A country reveals itself in a crisis. Americans are buying a record number of guns, in the UK Boris Johnson was reluctant to implement a full lockdown because he baulked at the idea of closing the pubs. In Australia, it is our beaches that are the metaphorical hills that we are metaphorically dying on.
Yeah, we want to beat this virus, but we also want to get a swim in.
Even in normal times, we elevated a trip to the beach way above the inconvenience entailed. Think about it. You might take public transport or drive for more than an hour to get there, then have trouble finding a parking spot.
Once there you risk getting swept away by a current or cut by coral or paralysed by body surfing into a sandbank.
Even a good, uneventful day at the beach means sunburn and discomfort. It’s an effort to go to the beach. You need to wear special clothes, have a special towel, put on a lotion and think about your hair and the best time to go to the loo. The swim itself is always potentially perilous. Even in calm waters there are the first frigid minutes as your body adjusts to the cold. The shock is great. You go under. You emerge with a scream, but survive.
Then what? Five, 10, 15 minutes in the drink? And there’s the aftermath – the frankly undignified walk from the sea to your towel (where is your towel?), aware only when you get there that your bikini top got twisted in a wave and you’re now exposing a boob. And then the impossible task of drying yourself while standing ankle deep in the very substance you are trying to remove. Your clothes feel clammy. A sudden wind, and sand becomes stuck to all your surfaces. You are coated, like a lamington.
It’s still not over. You trail sand through the car and the house when you get home. It gets up your nose and in your hair. Weeks after your last beach visit, when the autumn leaves are dropping, the beach is still there in the cuff of your jeans, or in the toe of your shoes, or down the side of your sheets. A tug and a great volume of sand pours out.
Yet even this … Even the disdain with which the beach often treats us, we return again and again – until we are forbidden.
The defining images and in many ways the story of Australia’s pandemic has been told through beaches. First there was Bondi on the balmy weekend of 20 March. Crowded with people, the images horrified politicians and public health officials, prompting them to shut down the beach, and move Australia into stage three lockdowns.
Then came the sad photos.
While America had a vacant Times Square and Milan had Andrea Bocelli singing Amazing Grace outside a shuttered Duomo – Australia had a deserted Coogee beach, cordoned off with police tape.
For weeks, my Instagram feed was full of pictures of empty beaches and sad-faced emojis. “Such a nice day, beach beautiful, can’t swim!”
The pandemic news cycle began – mercifully – to slow around weeks four and five. One of the major Australian stories was the beaches. They’re open. Now they’re closed. Now they’re open for two hours in the morning, for exercise only – no loafing on the sand! Now they’re closed.
In this strange time of shuttered beaches, elaborate plans were made. There were drives across the city to secret beaches. Everyone had the same idea. Even to post a photo with your toe in some water, somewhere, led to detective work of sorts. Where are they? Where is that beach? Are you allowed there??
In other states – and out in the regions – people can swim. But the focus is on the perennial scene-stealer of beaches, Bondi.
The residents of Sydney’s eastern suburbs have always been a bit despised by the rest of the country – but now with their covi-clusters and super-spreader “lifestyles” (flying all over the world, frequenting restaurants and bars, parties and celebrations, hugging, spreading germs), it is detectable, even in these socially distanced times, the schadenfreude much of the country felt over the closure of Bondi beach.
But I suspect Sydney’s beaches welcomed the break. Only months before they were a soup of ashes, a reconstitution of ancient forests and incinerated koalas, the water emergency-red – a reflection of the eerie sun. Ash washed up as dark lines and spooky marks on thousands of kilometres of sand. Swimming in the ash-filled beach felt like a too-intimate communion with the climate apocalypse.
But now the sky is clear again and we want to swim, our bodies having calculated there was a lost summer. The sight of the clean water beating on the empty sand, the air warm and dry, the smell of the salt and the sounds of pounding surf is enough to drive us into a frenzy that can in part be explained by desire, and a simple sensory pleasure, denied.
When the beaches reopened, in Maroubra someone painted “locals only” on the sea wall. There are dark echoes in this time of other famous beaches: not Anzac Cove or Mallacoota on New Year’s Eve 2019 – but Cronulla, one scorcher in the summer of 2005.
We bring to our beaches – to our swims and our surfs – not just our towels, but some complicated baggage. If you look closely enough, a whole nation can be read on the sand.
• Brigid Delaney is a Guardian Australia columnist
