Coast

Lavishly illustrated with over 100 artworks, photographs and maps, this is the first history ever written of an Australian coastline. Ian Hoskins traces Australians’ changing relationship to the New South Wales coast from the time when Aboriginal people feasted on shellfish, creating middens over millennia, to the present obsession with the beach as a place for holidays, a place to live or retire to, to fish, surf and relax.

Leading the reader through the European fascination with marine life, the attempts to establish a whaling industry, and the fear of seaborne invasion which led to the creation of an Australian navy in 1911, Coast argues that the current enthrallment with the coast began more recently than thought.