’s modern history rests; and this modern history is, to borrow a phrase from Robin Boyd, merely skin deep (Boyd 1960, 1). Neither do the layers of historical dermis on which it, in turn, sits have a consistent texture (Leach 2018).
Behind a recent industry of image-making bound to the 1950s and 60s rests a history of extraordinary depth. We do well to consider how the relation of this city-territory-country to its water (and what it allows), has long mediated, in often conflicting ways, how individuals, communities and polities value what is has, for the last sixty odd years, been called the Gold Coast.
References:
Allom Lovell Marquis-Kyle, Henshall Hansen, Context, HJM and Staddon Consulting. 1997. Gold Coast Urban Heritage and Character Study. Surfers Paradise, Qld.: Gold Coast City Council.
Best, Ysola and Alex Barlow. 1997. Kombumerri, Saltwater People. Port Melbourne, Vic.: Heinemann, 1997.
Boyd, Robin. 1960. The Australian Ugliness. Melbourne: FW Cheshire.
The Editors. 1959. “Editorial I: The Challenge.” Special issue, The Gold Coast, Architecture in Australia 48 (1): n.p.
Haglund, Laila. 1976. An Archaeological Analysis of the Broadbeach Aboriginal Burial Ground. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press.
Jones, Michael. 1988. A Sunny Place for Shady People: The Real Gold Coast Story. Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
Leach, Andrew. 2018. Gold Coast: City and Architecture. London: Lund Humphries.