Cottesloe Beach: The Culture of a Civic Beach

Cottesloe is Perth's public ocean beach, and its culture is built on three fixed objects and one annual event: the Indiana Teahouse, the offshore pylon, the row of Norfolk Island pines, and the March sculpture exhibition. Each has a documented history, and none of them is quite what it first appears.

The Indiana Teahouse, built to look old

The colonial-revival building above the main sand is the most photographed structure on the beach, and it was completed in 1996 — not a century earlier, as its style implies. It was designed by architect Laurie Scanlan, who won a Town of Cottesloe tender in 1994, and it opened in October 1996.

The name is older than the building. An original Indiana Tea House operated on the foreshore from 1913 to 1970. Scanlan's structure took that name and modeled its form on the Centenary Bathing Pavilion, an elegant 1929 building that resulted from an architectural competition and stood as the beach's landmark until the council demolished it in 1982. The 1996 Indiana, in other words, is a reconstruction of a memory — heritage rebuilt rather than retained.

It was added to the State Register of Heritage Places on 8 June 2021 (reference 16637). Its lease arrangements and a 2025 proposal to add a sauna have repeatedly drawn local debate about who the foreshore is for.

The pylon: a half-finished shark net

The lone concrete pylon offshore is the beach's most-painted object, and it exists for a grim reason. After a shark killed swimmer Simeon Ettelson at Cottesloe in November 1925, a shark-net enclosure was planned through the late 1920s and 1930s. The pylon was built in 1935 to anchor that net, with a line of timber posts meant to run from the jetty to a second pylon and back to the beach.

The enclosure was never completed. A storm in May 1936 dislodged the inner pylon under the jetty, leaving only the northern post that stands today. Its spike has been knocked off in storms more than once — in 1995 and again in 2009 — and a restoration costing about A$172,000 was approved in December 2008. What now reads as a romantic icon and a swim target began as the surviving fragment of a safety scheme that failed.

The Norfolk pines and the western horizon

The row of Norfolk Island pines (Araucaria heterophylla) along Marine Parade, set above the terraced limestone lawns, is the silhouette Perth uses to represent itself. The species is native to a single small Pacific island and was planted widely along southern Australian foreshores as a salt-tolerant amenity tree.

Cottesloe faces due west into the open Indian Ocean, so the sun sets straight out to sea behind the pines — the orientation that turned the pines-and-water sunset into the city's standard postcard. The beach has been Western Australia's gathering coast since the suburb was established in the 1880s, and the Cottesloe Surf Life Saving Club, opened in 1909, was the first lifesaving club in the state.

Sculpture by the Sea, every March

Since 2005, Cottesloe has hosted Sculpture by the Sea each March, a companion to the original Bondi exhibition that began in 1997. It lines the sand, terraces, and lawns with more than 70 works by artists from Australia and abroad, free to the public, and is billed as the world's largest free-to-the-public sculpture exhibition. The 2026 edition ran from 5 to 22 March. For roughly three weeks the civic beach becomes an open-air gallery, with some works lit after dark.

The honest part: it is open ocean

The culture of Cottesloe is performed on real ocean water, and that is the part the postcards soften. The pylon stands because a shark killed Simeon Ettelson in 1925. On 6 November 2000, at about 6:20 a.m., a great white killed Ken Crew in waist-deep water at the northern end during a dawn swim, witnessed from the shore — an event that reshaped Western Australia's public conversation about shark policy. The pines, the rebuilt Teahouse, and the March sculptures are the civic performance; the open Indian Ocean underneath is the fact they are staged on.