Why Australians are split about their beach cabanas

Class tensions emerge over beach cabanas in Australia

Australians are split over use of portable cabanas to reserve prime spots on the beach – a debate that taps into long-standing class tensions in the country regarding access to the coastline.

This week, Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese also weighed in regarding the practice of reserving spots on the sand with these colourful and portable gazebo-like structures which some beachgoers set up early in the day to claim later.

“One of the great things about Australia, unlike some parts of the world, (where) you go and you’ve got to pay to go to the beach, here, everyone owns the beach,” Mr Albanese said during a TV appearance.

“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,” he said.

While Mr Albanese found beach cabanas “un-Australian”, others argue that they provide essential sun protection, particularly in a country which experiences extreme solar radiation. The debate has sparked a heated “turf war”, dividing the nation.

Historically, there have been backlashes against attempts to privatise beaches, such as the 1929 Coogee Beach incident where beachgoers had to pay for access to shark-netted areas, and a more recent outcry over an exclusive beach club proposal at Bondi.

“Australian beaches, they always have been seen as shared spaces, democratic spaces where social hierarchies dissolve…. [they’re] seen as a great equaliser,” Ece Kaya, a researcher at the University of Technology Sydney told BBC.

Critics argue that beachgoers are hogging public space by setting up cabanas early in the morning and then leaving them abandoned for hours, preventing others from enjoying the beach. Some have called it “entitled”, with anti-cabana voices like TikToker Nic Salerno expressing frustration over the scarcity of space for ordinary beachgoers.

This summer, Mr Salerno, who runs the TikTok account @gunclediaries, posted several videos about the cabanas. He praised locations like Sydney’s Northern Beaches and the concrete area at Clovelly Beach, calling them the “place to be” due to the absence of cabanas.

In another video, he counted up to eight cabanas on a different beach, complaining that there was “no room on the beach” due to the crowded setups.

He said that people should be “charged for the space” they take up, adding they took up “prime real estate” at the beach.

File. Beachgoers sit under make-shift cabanas as others stand on the sand at Freshwater Beach, located in the northern beaches area of Sydney (AFP via Getty Images)

There are also people who are pro-cabana. “Australia receives about 58 petajoules of solar radiation every year – more than any other country on Earth. As a kid of the 80s, my childhood was a series of lectures about the importance of slip, slop, slap and collective terror at the disappearing ozone layer.

“A beach cabana offers full-coverage, portable and attractive shade, and in my view there is simply no place for ‘be less sun smart’ in our fiery skin-cancer factory of a country,” wrote Anna Spargo-Ryan in The Guardian.

Davina Smith, a TV presenter and another pro-cabana voice, said she pitches cabanas in the early morning to reserve space for her family later in the day. “There’s a lot of research that goes into this. You get up early, you’ve got to watch the tides. You can’t just plonk it there and walk away… you invest in it,” She said on Nine’s Today programme.

Famous for its sunshine and sandy beaches, Australia is currently in the middle of its summer period, where temperatures in some parts of the country have already topped 40C (104F).