A personal reflection on the author's annual tradition of visiting the same beach with their children, exploring the themes of nostalgia, childhood memories, and the comforting repetition of rituals.
Each year I insist we visit the same beach. Repetition tricks the mind into thinking a thing will last forever. I want to give my kids that overarching sense of a single summer going on all through childhood, a door to a memory they can open any time. You never step into the same river twice.
But you can step into the same ocean, or so it seems, each January when we take that first swim: ducking our heads under a wave to feel the rush of cold and the sting of salt, shaking like dogs when we emerge, washed clean of the year just gone. When I was a child, it was Phillip Island: a green canvas tent in my grandfather’s backyard; a chipped foam surfboard rasping against my skin as I lay on it, just floating in the channel between the island and the mainland, never daring to go into the actual surf. It was the acrid smoke of mozzie coils and the oily texture of the battered flake from the fish and chip shop. Showers under the tank stand; the sun burning our skin until it peeled. Now, for my kid, it’s Point Roadknight beach, Anglesea, Victoria: the broad strand of the beach at low tide, pockmarked with lukewarm, ankle-deep paddling pools; the hot sand turning cool underfoot as the track home enters the band of trees between the beach and the car park; a flat, wide rock platform jutting out beyond the point, appearing and vanishing under sheets of foaming water. No canvas tent for him; instead, a succession of rented beach houses, rebooked the moment we departed (or, as one after another was sold for increasingly prohibitive prices, found in a desperate online hunt for a place on the “right” side of the Great Ocean Road). No peeling skin either, with the slip-slop-slap, long-sleeve rashies and shade-tents. But always the same beach, the same routine, the same half-hearted attempts to Do Something Today, relapsing into walks and reading and takeaway for dinner – agai
Beach Ritual Childhood Memory Nostalgia
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