The sea in all its variations, from tranquil coves and moody bays to wind-racked ocean beaches, from the ostentatious harbour to meandering with dogs along a lonely shore, has come to encompass so many of life’s poignant memories.
My earliest – now briny – recollections include aunts and older cousins and a big sister on a yellow stretch of sand backed with multicoloured beach boxes, the calm, azure shallows of Victoria’s Port Phillip Bay our watery playground. It’s where I first dog-paddled, aged maybe three, when a cousin abandoned my hands. Sink or swim!
There were the blazing hot summer Saturdays on gull-flecked St Kilda beach and winter Sundays strolling hand-in-hand with Dad into the Arctic southerly along Port Melbourne pier as we inspected the international passenger liners. He loved this. So much we once caught one of these behemoths on its final stormy leg from Melbourne to Sydney, the whole family but him crippled with sea sickness.
Then there was the other more frequent, sometimes treacherous, crossing – in a small fishing boat, piloted by a man we always afforded the honorific Mister – from the mainland to an island where there is still a desolate, scrubby family farm. As kids we took that hour-long voyage many times with our adults, the rollicking boat replete with our cats and dogs, and supplies (slabs of tinnies, flagons of plonk, eskies of red meat and frozen veggies, and bags of spuds) to last a couple of summer weeks.
We escaped the relentless heat of the rabbit-infested, low, flat island by daring ourselves to jump, initially as a rite-of-passage, from the heights of the pier into the emerald water of Western Port Bay, the sharks (prolific, as the fishers proved) ever front of mind as we raced splashing to the ladder and clambered to safety. Sun-kissed and salt-crusted, the tribe of cousins ended the day weary and burnt, the last hour of the Test fuzzily playing from the mainland on the portable black and white box while the uncles and aunts drank beers and laughed and fired the barbecue.
That was the sea of early childhood memory. Innocent and content. Feeling the way. Jumping into the turbid green, but always in sight of the ladder’s safety.
But the man we called Mister disappeared after his little vessel capsized. His body was eventually fished from the bay, dashing on the rocks my faith in prayer.
Then came the ocean beaches and camping grounds of early adolescence. Trips with mates (no parents) to the coast, with surfboards and tents, which we seemed to be able to do on five bucks a day (sustained by $1.50 of chips nightly and a couple of illegally sourced beers). They were heady with passion, for waves and early romance, the scent of dope smoke and the campfire on our clothes and in our hair.
Variations of this continued through university years and into grownup-dom, even with jobs and serious partners and financial commitments.
But kids would change the nature of it all. There was no time for surfboards in those early baby and toddler years. Though the annual beach tent and floaties seaside holiday remained a hardy cultural and familial perennial. How could you really draw a line under another year and rejuvenate for the next without it? Despite those exhausting days of hitting the beach at 6am with the toddlers and running interference between them and the shore break.
Later memories have concatenated with those of my own childhood. The indignant fury of eldest daughter when she was first dumped by a wave. Eight-year-old son holding his breath and finally jumping from a cliff into the lagoon. Six-year-old youngest girl clenching shut her eyes and launching from the jetty knowing that the (tame) stingray was down there somewhere. That first time she stood on a surfboard.
And there is Dad, on his last beach holiday, wearing an overcoat, hostage now to the fatal Parkinson’s, leaning into the wind as he carefully negotiated the soft sand, the foam inching towards his feet. Holding a football. Smiling at his grandkids.
So much of my memory of life and the markers of its passing are refracted through the sea.
When I lived for many years in Canberra, a city I grew to love and understand, I always ached for the sea. Its smells. Its vitality. Its cleansing. Its capacity to evoke contemplation, to calm and excite. I’d never lived anywhere so distant from the sea. Even living in London the tidal enigmatic Thames drew one’s nose towards the nearby sea.
Sydney, sparkling city of light and water – harbour and ocean – constantly incites the imagination. Those Whiteley-esque blue days often seem a ridiculous, indulgent cliche as impossibly true as they are. The adult daughter, who first stood on a surfboard a decade ago, says the overcast days, when the bay is silver and black and mysterious, are the most beautiful.
It’s one of those luminous days of glare and cobalt. I’m back here after finding myself in a novel circumstance. Alone at a coast house for two days, children scattered to the cities, I stroll the empty surf beach with the dogs at my heels.
That’s life and the sea, moments now memories.
