Sun, sand, surf: The wintery beach

Australian beaches are distinctive, iconic, arguably part of our national fabric. They are our tourist drawcard, our international exports, and of course the place where many of us live or travel for holidays. For all the mythologising of the great Australian Outback, the majority of us live along our country's coastlines. Beaches are also a strange space that are both border and boundary - they are a safe haven from the open water, but also a frontier to be breached by all new arrivals. The beach can be a place of strange binaries - of safety and sunshine, of danger and destruction. It is perhaps unsurprising then that the beach in winter is a little strange, a little disconcerting.