November 19, 2013
In her Coast goes from green to greedy article on Australia's coastal or seaside towns and a sense of place Elizabeth Farrelly says that they suffer from a single organising principle: water.
Nothing else figures - church, square, town hall, market, windmill. Only water, which is to say, money. Water makes a town self-arrange like iron-filings along a magnet, its streets pervaded by a palpable straining for view, proximity or access. Architecture is tyrannised by it and those not so blessed are permanently blighted by its absence.It's as though water is the one common value remaining. And it has remade our coast, one of the longest and loveliest littorals in the world, into an encircling crust of suburban gentility.
The coastline becomes very low-density sprawl and there is little attempt by developers, local councils or state governments to create hamlets, villages and cities that act as counterbalancing goods to nature.
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