by The sea in all its variations, from calm bays and sunken bays to popular ocean beaches, from the rugged bay to the encounter with dogs along a secluded shore, has held so many memories of a lifetime.
My earliest memories – now brown – are of aunts and older cousins and a big sister on a yellow stretch of sand with colorful beach boxes as a backdrop, the calm azure shallows of Victoria’s Port Phillip Bay, our aquatic playground. This is where I first padded dogs, maybe three years old, when a cousin abandoned my hands. Sink or swim!
Related: Swimming in the ocean I’m alone and caught up in risk and trust | Anna Sublett
It was a wonderfully warm summer Saturday on a seagull-infested St Kilda beach and a wintry Sunday strolling hand in hand with Dad into the Arctic south along Port Melbourne pier as we explored the international passenger liners. He liked this. So much so that we once managed to catch one of these behemoths on its last stormy leg from Melbourne to Sydney, the whole family but full of seasickness.
Then there was another crossing that was more frequent, sometimes treacherous, – in a small fishing boat, piloted by a man we always gave the honorable crossing. Mr – from the mainland to an island where there is still a rickety, rickety family farm. As children we often made that hour-long trip with our adults, the rolling boat full of our cats and dogs, and supplies (sick sheets, crow flags, frozen red meat and vegetable skies, and spud bags) to last a few weeks. summer.
We escaped the unrelenting heat of the low, flat, rabbit-infested island as we tried to jump ourselves, as a rite-of-pass first, from the height of the pier into the emerald water of Westport Bay, the sharks (prolific , as the fishermen proved) ever ahead as we ran flashing to the ladder and towards safety. The sun kissed and crusted with salt, the cousin tribe ended the day tired and burnt, the last time of the Test played fuzzily from the mainland on the black and white portable box and uncles and aunts drank beer and laughed and lit the barbecue. .
That was the sea of early childhood memory. Innocent and content. Feeling on the way. Jump into the turbid green, but always in sight of the safety of the ladder.
But the man we called Mister disappeared after his little vessel went down. In the end his body was fished from the bay, swinging on the rocks my faith in prayer.
Then came the ocean beaches and camping grounds of early adolescence. Trips with friends (no parents) to the coast, with surfboards and tents, which we seemed to be able to do on five bucks a day (fed on $1.50 of chips every night and a few beers illegally obtained). They were dominant with passion, for waves and early romance, the smell of dope smoke and campfire on our clothes and in our hair.
This continued with variations during the university years and into adulthood, even with jobs and serious partners and financial commitments.
Sydney, the sparkling city of light and water – bay and ocean – always inspires the imagination
But children would change all that. There was no time for surfboards in those early years for babies and toddlers. Although the annual beach tent and seaside holiday floaties were a perennial cultural and family favorite. How can you really draw a line under another year and renew for the next one without it? Despite those exhausting days of hitting the beach at 6am with the toddlers and running between them and the shore break.
Later memories are combined with my own childhood memories. The eldest daughter’s anger when she was first dumped by a wave. An eight-year-old son held his breath and finally jumped from a cliff into the lagoon. The youngest girl of six years old closed her eyes and sailed off the jetty knowing that the stingray (tame) was down there somewhere. That first time she stepped on a surfboard.
And Dad, on his last holiday at the beach, wearing an overcoat, now hostage to the deadly Parkinson’s, is leaning into the wind as he carefully deals with the soft sand, the foam tipping towards him legs. Holding a football. Smiling at his grandchildren.
So much of my memory of life and the marks of its death are refracted through the sea.
When I lived for many years in Canberra, a city that I grew to love and understand, I was always in the distance of the sea. It has a smell. His vitality. To clean. Its ability to evoke thought, to relax and stimulate. I have never lived anywhere so far from the sea. Even living in London the enigmatic tidal Thames pulled its nose towards the nearby sea.
Sydney, the sparkling city of light and water – bay and ocean – always inspires the imagination. Those Whiteley-esque blue days are often seen as a ridiculous cliche, indulgent as impossible as they are real. The grown daughter, who stood on a surfboard for the first time ten years ago, says that the cloudy days, when the bay is silver and black and mysterious, are the most beautiful days.
It is one of those shining days of glare and cobalt. I am back here after finding myself in new circumstances. Alone in a coastal house for two days, children scattered to the cities, I walk on the empty surfing beach with the dogs on my heels.
That’s life and the sea, now fleeting memories.
