Family Memories For Sale
Herald Sun, Saturday 28 February 2009
This weekend, as the boozy haze of February fades, and many people spend these last few days of summer on the beach soaking up some rays, or whacking sixes with a grubby cricket bat, not everyone will be having fun in the sun. For my family and I, this summer has been different. The holidays have been a time of mourning, and now we will be reading the last rites: our cherished beach house, a home away from home almost fifty years in the making, is up for sale.
In 1961 my grandparents paid three hundred pounds for a block of land at the beach. Grandpa was a storeman in the army earning a scrawny fifteen quid a week. He and his wife, a volunteer teacher at a local primary school, lived as hardworking Catholics with five kids and a dog in a tiny weather board house in Fawkner in Melbourne’s North. Summer days were long and sticky. When they discovered Sandy Point, a sleepy coastal town near Wilson’s Promontory, they scrimped and saved and went without new clothes to build a beach house on their own little slice of heaven, and escape the drudgery of city life.
Every year Nanna and Grandpa packed the trailer, squeezed the kids into their old Holden FX sedan and drove the long five hours through the hills and valleys of South Gippsland down to the coast. The house was small, there was no electricity, and the thunderbox in the backyard was filled with spiders, but it was worth it. My dad, his brother and his sisters spent their summers swimming in the frothy bubble of washing machine surf. Nanna and Grandpa sat in the backyard and baked under the sun on brightly coloured banana lounges, smoking cigarettes, wracking their brains over crossword puzzles as lazy March flies swam through the thick and heavy air.
The house grew with the family. Grandpa was a keen handy man and soon the place had new bedrooms, an inside toilet, a back porch and a garage to cope with all the grandchildren. On the beach, my mates and I loved to carve up the surf on our boards, ripping our way through the summer days on heaving walls of water. It was bliss. Dripping wet and starving, we would run back home, hang up our wetsuits, set up camp in the garage, and hatch plans to secure booze for the night. Being underage, the P-Plater girls down near the surf club were our normal targets, but we were rarely successful – many nights were spent talking about girls instead of to them.
Of course, when things didn’t work out with the ladies, we went tree surfing. This involved jumping off the beach lookout (in some spots a three metre drop) into the hard and wiry tea trees on the dunes below. The buzz of free falling for those few seconds was stupid but intoxicating. ‘Are you sure about this?’ a friend asked on his first mission, his body trembling as we ventured out at midnight, the wind cold and whipping our cheeks. ‘Won’t we, well, die?’ I climbed the wooden railing, looked over the edge and shrugged. ‘Possibly. But at least you don’t have to worry about any sharks.’ The next day no-one could figure out why all the scrub was flattened near the lookout. Or why there was blood on the sheets of my bed.
When summer finishes this year, the good times at my grandparents’ beach house will end forever. Nanna and Grandpa passed away a few years ago, and now the house is on the market. As I sat down in Nanna’s creaky old chair, looked out across the backyard for probably the last time, and listened to the comforting rumble of the surf behind me, I realized how lucky I had been to call their place home.