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The Forum > Article Comments > Where have all the beach shacks gone? > Comments

Where have all the beach shacks gone? : Comments

By Natasha Cica, published 19/1/2007

Why is it that you don't know what you've lost till it's gone?

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One thing that bothers me is that no matter if it were beach shacks, bush shacks, River Camping, Caravaning, anywhere, all of us look fondly at the past and in particular our childhoods.

Lets be realistic. These beach shacks where owned by the very people you mention in the article and i bet these people reaped the rewards of these investments when selling. In fact, it may have secured the retirement of many.

There is more beachfront and waterfront land in Australia than almost anywhere on the planet, you just need to look a little further afield if you want what you had as a child.

You cant whinge about development, everywhere is developing and lets be honest, it is a positive thing in some regards through employment, extra services and infrastructure and wealth creation. We all love the good old days, and if you want the beach shack and village just look a little further afield and youll find it.

In this day and age i agree many waterfront homes are not integrating with outside and have the beachy feel many did in the past, but hey if they can afford to buy it at a premium after a developer has chopped it up and flogged it they have a right to whatever lifestyle they feel comfortable with.

The past is the past, lets look to the future. Your Utopia is still out there, its just no longer down the road like it used to be.
Posted by Realist, Friday, 19 January 2007 9:24:20 AM
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" Where have all the beach shacks gone?"
Gone, long time gone..."
paraphrasing another 'sixties song they've been turned into:
"Acres and acres,
of tar and cement..."
Don't worry, Natasha, if you have found a "secret" location, the developers will have already been savvy to it a long time ago.
They can chop down the trees, kill the animals (or what's left of them) with DDT and "put up a parking lot"; complete with mobile dog and bone towers and predigested junk food, so people can undergo more completely that mindclearing return to nature, detoxing simulacra, that you so lyrically described in your wistful account.
Posted by funguy, Saturday, 20 January 2007 2:16:12 AM
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Where have all the beach shacks gone?
Gone to developers every one.
When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?

Once upon a time between little towns ,there were stands, acres of bush with bush birds, kangaroos, now there is a sea of roofs, a deadly dull row upon row of roofs covering housing with no back yards, no chook pens, no vegie gardens and no fig or mulberry trees.

Too late to learn now.
Posted by mickijo, Saturday, 20 January 2007 4:04:06 PM
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I don’t get it. Natasha Cica and the three respondents reminisce about the ugly side of development and the loss of an age of innocence along our coast…. but there is not a hint of a suggestion about tackling this development momentum.

This has been one of the most perplexing things to me over many years. How on earth can people see such strong and obvious negative aspects to this development, and yet be willing to just accept it?

If we’d read the warning signs of decline due to continued rapid expansion of a Europeanized lifestyle on this continent, which were highly evident in the 70s if not earlier, we could have started working towards limiting the insane continuous expansionism by about 1980 and reached a stable population size by 1990.

Of course if we’d done that, the crazy overdevelopment of our coast would have been vastly less significant, and places with beach shacks would still exist along the coast of my childhood (Dunsborough and Jurien Bay in WA) where absolutely gross overdevelopment has ensued.
Posted by Ludwig, Sunday, 21 January 2007 4:05:35 PM
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I for one would be very interested to hear GrahamY's take on this - being one who got his start in the property development game by selling the family 'beach shack' at the Gold Coast ;)
Posted by CJ Morgan, Sunday, 21 January 2007 8:26:16 PM
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Richard White (Uni of Sydney) provides some answers to this question in his book:

Title: On Holidays: a history of getting away in Australia
Author: Richard White
Publisher: Pluto Press 2005

He was on ABC's Hindsight program back in Dec 24.
See this link:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/hindsight/stories/2006/1791040.htm

RW's basically said that because of changes to work and recreation leave, women enjoying full time employment, the developers buying up all those fibro shacks we could rent, its no longer a cheap holiday.

In Brisbane they have tried to substitute and capitalise on this by creating an inner city beach. (South Bank - YUK)

A slice from the ABC radio program blurb reads:

'We are the children of the sunny south and we borrow from the clear skies above us, and from the general clime, much of that lightness of heart and of that vivacity, which so eminently distinguish us as holiday-making people'.
The Sydney Morning Herald, 1859.

Australians have a reputation of being a people to whom leisure is important; where we work to live rather than live to work. However, that reputation is recently earned. Until the 1930s Australian workers did not have 'holidays' as we know them now. There was half-day closing on Saturdays, which during the late-1800s allowed more people to take a weekend break, but that was all. Holidays belonged to the privileged and already idle.

In the years following world war two, people realised life was for living. Governments increased the amount of time people could take for relaxation from work; unions fought successful battles to improve working conditions. There was, suddenly, a rapid rise in the amount of paid leave available to Australian workers: four weeks' annual leave! Economic prosperity and widespread car ownership also meant 'getting away' for a holiday became an integral part of life
Posted by Rainier, Sunday, 21 January 2007 9:23:38 PM
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