The politics of collapsible beach huts
How scarcity mindsets affect shared spaces
After six years spent in Melbourne, I have returned to a city embroiled in an identity crisis.
It was neither Sydney’s affordable housing nor ample parking that beckoned me back home. Nor was it her world-class public transport system, well-considered roads, reasonable tolls, or general pet-friendliness. And believe it or not, it most certainly wasn’t being charged $8 for a pint of soda water at a pub that I, as a child at the turn of the millennium, could get a steak sandwich for $11 at after school.
No, Sydney’s drawcards were far less complicated: the beaches and the weather.
Over the past few months I have been struck not by the advent of collapsible beach huts wedged cheek to jowl along Sydney beaches, but by how divisive their presence has become. As a huge fan of not having skin cancer, I find myself perplexed by the scorn that these huts have attracted.
Feeling equal parts outsider and native, I feel familiar enough with my hometown to speak to her moods, yet removed enough to speak with some degree of objectivity.
As complaints abound, and as tempers flare, the frustration directed at the humble beach hut marks an inflection point in Sydneysiders’ relationship with the commons.
60 years prior to Sydney’s Cabana Beach Hut summer (2024-25) Donald Horne published the ever-prescient words, “Australia is a lucky country, run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck.”
Given the short but exhausting-to-read list of reasons that might repel any sane person from attempting to live in this frustratingly beautiful town, you might be asking yourself: “how much luck is there to go around?”. And if you’re not — you really should.
If luck is a resource best expressed to the Sydneysider in metres-squared-on-a-beach, then one can begin to understand why Sydneysiders might be struggling to reckon with The Hut.
It is blind luck alone that has landed Sydneysiders with the beaches that we have. Moreover, it is Sydneysiders—the same people who will stand in lines of 30 to 50 other hopefuls just for the opportunity to view an unaffordable, terrible apartment 40 minutes walk from the closest bus or train stop—who all still need to share in that blind luck, or beautiful beach.
If Jean-Jacques Rousseau had been born centuries later he might have instead written, “man is born free, everywhere he is in chains, and in Sydney he must rent them.” Given that we’re already all jostling for space to live or space to park a car in this city, I think Sydneysiders can and should be forgiven for our kneejerk rejection of the Hut. It makes sense that we might take this jostle-mindset down to the beach; it makes sense that the commons might have become subject to a very Sydney syndrome.
Sydney’s many man-made shortcomings have primed her residents with a scarcity-mindset. This scarcity mindset has affected our capacity to share the beach—our most sacred space—without argument. Bad policy affects not just our bodies, but our minds and our relationships with both shared space and each other.
One might walk down to the beach and see it crowded, space seized by a wall of awnings erected by fellow punters we’ll spend hours sunning and swimming beside without making eye contact or saying hello. One might only consider these huts from the angle: how might this take from me? How might this negatively affect me? What might I stand to lose from this new development?
But it doesn’t have to be like this. We don’t have let built-environment scarcity poison our experience of the beach. Over the space of a morning, hundreds—if not thousands of people—work together, without having discussed the operation, to erect a wall that provides effective sun protection for countless people. Ants work together to bridge small bodies of water, providing structural workarounds for protection from the elements. Bees work collectively to maintain optimal hive temperatures by beating their wings or huddling together for warmth. Termites gather sand, dirt, and organic materials in order to build mounds that shield the colony from predators, harsh weather, and environmental extremes.
And from an alien spaceship, humans might have recently been observed to be doing something remarkably similar. Unlike insects, we humans seem to have an incredible capacity to forget that we are a collective. And in spite of our own short-sightedness, we might even accidentally build structures that serve purposes greater than our own self-interest. The conception that ‘they put up a hut that makes it harder for me to find a place to lie in the sun’ is not born of reality. It is born of fear. And while fear might be a natural and powerful emotional response to a perceived threat, the threat simply does not exist on the beach. It might exist everywhere else in Sydney, but it stops at the sand.
The wall of beach huts, from this imaginary alien spaceship, looks a little like cooperation in response to an environmental threat. Whether the humans erecting beach huts are consciously acting in anything more than self-interest is irrelevant.
It is context that has compelled us to consider the Beach Hut as a way of ‘sectioning off’ a small, temporarily privatised beach-lot or terre colonisée du jour. But this is simply not the case. If we strip away our scarcity mindsets, and momentarily, manually un-warp the perspective that encourages us to turn a trip to the beach into a battle for lebensraum, we might be able to see the Cabana Beach Hut Summer (2024-25) for what it really is: a communal, collective, science-backed, grassroots enterprise.
A friend of mine works for a company that builds temporary structures for big Australian events. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on months of preparation for pay-to-play sports matches, music festivals, etc. She and her colleagues start early, finish late, and conduct ‘step count’ competitions as they scramble to erect shared spaces that might shield attendees from the elements.
When I first saw seas of Beach Huts cropping up, wedged next to each other in hundred-metre lines along Sydney’s beach, I saw a community working like bees, piece by piece, to take responsibility for making Sydney’s most precious spaces safer. Whether or not anyone intended to engage on a beach-wide, communal enterprise as they shoved the Hut in the wagon and headed off to Bondi is beside the point.
Sydney’s Cabana Beach Hut Summer (2024-25) is not a battle for the commons, but the opposite. It is a curtsy to the not-quite-dead importance of communal enterprise.