This book explores the ever-changing interconnections between bodies, subjectivities, space, beach cultures and tourism, engaging with the geographies of the beach: its makings, boundaries and meanings for the West. Drawing on feminist scholarship, Christine Metusela and Gordon Waitt explore the reciprocal relationship between bodies and beaches, focusing on the shifting intersection between age, race, class, sex, gender and national discourses that naturalise particular bodies as belonging on the beach. The authors critically examine how subjectivities of bodies are produced under specific circumstances - the Illawarra beaches from 1830-1940, some 80 kilometres beyond the metropolitan centre of Sydney. Drawing on modernisation and nation building discourses, the paradoxical qualities of the Illawarra are highlighted; imagined as both the New Brighton of Australia and the Sheffield of the South.

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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.

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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.