Tourism and Australian Beach Cultures

Tourism and Australian Beach Cultures is an original, sophisticated and revealing history of the 'geographical imaginary' of the Australian beach, which carefully maps the cultural and spatial politics which helped to shape the bodies displayed on it.

* Graeme Turner, University of Queensland, Australia *

This book is an engaging synthesis of social theories that draws on well-chosen and exciting historical examples from the Illawarra, New South Wales. Explaining the ways in which gendered, sexualised, classed, and racialised bodies and beaches are intimately related, the book is full of ideas and fabulous images, and is at once accessible and challenging. Body politics are shown to be integral to the tourism spaces of beach resorts. Crucially, Christine Metusela and Gordon Waitt's book is a key intervention into the limited critical historical and geographical analyses and practices of beach resorts. It will be of interest to social and cultural geographers, tourism scholars, as well as historians who need to enrich their geographical imaginations.

* Lynda Johnston, University of Waikato, New Zealand *

The book is an insightful contribution to this area and the authors are to be congratulated on the informed research and analysis this book makes to the study of leisure, tourism and geography.

-- Stephen Wearing, University of Technology, Sydney in Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, 10:4, 340-341

The insights into the sexualization of the beach and attempts to control that process make Tourism and Australian Beach Cultures an enriching and worthwhile read.

-- Douglas Booth, University of Otago, New Zealand in Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 40, pp. 446–448, 2013

This book picks up from feminist discourse on bodies and processes of marginalization to enhance tourism studies and cultural geography approaches to the Illawarra between 1830 and 1940. It describes the related contested sexual politics of the time, and how individual bodies became included or excluded from the beach, depending on how they were sexualized, gendered, racialized, and classed. This not only provides a good introduction to the historical development of Australian beach culture. The example of the beach also makes the works of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler and their particular notions of gender trouble, here ‘beach trouble’, and governmentality accessible to a wider readership. The book provides a good introduction for students and other people interested in these topics.

-- Carsten Wergin, Martin-Luther-University, Germany in Annals of Leisure Research, 2013, Vol. 16, No. 2, 180