It wasn’t there back in the 1970s. In those days there were no real paths to the beach.

If you approached from the northern end you skirted along the edge of a golf course and tried to avoid walking on the road, which was a road in name only, really. It was more like a narrow strip of potholes with occasional bitumen inserts. If you walked on it by accident you either fell in a pothole or were run over by a car trying to avoid one.

If you approached the beach from the southern end back in the 1970s, as I did this week shortly after 2pm on the first day of 2019, you could bush bash through the trees or walk through the caravan park, with bush bashing the preferred and cooler option, although I can’t remember why.

It’s a much more organised beach now, hence the fancy new footpath on the southern approaches.

Way back when I was a kid the favourite place to hang at the beach was a huge concrete thing off to one side of the old surf club. It could have been a big old septic tank or the foundation of a long-abandoned building for all I know. It had no shade to speak of and no shelter from the elements but it was pole position on that particular stretch of coastline. If you were a teenage girl in a bikini with a deep summer tan and you fancied your chances, that big old concrete block with views up and down the beach was the place to sit. And so we did.

It’s gone now, of course. The big, flat grassed area is still there, with a single fancy multi-coloured seat, but the local council that spent millions sprucing up the beach, before disappearing in a local government merger, wasn’t a fan of trees. Left to its own devices it would have changed the shire emblem to a pair of crossed chainsaws and a pile of sawdust, with a motto like “A good tree’s a dead tree” or “We’ve never met a developer we didn’t like and we’ve never knocked back a campaign donation from one”.  

So the big, flat grassed area sat hot and empty in the baking sun the other day without even a straggly bottlebrush for relief, and people seeking shade set up camp haphazardly, and somewhat uncomfortably, along the concrete strip on the beach side of the toilet block.

There were thousands of people on the beach, which is almost a cliche of the Australian eastern coastline – a long blinding yellow-white crescent of sand capped at each end with a prominent curve of rocks hit occasionally by waves of white spray.

I’ve changed a lot in the past four decades but that crescent, those rocks, the spray and the smell of salt and sweet sun creams is still what it was back then – summer in Australia. Permanent, predictable, maybe even a little pedestrian at times, but perfect, too. At this beach, at least, the social indicators of class are stripped away, literally, and during these lazy, loafing days everyone bakes on the sand as equals, Australians all rejoicing in the freedom to get burnt on their own little temporary patch of beachfront paradise.

There was always a caravan park near the beach. Its vast expanses leading up to the golf course have always filled and emptied at regular times of year in a rhythm reminiscent of the tide, but much slower. Just before Christmas Day there were only a couple of campers and tents set up beneath the big gum trees beside the fence that follows the road from near my house to the closest shopping centre. By last Saturday night the place was bulging.

A walk to the beach was punctuated by the sounds of summer – kids laughing, babies crying, adults calling out to one another about buying chips, taking the kids down to the water or finding where the toddler hid the key to the toilet block. And last Saturday night, a few days before the new year, the other sounds were the booming ocean only 100 metres away and the sounds of tarps lifting, puffing out and snapping back with every blast of a petulant wind.

The caravan park will stay full throughout January, drop away for the return of school, bulge again for Easter and mostly fill, rather than bulge, for school holidays until next December when the king tide of visitors rolls in again.

Because I live near the beach I have never actually stayed in a caravan park in my area. Instead we used to take our three sons an hour or so north of here to stay at a caravan park there.

The beaches were roughly the same. The weather was the same. A lot of the time the people we spent our days with were the people we would have socialised with if we’d stayed at home, because they also made the trek slightly north for the Christmas break. But it felt different.

The rhythm of holidays by the beach and away from home are different. There is no long grass to look at and feel guilty about not mowing. We seemed to spend a lot of time sitting in chairs in the shade beneath the fabulous temporary shelters that are mandatory when you camp, and the conversations never seemed to become more demanding than deciding on what to have for dinner.

Photos from those years show a group of adults sitting on camp chairs amidst a sea of abandoned children’s bikes, skateboards, boogie boards, rollerblades, cricket sets and balls of every description. And that hasn’t changed.

Walking past the caravan park near my house takes me back years ago in many ways – to my adolescence and those long, hot, lazy summers with friends, and to holidays with our children, friends and their children. Groups of adults the other night laughed and talked with that slow drawl you take on when your mind is in holiday mode and a nap is never far away. Children burst in on parents and showed their latest find, or made a request. Everyone had time to do everything, or nothing, and strangers exchanged smiles at how very Aussie it was.