Beach Crossings
Voyaging across Times, Cultures and Self
Beach Crossings is a book of extraordinary richness that crosses genres as well as beaches, blending memoir and social history, ethnography and elegy, cultural studies and testament.
Opinion
This 'beautifully produced book is both intellectual memoir and a narrative return to the 18th century. Dening's sweeping narrative stiches lives together as marvellously as a novel.'
The Age, 2/4/04
'a book to be treasured. As we reach its endpapers, elegantly drawn islands birds remind us of the journeys and beach crossings we have been privileged to share with this remarkable scholarly guide.'
The Canberra Times, 21/08/04
About this Title
Beach Crossings is a book of extraordinary richness that can be read on many levels. It crosses genres as well as beaches, blending memoir and social history, ethnography and elegy, cultural studies and testament.
Greg Dening presents the accounts of early European visitors -- sailors, missionaries, soldiers, beachcombers, whalers -- to Fenua'enata, the Marquesas Islands. He examines these dusty documents not only to tell the visitors' stories but also to reveal what their unseeing eyes were seeing, life on the other side of the beach as the islanders actually lived it. These accounts are the starting point for insights into the theme of the book, the 'in-between'. Dening explores the divide between land and water, the beach that is both an exit space and an entry space, where edginess rules.
Dening's elegant prose moves effortlessly from detailed descriptions of the life of Enata, the Marquesans, to reflections on the significance of cannibalism and tattoos, to analysis of the process of writing, the methods of scholarship, the discovery of the past, the possibilities of knowing. The story encompasses Dening's own voyaging during a brilliant academic career spanning several decades, his life search, his beaches of memory. Here are his struggles with faith, with the Catholic Church and his spiritual advisers, with history as discipline and performance, with teaching as storytelling and as footprints on the sand.
'From a beach, things loom -- it is possible to see beyond one's horizons. Beaches breed expansiveness. My beaches do anyway.'
Greg Dening
About the Author
Greg Dening was educated in philosophy, theology, history and anthropology in Jesuit seminaries and at the Universities of Melbourne and Harvard. He has written some dozen books on the cross-cultural history of the Pacific. Among the best known of these are Islands and Beaches (1981), Mr Bligh's Bad Language (1992), The Death of William Gooch (1996), Performances (1996), and Readings/Writings (1998). Since his retirement from the Max Crawford Chair of History at the University of Melbourne in 1991, he has been an Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University. He 'adjuncts' by conducting postgraduate workshops on the creative imagination in the presentation of scholarly knowledge.
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