Beach Beyond

This novel, published in 1923, combines the sense of adventure and mystery in the style of Enid Blyton with a more serious political consciousness, shaped by socialism and idealism. The central character, Merrick, is a young clerk who, as a confident sea swimmer, has been seconded from his office duties to serve as a lifeguard at the secluded seaside resort where his boss and some business friends have developed a simple idyll. His responsibility is to prevent the recurrence of a recent drowning tragedy. This remote unorthodox community is discovered by a young, terminally-ill, Utopianist  millionaire and with his small army of converts he attempts to coerce the Beach Beyond families to join his new society on an ocean island he has purchased.

The author, Jean Curlewis (born 7 February 1898), grew up in Mosman on the north shore of Sydney Harbour. Her mother, Ethel Turner, was a prolific author. She was educated at the Sydney Church of England Girls’ Grammar School in Darlinghurst. In the aftermath of the First World War she served in the Voluntary Aid Detachment as a relief nurse in Sydney during the severe influenza epidemic. While serving she contracted tuberculosis and she died of the disease in 1930. In the early 1920s she regularly contributed stories to a Sunbeams, a children's supplement, edited by her mother, in The Sunday Sun. Her first novel, The Ship That Never Set Sail, was published in 1921 and three novels followed in the following three years. She used the same illustrator, John Macfarlane, as her mother had engaged for her children’s books.

The central character, Merrick, is too young to have seen active service during the war. Many of the other male characters, however, were probably survivors of Gallipoli and the Western Front — although the fathers at Beach Beyond seem much older and wiser than Merrick, they have little children and are probably still young men. A minor character, Carstairs, for example, is described as an “English lad... with shrapnel chest wounds and a collapsed lung”. The author introduces several familiar features of the First World War mindset to the plot of the novel: young men facing imminent death; an armed enemy; and the determination of prisoners to escape. In one scene, Carstairs has organised a surf carnival but the weather conditions are severe and as a war veteran recognises the threat to life and wants it to be cancelled: “If I let it go on, we'll have a tragedy — if not several” and is willing to risk his job rather than “have the murder of 22 men on [his] hands”. Many young Australian officers had similar conviction at Gallipoli.