When I was walking along the beach in the early morning at Encounter Bay, Victor Harbor, during the week of the heat wave, I realized that the old beach architecture of Victor Harbor was going, and that it would soon disappear into the slip stream of history.

The sizeable blocks would be sold by the children of the current owners, the beach house would be bulldozed, to be replaced by several two story glass and concrete buildings that would take up the whole block. Oh, and the trees would be pulled down so those in the back block could have sea views. Modernism comes to Victor Harbor, belatedly.

The old is giving way to the new and there is a changing sense of place. This is the effect of sea change in spite of the threat of rising sea levels the early signs of beach erosion.

The changes are subtle around Encounter Bay. A house gone here, an empty lot appears where once there a beach shack; another new house going up; a new boat ramp that replaces the old jetty, the subsequent absence of the pelicans, a tree cut down; another big development proposal announced.

What we have here is the significance of the ordinary, the unremarkable and the overlooked in our understanding of how many (if not most) advertising images communicate with their ‘smiling, white middle-class families at the beach, well-groomed businessmen shaking hands,and romantic young couples kissing. This background noise of consumer culture is the highly visible and dramatic advertising images which attract most consumer and critical attention.

So we overlook the old wooden jetty at Encounter Bay--it is now a faded memory-- whilst the white beach house standing back from the road amidst the old pines of the farm that is long gone is unseen and overlooked. The pines remind us of what once was and the beach shack stands as an isolated image in the ‘visual landscape of stock photography.