There were two of them over Christmas — pretty blue ones with white fringes — pitched on the sand and they came with several groups of campers. Then a fresh relieving squad turned up for new year and pitched another one.
There was a surprise in store for the second lot though: it was our version of the incoming tide. A scheduled flow of irrigation water arrived late on New Year’s Day and soon covered the sandbar, forcing a quick evacuation. The river kept rising, so they had to retreat to the high bank, where the cabana didn’t look so inviting.
I don’t need a cabana myself but I can see they offer handy relief from the fierce Australian sun, and by all accounts they are a Queensland invention. They are more stable and useful than those top-heavy beach umbrellas but take up more room on what is usually a common space, belonging to everybody.
The beach umbrella isn’t quite so definitive about where common space ends and private space starts, whereas the square cabana anchored in the sand says loudly “This is mine!” Apparently, some cabana owners pitch them in a good spot early in the day but don’t return to actually use them until, say, late afternoon.
So, despite our 12,000 beaches and 50,000km of beach coastline, these assertions of private space in a public place are testing the patience of less well-heeled beach-goers, surfers carrying their boards to the water, kids who want to build a sand castle and now prime ministers.
Albo calls the habit of claiming a spot early — but not using it much of the day — “un-Australian”, a devastating label in this easy-going land. The Boss says it’s a classic case of the “tragedy of the commons”, the observation made by William Foster Lloyd back in 1833 that, when cattle grazing was available to anyone on the common, the individual farmer tended to add an extra cow or two to make more money for himself, but as everyone then did the same thing, the pasture was soon overgrazed.
A private owner, on the other hand, would rotate his fenced pastures so the herd could continue grazing for ever.
A similar thing happened on Newfoundland’s famous Grand Banks fishery, where the massive cod population collapsed after unregulated over-fishing. A more current example is groundwater depletion through exploitation of shared aquifers, as California has experienced, and you can see the same effect in deforestation in the Amazon, or in global atmospheric pollution.
The Boss reckons it was Paul Keating who said you should always back the horse called self-interest: even though it’s clear everyone benefits from preserving a shared resource, individuals acting in their own self-interest will eventually deplete it.
This dog’s tragedy is the way some people leave their drink bottles on my sandbar. They come to enjoy a beautiful spot — but when more and more people leave their cans, Macca’s wrappers and used nappies behind, it’s not a beautiful spot to enjoy any more. Woof!
24°C