Every summer for nearly 30 years, I camped on the wild coast of far east Victoria, on Gunaikurnai and Bidwell land. It’s a good seven hours from Melbourne and, even as kids, the rhythm of the trip up the highway was encoded in our DNA. Fuel at Nar Nar Goon (always cheap), fish and chips for lunch on the wide grassy median strip at Bairnsdale, ice-cream at Cann River. Then we’d turn off on a track that quickly became corrugated dirt before we finally slowed to cross the bridge into the campground.
Even now, I can take myself there: the tea-coloured tannin of the Thurra River winding through high reeds down from the dunes, slipping under the bridge where kids were already diving and whooping, and out to the mouth where it spilled into the endless expanse of Bass Strait.
