What is it about sport and beach holidays that end up illuminating the darker sides of humanity? We have seen time and time again the reckoning of our society at the end of a football boot, and now, the humble beach has become the same canary in the coal mine.
This summer feels as if there has been a point of no return for the humble beach ambler. The hunger for property acquisition in some of these fancy beach environs has spilled over onto the sandy dunes, where once we were equal and lived a utopian dream. Remember the days when the beach was not owned or staked as territory, but a shared egalitarian natural resource? It didn’t matter, once you had hit the sand, if you drove to the beach in your expensive car because your speedos looked the same as my dad’s when applied to both of your fulsome girths. We all had just a bucket and a spade to build what we could with the skillset of those in our family. Good news if your mum was a structural engineer, not so good if she accounted.
But, to avoid nostalgia tainting a true view of the olden days, there were little flashes where what we see today in our hunger to win the beach, may have been predicted. While on the face of it, a sandcastle is a joyous experience of hands deep inside the wet sand, children collaborating on best use of buckets, it wasn’t really ever that innocent. My grandad was a frustrated construction man, which was of enormous benefit in the sandcastle wars. He likely took it too far when he suggested the enormous holes, dug deep into the sand and complete with stairs, were in fact to catch the joggers who ran before dawn. He brought industrial level equipment and would spend the six hours of our beach day, focussed and effective on building our dream dungeon. Mind you, he wore slacks and a button-up shirt while he worked away, and I never saw him in the actual surf, but he took his role as the leader of our family sandcastle (and dungeon) build, seriously, as a man who loves his family should.
And then of course there was beach cricket where the desire for a win found its way onto the innocent sandy turf. I remember the hunger to show my brothers that I too had been playing cricket at lunchtime and knew how to wield the plastic bat with aplomb. And later, as a parent, the hunger to prove to my children that I had skillz, overshadowed what perhaps should have been an enriching time of mother-child connection.
And then there is the latest flagrant up-yours to the values of beach equity, etiquette and harmony – cabanas. Where once we popped a little umbrella up in the sand and would offer to share our shade with families who hadn’t done such forward planning – what we are seeing on the beaches is an assault on our values and our sense of community. The cabana wars.
Today’s beachgoer stakes a claim on their piece of sand with a structure that symbolises something not unlike the Berlin wall, a structure that separates us from each other. Real estate is at a premium at some beaches, perhaps we’ve had a momentary flip out. People arrive as the sun rises to stake their claim.
In my book, cabana has now become a verb. “She cabana’d the meeting” meaning: she stuffed it.
There have been whispers of some leaving the cabana overnight. Risky, yes, but also desperate. Do these people dream about their cabanas? Get the kids into the best school, buy them the latest gadgets and then make sure they have prime cabana position? A friend and I walked past one the other morning, staked perfectly, but without owners. We gave each other a knowing look and wondered if I should set up a stake-out to catch them red-handed, but then I forgot about it when I thought about coffee.
But what of it? Are we becoming a ruthless people whose search for joy and connection and time with our family has turned into a rabid pursuit to win? To not miss out? To do both, win and not miss out, without care for our fellow beach goers? Have we already forgotten about the toilet paper shame of 2020?
I implore my cabana friends to remember the days when there was enough to go around. Another’s cabana happiness could also be ours. If not, you can get cabana’d.
Jacinta Parsons is a Melbourne writer and co-host of The Friday Revue on ABC Radio Melbourne.
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Jacinta Parsons is a Melbourne writer and co-host of The Friday Revue on the ABC. She is the author of “A Question of Age” and “Unseen: The Secret World of Chronic Illness”.
