At a time when Donald Trump threatens to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal, China is flexing its military and economic muscles, Britain is in a state of seemingly permanent political crisis, Los Angeles tragically burns, and murderous conflicts still ravage Ukraine and the Middle East, here in Australia just one issue dominates public debate this week: whether a true Australian has the right to reserve beach space by setting up an American-style beach shelter – a cabana – to stake a claim, whether or not it’s occupied. Even the country’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, has waded in on the subject – and finally found popularity by condemning the canvas structures.
Cabanas make our beaches look more like a Depression-tent city than a typical Australian seaside
Cabana-bagging on Australian beaches has become our equivalent of invisible Germans plonking towels on poolside deck chairs before breakfast, intending to occupy them at some indeterminant time later in the day. No more for us trekking down to the beach with a beach umbrella and towels and taking space as we find it.
Cabanas themselves are a relatively recent phenomenon in Australia, but they’ve come to infest our seaside. These 10×10 feet canvas monstrosities straddle the strand, occupying every bit of spare sand and making our beaches look more like a Depression-tent city than a typical Australian seaside. A satirical online dictionary defines a cabana as ‘the only housing structure young Aussies can afford without the help of their parents’. There’s a lot of truth to that gag in a hyperinflated housing market that puts London’s in the shade.
How it works is very Teutonic. Cabana owners descend on a beach at sparrow’s fart – Aussie for the crack of dawn – setting up their tent and announcing their presence to the world, even if they have absolutely no intention of occupying it until the sun is high in the sky. It is German deckchair reservation on a grand scale – some would say grand larceny of a public space.
Worse, some cabana campers don’t even occupy their canvas castles when in actual possession. To the annoyance of other beachgoers, they plonk their towels on adjacent sand to catch the very direct sun from which their cabanas are supposed to protect them. ‘The sheer amount of space that people are taking up… [when] you’re just trying to find a free square inch of sand to lay your towel, it can just be a little bit frustrating’, an anti-cabana beachgoer told the BBC.
Cabana lovers say it’s a matter of prudence and foresight getting their rewards: an Aussie’s cabana is his castle. They make no apologies for staking their claims, nor for annexing far more sand than a mere towel would allow. Indeed, the national cancer charity, the Cancer Council, enthusiastically supports beach shelters, including cabanas, as reducing the risk of deadly melanomas and other skin cancers.
It’s surprising that the cabana lobby haven’t yet pointed out that Australia’s prosperity was founded on squatters taking Crown land to erect their homesteads and run their sheep and cattle, asserting they’re just doing a modern version of squatting. But then, Australian colonial history is unfashionable in these times.
The cabana crisis has been building on a slow (sun)burn for several years now, but this week it has burst into full flame, consuming social media, filling radio and TV time, and reaching the very highest reaches of national politics.
Interviewed on breakfast television, Australian PM Anthony Albanese, was asked whether cabana-bagging was un-Australian. ‘Well, that’s not on, Albanese said. ‘One of the great things about Australia, unlike some parts of the world, you go, and you got to pay to go to the beach. Here, everyone owns the beach. Everyone. And it’s a place where every Australian is equal. And that’s a breach of that principle, really, to think that you can reserve a little spot as just yours’.
Australia faces a general election within months, and Albanese was pressed on his government’s failure to rein in Australia’s cost-of-living and inflation pressures. He also commented on Trump’s latest outbursts and Justin Trudeau’s resignation as Canadian prime minister. But the only thing any one seems to remember of what Albanese said was that cabanas are un-Australian.
The irony that Albanese himself doesn’t have to mingle with the Bondi Beach hoi polloi, occupies a magnificent official residence fronting beautiful Sydney Harbour, and owns a huge coastal house with spectacular ocean views, was lost on nobody. Yet the Labor prime minister, badly trailing his conservative opposition in the opinion polls and in serious electoral trouble, is basking in unfamiliar public and media praise.
A true man of the people, is our ‘Albo’, or so he wants us to believe. He has been derided for embracing Groucho Marx’s ‘If you don’t like my principles, I have others’ as the basis of his electoral politics. But on the cabana issue obsessing the nation, at last he has shown some conviction about something. Who knows, it might just possibly work.