Gold Coast beaches oscillate in the cultural imagination between everyday reality and a tourist’s paradise of ‘sun, surf and sex’ (Winchester and Everett 2000:59). While these narratives of selfhood and becoming, egalitarianism and sexual liberation punctuate the media, Gold Coast literary fictions instead reveal the beach as a site of danger, wholly personifying the unknown. Within Amy Barker’s Omega Park, Melissa Lucashenko’s Steam Pigs, Georgia Savage’s The House Tibet and Matthew Condon’s Usher and A Night at the Pink Poodle, the beach is a ‘masculine’ space for testing the limit of the coastline and one’s own capacity for survival. This article undertakes a close textual analysis of these novels and surveys other Gold Coast fictions alongside spatial analysis of the Gold Coast coastline. These fictions suggest that the Gold Coast is not simply a holiday world or ‘Crime Capital’ in the cultural imagination, but a mythic space with violent memories, opening out onto an infinite horizon of conflict and estrangement.

中文翻译：

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黄金海岸叙事小说中的海滩作为（人）人的极限

黄金海岸的海滩在日常现实和“阳光、冲浪和性爱”的旅游天堂之间摇摆不定（Winchester and Everett 2000:59）。虽然这些关于自我和成为、平等主义和性解放的叙述在媒体上广为流传，但黄金海岸的文学小说却将海滩揭示为一个危险的地方，完全是未知的化身。在 Amy Barker 的 Omega Park、Melissa Lucashenko 的 Steam Pigs、Georgia Savage 的 The House Taiwan 和 Matthew Condon 的 Usher 和 A Night at the Pink Poodle 中，海滩是测试海岸线极限和自身生存能力的“男性化”空间。本文对这些小说进行了仔细的文本分析，并在对黄金海岸海岸线进行空间分析的同时调查了其他黄金海岸小说。